Audio Transcript

The Bible is clear: God’s children are heirs of the entire world. So then, what will we settle for in this world as a tradeoff for eternal riches? This critically important question John Piper picked up in a 1999 sermon. Here’s what he said.

[The risen Christ] must reign until he has put all of his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. (1 Corinthians 15:25–26)

So the gates of our enemies include the gates of hell, and we will possess the gates of Hades, and we will break them off their hinges and come out of Sheol and the grave. And there will be no death anymore among God’s people. So they will have an everlasting inheritance — namely, the inheritance of the Messiah. This is not just Canaan, but super-charged: all the nations and all the geography of the world.

So I hope it is clear that the reason we are heirs of the world is that we are in Christ, who is himself the heir of the world.

Descendants of Promise

Galatians 3:29 puts it so simply, so wonderfully, so clearly: “If you belong to Christ . . . ” So ask yourself right now if that is true: Do you belong to Christ? And you do if you are trusting him, and you don’t if you are not trusting him. But trust him. Trust him, so that as I finish this sentence it will be yours. “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.”

Here are the two consequences: (1) then you are Abraham’s descendants, and (2) you are heirs according to the promise. We become heirs of the world the same way we become descendants of Abraham — namely, by being grafted into Christ, the Messiah, the heir of Abraham. And so faith in Christ is the key to becoming both a Jew and an inheritor of the world.

All Things to Us

Now what does it mean? If it is true, if all the believers in this room right now are heirs of the world, someday the world will become yours by inheritance. What does that mean? And what difference should it make today?

The best exposition I know of is Paul’s own in 1 Corinthians 3. It is so interesting, because this is born out of a very practical, nitty-gritty thing where there is boasting going on in the church and one is saying, “I am of Paul.” Another is saying, “I am of Apollos.” And Paul is so put out by this thinking that he says, “Would you stop boasting in men?” And then he gives this as an argument, a support for why they should stop boasting:

So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future — all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s. (1 Corinthians 3:21–23)

He could have argued exactly the opposite way. And it would have been true. He could have said, “Would you stop boasting in men? Because you and they are both nobodies in yourselves. So where is boasting? It is excluded. By what principle? Demonstrations of the law and how great the teachers and we are? Or by faith, which is a childlike reliance on God for help when we are helpless?” He could have argued like that — and he didn’t.

Here is the way he argued: “Let no one boast of men, for all things belong to you, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas.” The next word is the key: “or the world.” That is why I call it an exposition of Romans 4:13: “. . . or the world or life or death or things present or things to come. All things belong to you.” And why? How? “Because you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. You belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God.”

So the first thing to notice here is that the reason all things are ours is because all things belong to Christ and we belong to Christ, and therefore, they are ours. And the second thing to notice here is that it is all things. It is all things. Hebrews 1:2 says hat Christ has been appointed “the heir of all things.” And if Christ has been appointed the heir, and we belong to Christ — we are in Christ — then all things belong to us.

Million-Dollar Difference

This is so wonderful that it defies description with human words. And so I have prayed for you, and we have prayed for you downstairs, and I have prayed for myself, because there are truths in the Bible that are so stunning, they are so wonderful, that when you read them, you feel like they are so far out there that my little problem here has no connection with that at all. And so we just don’t even connect. You will walk out of this room, some of you, if the Holy Spirit doesn’t work, and you will just whistle through the day with no recollection of what was said here, and no sense of being stunned by the fact that you are an heir of the world.

If I had a check for a million dollars here, and I could with a legal counsel show you that it is made out to you from an account filled with a million dollars, and Monday morning all it takes is a signature for it to be yours, I guarantee you the rest of this day would be different. And there’s a promise given to you that is far, far, far greater.

So test whether you believe this, because that is nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing compared to what I am saying. Oh, that God would give us eyes to see, hearts to feel, minds to get around this truth: that in a very short time you will come into your inheritance. And it is everything.