RIGHT WAY AROUND

We should always be suspicious whenever the church regularly uses language found nowhere in Scripture.

You can look up all the uses of the word "heaven" in the New Testament and not find it to ever be used as part of a phrase like "going to heaven". 

Not once.

You will find one verse which speaks of "ascending to heaven", though. 

It's John 3:13 - "No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man."

And maybe you don't want to go there anyway - at least not yet:

2 Peter 3:10-13 - "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells."

The bad news is ... you aren't going to heaven when you die.

The good news is that heaven is coming to you. (Once everything gets wrapped up.)

Making sure you get this the right way around has more profound ramifications for your theology than you might first suspect.

"Many Christian traditions have seen the ultimate goal of life as being for us humans, somehow, to go and be with God, in heaven. But the great story the Bible tells, from Genesis to Revelation, is about God's purpose and promise to come and live with us." N.T. Wright, God's Homecoming, p.10