I Go to Prepare a Place for You 

“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)

Jesus is informing His disciples that He is going to leave them and return to the Father. In Luke’s account of the actual ascension of Jesus, He focusses on the disciples returning to Jerusalem and waiting to be filled with the Holy Spirit, something they direly needed in order to fulfill their roles in evangelizing the world. But here in John 14, the Ascension takes on a much more comforting timbre. Jesus is actually making His ascension be about them, the disciples!

Now, we know that it was because Jesus had finished His mission on earth and was returning to His rightful place at the right hand of the Father in heaven, that Jesus was leaving. But, once they could understand what was happening here, how comforting were these words of the Savior to the disciples!

Jesus begins by referencing the “troubled hearts” His disciples would have when He physically left them alone. Many of us will have experienced something similar when our parents had to leave us alone when we were still fairly young children. Up until that point we had always relied on their presence and that they would assume responsibility for every situation, but now we were suddenly placed into a position of having to decide and do things on our own, filling us with trepidation. For the disciples, the thought that Jesus would actually die on the cross must have been terrifying! It was so terrifying that their minds just couldn’t conceive of it; they just didn’t understand. And then, after His resurrection from the dead, when it finally seemed that everything would be back to normal or even better, Jesus left them and ascended to heaven. Once again, they were left alone, albeit with the promise of the Comforter, or Holy Spirit.

But here in John 14, Jesus is offering them further comfort before all those things happened. Years later, when John wrote down his gospel, the Holy Spirit brought these amazing words of Jesus back to his mind. “Let not your heart be troubled; you believe in God, believe also in Me.” Then the Lord refers to the eternal home that is awaiting every one of His followers, and then come the words that make this all so personal and wonderful: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

What can we learn from these words?

1. Jesus is going

In other words, no one is forcing Him to do something. The nations might rage against Him and sinners might crucify Him but in the end, they are not doing anything to Him that He doesn’t want to do. And now He is going with a very specific task in mind: to prepare a place. The Lord knows that this is what we need. He knows that the place that He prepares will be the answer to all our hopes and dreams, exceeding them by far! And He is going…

2. To prepare a place

Let’s focus on the place first. Heaven is a real place. Many have questioned where it is to be found on a map of the universe. Astronauts and cosmonauts have seen no physical signs of it, or of God for that matter. And yet, He exists, and He resides in a “place.” That place exists in some completely different dimension or functions according to some completely different laws of physics that cannot be directly detected by inhabitants of the universe in which we live. Nevertheless, it is a specific place. A place that may be as vast as the current universe (which seems unending to human understanding), or even greater. All we know is that it is a perfect place, a wonderful place! And Jesus is going to prepare that place. He calls it “His Father’s house.”

Does the fact that Jesus is going to prepare it mean that it doesn’t exist yet? Or that its “construction” is not finished? Surely not! Jesus is indicating that He is going on before, and that once our work here on earth is done, He will be waiting for us and that there will be room for us, for every one of His redeemed. The “many mansions” that Jesus refers to can be better described as “settled abodes.” In other words, something permanent. We will eternally not need to fear any changes from their perfection! And the fact that Jesus is preparing “many” mansions does not mean that we may live millions of kilometers away from the throne of God; we will all be in “God’s house,” in His inimitable presence … forever!

3. A place for you!

Yes, we could take these words in the collective sense: “I will prepare a place for all of you; there will be room for everyone,” but my personal feeling, formed by the way I’ve experienced my Lord, is that Jesus will delight in having a special place for each one of His redeemed, according to the special way He created them and how He relates to them. God created each one of us individually, as His own special child that is to glorify Him in a unique way. He bestowed unique gifts and talents upon us, along with gifts of time and opportunities with which to serve Him. And He is preparing a very special place in the Father’s house that is just perfect for each one of us. It will be marvelous, wonderful, and astounding, a never-ending source of joy and pleasure in our God!

The Expositor’s Bible Commentary writes of this place: “And this is what we have to look forward to … we shall live in the constant enjoyment of a Father’s love, feeling ourselves more truly at home with Him than with anyone else, delighting in the perfectness of His sympathy and the abundance of His provision. Into this intimacy with God, this freedom of the universe, this sense that ‘all things are ours’ because we are His, this entirely attractive heaven, we are to be introduced by Christ. ‘I go to prepare a place for you.’” How great is our Savior’s love to us!

4. I will come again and receive you to Myself

Jesus left His disciples and went to heaven. There is no doubt about that. He also fulfilled His promise of never leaving or forsaking His children by sending the Comforter, the Holy Spirit. But the Lord also promised to come back. When He returns, He will judge the world, and all eyes will see Him and every knee will bow before Him. But He will also receive His redeemed unto Himself and take them into His presence to be with Him, where He is, forever. What a wonderful promise and what a beautiful hope for all His children: To be with Jesus in the place that He has prepared for us, for me, in the Father’s house, forever. All by His grace and His great love. All praise and honor to Him!

Ron Taron