The first and most basic thing to nail down in order to prepare ourselves for heaven is to know how and to be assured that we will get there. If we know all about heaven—if we have studied the subject thoroughly from the Scriptures—and we fail to be assured of our entrance, then all our effort in study will be in vain. But the good news is, we can know for sure that we are going to heaven; the bible tells us how we can get there.

We Enter Heaven By Faith And The Gospel

I would like to start this section from Revelation 21:3-4, because it gives us a clear picture of what heaven will be like. Then we will travel backwards in time to the cross and show what Jesus did for us on the cross to accomplish heaven. So, in Revelation 21:3 and 4, John wrote,

And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them,and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, 4 and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”

So, here we see the presence of God in heaven and what He will do for us. He will wipe away every tear from our eyes. And He will abolish death. And He will eliminate any mourning, or crying, or pain.

And He does that for us based on His own suffering and death on the cross. He suffered and died for our sins. Let’s look at Isaiah 53:3-6.

He was despised and forsaken of men,

A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;

And like one from whom men hide their face

He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

4 Surely our griefs He Himself bore,

And our sorrows He carried;

Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,

Smitten of God, and afflicted.

5 But He was pierced through for our transgressions,

He was crushed for our iniquities;

The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him,

And by His scourging we are healed.

6 All of us like sheep have gone astray,

Each of us has turned to his own way;

But the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all

To fall on Him.

From this passage, we could say that Jesus was a “substitute recipient of God’s wrath on sinners.”1 And by His scourging we are healed. Everything, every blessing we see in Revelation 21:4 will come to us as our healing of sin that He worked out for us. Our having no pain, no mourning, and no crying is our healing from His cross. It is our new body which He has made for us through the cross.

Yet we must receive it by faith. We must acknowledge what He did for us on the cross. Then we must respond to it; first, seeing our sin and separation from God (Rom. 3:23; 6:23); then to see that we need His remedy for our sin—that if we believe in Him (Jn. 6:40) and ask Him, He will forgive us our sins and cleanse us of sin (1 Jn. 1:7), making us His children (Jn. 1:12). And if anyone chooses to believe in Him, He gives us a new heart and a new life. His old life is passed away and a new life is come (2 Cor. 5:17).

Now let us return to Revelation 21, and we will start reading from verse six to verse seven.

Then He said to me, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. 7 “He who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be My son.

From these verses we find two key words: “thirst” and “overcomes.” Jesus says to us, first of all, that He will give the water of life to the one who thirsts. Jesus here is bringing us back to the time when He provided for us a living example on this very subject from John 4:7-14. In this story He said to a Samaritan woman who had come to a well to draw water, “Everyone who drinks from this water [from this well] will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”

So here in Revelation 21:6, Jesus is saying to those in heaven, if you thirst, that is, if you desire anything from Me, I will give you living water—water of life from Me—without cost. That is our heavenly blessing.

Then in verse seven, Jesus gives us the condition for this heavenly blessing. We must be overcomers. And John clearly tells us in 1 John 5:4 what this means. He writes, “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world.” Hence, we who are Christians are overcomers, and so we will inherit the blessings of heaven. We will drink from the water of life freely whenever we thirst.

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1 John MacArthur, The MacArthur Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2006), John MacArthur’s notes of Isaiah 53:5.