Gate of Heaven

Ghostbusters.

It’s in the top ten of my favorite movies. Not the sequels. Those are trash. The O.G. Ghostbuster movie. Bill Murray. Dan Aykroyd. Sigourney Weaver. Rick Moranis. Ernie Hudson. It was a great movie. On a side note, I wrote alternate lyrics to the Ghostbuster theme song about diarrhea… it was hilarious.

In any case, one of my favorite parts of the movie is when Louis is running around the city asking anyone and anything he can find is the “gatekeeper” to entryway to the evil dimension. At one point, he runs up to a horse, announces he is the key master and asks the horse if it’s the gatekeeper. Rick Moranis is hilarious.

As I was reading a few weeks ago, I ran across a reference to a different kind of gate and it gave me chills. Check this out:

‘He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place? This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”’ Genesis 28:17

Jacob, on the run from his brother and on his way to find a wife, stopped for the night to sleep. During his sleep God came to him full of promises, not the corrections he deserved for taking his older brother’s blessings. Jacob didn’t go looking for God. Instead, God looked for Jacob.

And after waking up from this dream, Jacob declared that the place he was standing was none other than the gate of heaven and named the place, Bethel.

The gate of heaven.

Can you imagine standing there in that place with Jacob? To experience the awe and wonder and majesty of God. To literally be standing at a place where it had to be labeled, the gate of heaven. That must have been crazy…

Except, it isn’t that crazy. It’s something that can happen to each one of us. It happened to Jacob. He didn’t deserve the promises of God. He had just stolen his older brother’s blessing from their father. Instead of receiving a beat down from God, he received blessings. Jacob was far from perfect. He didn’t look for God. God looked for and found Jacob.

And He will do the same with us through His Son Jesus. And instead of making a plot of earth where the gate of heaven is found, He is able to make our very life the gate of heaven, if we let Him.

The choice is ours. Each day we have a choice to have our life be the gate of heaven, or not. And that choice lies in what we allow to flow out of our mouth and our actions. Check this out:

“What goes into a man’s mouth does not make him unclean, but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him unclean. Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man unclean. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what makes a man unclean…” Matthew 15:11, 17-20

In other words, your heart is the gate… the gate of heaven or the gate to everything else. I don’t know about you, but without Jesus, my heart would be filled with everything else. My life would be a giant mess. And instead of my life being a gate to heaven, it would be a gate to destruction.

But with Jesus, man, with Jesus my life and your life… our hearts are the gate of heaven. And this is what the gate of heaven lets out… check this out:

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit.” Galatians 5:22-25

This world, this community… your community… needs another gate of heaven… to bring the goodness and faithfulness and grace and promises of God. The question is, will your life be a gate to destruction, or… will your life be a…

Gate of heaven.