GREG LAURIE - Wednesday, September 4, 2019

Meet Me in Heaven

Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also.

—John 14:1–3

Johnny Cash’s brother Jack was two years older. Jack was his protector, best friend, fishing buddy, and mentor. The brothers were inseparable. No one who knew them back then can remember a cross word between them.

Jack prayed all the time and was forever encouraging Johnny. “You need to be sure you follow the Lord in your life and in whatever you’re doing,” he’d say. By the time he was fourteen, Jack was close to wearing out the small-print Bible he carried with him everywhere. Cash remembered that while he listened to the radio every night before bedtime, Jack intently studied Scripture at the dining room table by the light of a kerosene lamp.

One Saturday, as Jack and another student sawed posts on the pendulum saw at school, Jack was somehow yanked into the oversized, razor-sharp blade and sliced wide open. Jack clung to life for a week.

Jack was under heavy sedation for the pain, with his entire family at his bedside. Jack looked at his father and asked,

“Will you meet me in Heaven?”

Ray Cash did the most unexpected thing: he fell to his knees and prayed, asking Jesus Christ to be his Lord and Savior.

A moment later Jack said, “What a beautiful city! And the angels singing! Oh, Mama, I wish you could hear the angels singing!” Then he was gone.

But death for a believer is not the end.