What if the stories of people who have died and come back could reshape the way you understand God, heaven, and your purpose on earth?

In this thought-provoking episode of the Collide Podcast, we sit down with pastor and author John Burke to explore the mysteries of near-death experiences (NDEs) and what they reveal about the God of the Bible. John shares how three decades of studying more than 1,000 NDEs—and personally interviewing people from every continent—has strengthened his faith and pointed consistently to a God of captivating love. Whether you’re navigating grief, wrestling with doubt, or longing to better understand eternity, this conversation will remind you that God is closer, kinder, and more glorious than you ever imagined.

Meet John Burke

John is the founder and former lead pastor of Gateway Church in Austin, Texas, a multisite church that has grown to more than 4,500 people since its launch in 1998. He is also the president of Gateway Leadership Initiative, equipping church planters and everyday Christians to “raise the church out of the culture.” John is a New York Times bestselling author of Imagine Heaven and has written several influential books, including No Perfect People Allowed, Soul Revolution, and his newest work, Imagine the God of Heaven. He is passionate about helping people discover the real God revealed through Scripture and confirmed through thousands of NDEs. His story is a powerful example of curiosity transformed into calling.

Connect with John - Website | Instagram

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• What near-death experiences really are—and why they matter
• The surprising commonalities people report across countries, cultures, and faith backgrounds
• How NDEs align with what Scripture teaches about heaven, God, and life after death
• The personal story of how John went from agnostic engineer to follower of Jesus
• What convinced him that these experiences cannot be explained by drugs, dreams, or hallucinations
• How these accounts can strengthen your hope, shape your faith, and transform your view of eternity

How This Episode Will Encourage You

If you’ve ever feared death, questioned God’s goodness, or longed for assurance about your loved ones, this episode will offer hope-filled perspective. You’ll be reminded that God’s love is more personal, powerful, and present than you think—and that eternity is far more real and beautiful than you’ve imagined.

Personal and Powerful Bible Study - Explores how God shows up in our lives in ways that are both deeply personal and undeniably powerful.

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Hey there. Welcome to the Collide Podcast. This is Willow Weston. I'm so glad that I get to be with you today.

We get to grow and be challenged and think and wrestle and I think be blessed today. I just interviewed John Burke. He's the founder, founder and former lead pastor of Gateway Church.

He is the president of Gateway Leadership Initiative. It's a non profit organization that helps church planning pastors.

He's written several books including no Perfect People Allowed, also Soul Revolution. He was the New York Times bestseller author of Imagine Heaven.

And then the book that my family has been incredibly impacted by, by and why I asked him to be on this podcast, Imagine the God of Heaven.

In this interview, he's going to talk about interviewing for the last 30 years people who've had near death experiences and had conversations with God in heaven. And it might blow your mind, it might stretch your brain.

I highly encourage you to listen and then get this book that we talk about in this interview. I think that it has grown me immensely. It's grown my children's faith immensely and it'll grow yours. Take a listen.

John, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today. I know I just shared with you offline, but I have to share with you so our listeners know too.

Your work, especially in the book Imagine the God of Heaven was such an impactful book for my husband and my, my two young adult kids and I to read and just grew our faith immensely.

And so I'm not only just grateful to you on a personal level and it came at such a needed time right before my dad passed away, but I'm also just so grateful that you would hop on here and share your time and wisdom and experiences with the listeners. So thank you so much for having me on today.

Thanks, Willow. Thanks for having me on. It's, it's an honor.

Awesome. Well, you, you spent about three decades studying more than a thousand NDEs. And there's going to be people listening who are like, what's an nde?

So would love for you to not only define that but then tell us what led you to, to start studying them.

So a near death experience or NDE is. Or the ones I really focus on are those when someone clinically dies. So literally like no heartbeat, no brain waves.

And yet either modern medicine or quite honestly sometimes it's just miracle. I mean, I have people who have the hospital records that they were dead an hour and 45 minutes, proof positive.

So there's no way they should have come back remember anything. And yet they consistently Say they were more alive than they've ever felt before in a place more real than this has ever felt.

And many times, and there are all these commonalities, but the way I got into it was purely accidental. I mean, I was actually. An agnostic. When I first came across near death experiences, I'd pretty much concluded that there was no evidence for God.

Maybe there was, maybe there wasn't. Jesus was probably a good human teacher who was made into a legend, but not the Son of God. And that was mainly because I was always very analytical.

I studied engineering and I worked as an engineer. So my mind works that way. It's like, well, how do you know and how does this work and how does it fit together? I'm always asking questions.

Very annoyingly curious. Yeah. And so that's kind of where I was, because no one could answer my questions or I wasn't around people who could.

So my dad was dying of cancer and someone gave him the very first research that coined the term near death experience. And I saw it on his bedside table. He's on hospice, he's dying. And I looked at it as like life after life. And I said, what's this?

And I start reading it and I couldn't put it down. I read the whole thing in one night. And at the end I said, oh my gosh, this God, Jesus, afterlife stuff may be real.

I said that because of how many of these people were reporting, you know, being in the presence of this God of light, who was love, who was personal. So many of them knowing this is Jesus or seeing him as Jesus. So I, I then was like, okay, I better be more open to the Bible.

And so I actually got in a small group Bible study that later that next year, and I started learning and studying and I came to Faith in Christ and ended up working in engineering out in Santa Barbara, California. And I kept running into more and more of these near death experience stories and the way my mind works.

I'm studying the Bible now and I'm learning more, I'm hearing more and more of these. And so I start actually charting it like, oh, well, this person and this person, this person said that, and that's in scripture over here.

Like when people have these experiences, they say a lot of the same things because they're having a real experience of something very real. And so it's like there are not just thousands, but millions of people who have had near death experiences.

The Gallup poll did a survey, found that 1 out of 25Americans, that's 13 million Americans, has had a near death experience. So this is not a small, you know, number. And yet there are about 40 of these commonalities that I've traced.

And in Imagine Heaven, I'm showing how they're all in scripture. You may not have seen it yet, you may not have teased it out, but it's all there.

And trying to help people see, first of all, what led me to faith, that there's incredible evidence, and it's not just evidence with near death experiences. The second book I wrote that you read or listened to was Imagine the God of Heaven.

And I was trying to show there as well, that in every religious culture, if people experience God in these near death experiences, it's the same God and it's the God who's been revealing himself through the Jewish prophets and ultimately through Jesus and how history and the prophecies confirm that to help people see that we, you know, and this is really important.

I do not believe we should get our view of heaven just from what near death experiencers say, because they're interpreting an experience that truly is other dimensional.

And so they're having to interpret, but what they consistently say, what they consistently report, not necessarily how they interpret what they report, but what they consistently report fully aligns with Scripture and it brings it to life.

That's what I was hoping to do, is help people realize we are told to set our minds on things above, not on things of the earth, that we have died in Christ. Our life is hidden in the heavenlies, and we're to imagine heaven.

And so that's why I wrote Imagine Heaven and then I wrote Imagine the God of Heaven, because fascinatingly, all these people I've interviewed, if they were in the presence of God, they consistently said, yeah, I saw that other stuff. Yeah, there were these great reunions with people I loved, but I wanted nothing but just to be in his presence. He's that awesome.

I have so many questions to ask you.

I mean, heck, we've had so many guests on this podcast that are really well known, doing really cool work, and I'm just so excited to have you because I have just so much respect for what you're teaching and what you have studied. And like I said, it personally impacted my family.

But before I start asking you specific questions about your research and what you started to notice were the consistencies and the commonalities and all of those things of people who experience near death. Near death experiences.

Can we go back to, your dad has cancer and you're not a believer and you see this book and can you tell us, because you say you gave your life to Christ. I'm assuming maybe that happened after your dad's passing. What did the combination of.

You're reading about near death experiences, you're about to lose someone that you love desperately and you're thinking about them and where they're going, where he's going. And how did the sort of combination of that, how did God use that in your life?

Well, yeah, you know, things are never as neat and tidy as. You know, we would like them to be. And the truth is I was in the process of coming to faith. You know, that opened my mind and my heart.

I'm starting to learn and understand. And I'm thinking, okay, God, are you real? Is this real? And so I start praying, well, then heal my dad. And he didn't.

And you know, when my dad died, I mean, my first reaction was. Bad words. You know, really, like, hey, you know, the finger to God, I'm done with you, even if you are real.

And it was just hurt, you know, but that's how we, that's how we react.

You know, so many people, you know, I've been a pastor for 30 years too, and so many people reject God, honestly, not because there's some good reason other than he hurt them, he didn't do what they were expecting. And that was me. And so that was my first reaction.

But then as I, even in my grief, I was, and I think now this was God, God's spirit speaking to me, you know, because they were just thoughts, but the thoughts were, you know, you already know what life's like without God and that's all you get. Like you're grieving your dad's loss because you love him. But if there's no God, there's no redemption of this. That's it, there's nothing after this.

But if there is a God, maybe one day you'll understand, even though you don't understand right now. And that Willow turned, it turned me around.

I mean, I'm absolutely convinced that was God because I said, I said that day, okay, then if you are real Then you're going to have to be like a father to me now. And 10 years later, I'm reading in the Psalms. A father to the fatherless is God in his holy dwelling.

And I was like, oh, my gosh, you put that thought in my mind. And so, you know. Yeah, I don't know if I answered your question, but.

Well, it's just very interesting to me that at the same time that your dad was undergoing the fight to beat cancer and he was dying, you also, he was given this book and it set you on this journey that.

Oh, well, it's not coincidence.

Right? Right.

I mean, Willow, it's. No, it's so. I mean, even more bizarre, you know, I didn't start studying these to become a near death experience expert at all.

I just was curious and I couldn't stop being curious. And I think that too was a gift from God. You know, I went from engineering into, you know, being a missionary and then executive pastor on a church.

And then we planted a church to reach skeptics and, you know, did that for the last 20, for about 25 years. And.

You know, when I look back, I mean, when I wrote Imagine Heaven, right before I punched sinned, I said to the Lord, well, this might be the end of my ministry, but I think it's what you asked me to do. So here goes. And it was because the church is not very accepting of near death experiences.

And there's a whole history as to why, which I lived through.

But long story short, as these are coming out and more and more people are talking about I had that happen, they go to their pastor or their priest and the first reaction was, that's evil. Stay away from it. Just don't talk about that. But imagine if you've had an experience more real and sacred than this experience.

So they were like, well, then there's something wrong with you and your religion. And so many of them turned away from the church and it kind of got embraced by a more New Age interpretation of the whole thing.

So it became this divide. So when I wrote Imagine Heaven, yeah, I was like, who knows what's going to happen here?

But I'd seen this incredible evidence and I'd also seen how Christians don't imagine heaven very well, so they don't live for it.

We're told in Hebrews 11 that the heroes of faith, you know, Abraham and David and Sarah and Rahab and all these, they lived for a heavenly land, not an earthly land. And that's why they were able to walk by faith. And so I wanted to help Christians, you know, as well.

But all that to say, yeah, when I got the manuscript back and I was proofreading it, my mom was on her deathbed and she'd been through eight years of Alzheimer's, it was pretty brutal. But I got the manuscript back and I read it to her out loud. And then she died that month. So, I mean, it was.

Poetic in a weird way that it was my dad's death that got me on this whole bizarre journey that I never set out to do.

And you know, and now I've been able to tell literally millions of people in a hundred nations about this God who loves them and has given witness to him, you know, and that first book, you know, just happened to coincide with my mom going to heaven.

They're from different nations, different religions. Not only did they have some consistencies and commonalities that I'd love for you to point out, but it wasn't just their imagination.

And there were these compelling stories where, and I don't know if you could tell one and you can put this in better words than I can, but their experience.

Wasn'T them imagining something, it was them actually seeing things where, when they lived and they came back and they said I saw things like in the room, like they came above their body and saw things in the room that they could have never seen laying on their bed.

So can you invite us into some of these stories or interviews where it wasn't just people who are like tripping on drugs in some kind of state of unconsciousness or something, but it's actually like, no, they saw things that.

Yeah, and I put this in chapter two of Imagine the God of Heaven. The ten points of evidence that convince me these cannot be explained by saying, oh, this is brain based. And that's what many skeptics will say.

They'll say, oh, well, this is just hallucination from drugs in the hospital. Well, there have been studies done showing no near death experiences happen when people have no drugs and are on drugs, doesn't matter.

So that rules that out. They'll say, oh, it's the neurotransmitters flooding your brain. DMT is a chemical that floods your brain.

We know when people have these dmt, they have experiences like this, but it's nothing like this.

And so I, you know, when I was still an engineer and I'm starting to study this, I had a lot of the same thoughts, like, well, maybe this is a human thing. It's like it's in, you know, it's what the brain does, it creates this, you know, and that's what skeptics will say.

It's just creating this kind of feel good way to go into the, the, you know, the nothingness that we're going to. Well, so let me just give you a few of the ten points of evidence. One, like you pointed out, verifiable observations.

So when people die, when they clinically die, what they consistently say is, I left my body, but I still had a body. I was still myself, in fact, more myself than I've ever felt before.

That Crystal who I interviewed said, the first person you'll really meet on the other side is yourself. Because you realize how much more you are than people told you or you believed.

And not just with five senses, more like 50 senses, more like hypersenses. So that's why they say I felt more alive. I didn't die, I became more alive. That's what they'll say. And they have a spiritual body. Now.

This is just what Paul talked about, right? That's what he writes about in 1 Corinthians 15. Our bodies are buried.

A natural body, they're raised a spiritual body, they're buried in weakness, Paul said, but they're raised in dunamite, which is the word we get dynamite. They're raised in power. And they say that these new powers of sight and communication and movement.

And by the way, I think Paul might have had a near death experience. You know, In Acts chapter 14 it says he was stoned to death in Lystra, right?

A mob turns on him and stones him to death and drags him out of the city and leaves him for dead.

And it says the believers prayed and rallied around him and he miraculously, I mean, you don't get up and go back in the city and start preaching again if something miraculous didn't happen. Right? And that's what it says then in 2 Corinthians 12, he says, 14 years ago, okay, was that 14 years ago in Lystra? Possibly.

Whether in my body or out of my body, I don't know. Only God knows. Why didn't he know? Because we still have a body. We're still ourselves, we have a spiritual body. He says, I was taken up into heaven.

And I heard and taken up to paradise and I heard and saw things inexpressible. So I think he may have had one of these experiences.

But when people are out of their bodies, they are often in the room where their resuscitation is taking place. So I interviewed this. I report on medical doctors like cardiologists who have also studied these. They were skeptics like Dr. Sabum.

He first heard about this from the same book I did back almost 40 years ago. And he said, that's not true. I'm a cardiologist, I've never heard anything like this.

And then he starts asking his patients and then he starts recording what they're saying. And he said, I set out to disprove near death experiences scientifically. And after five years of research he changed his mind.

He published in the Journal of the American Medical association because he said things like, Pete, this one guy he interviewed, he said. He told me about the resuscitation that I was doing and described with such detail all the procedures of resuscitation.

I could have used the recording to teach other physicians how to do resuscitation. There's no way he could have known that. And this is not one off, this is like many people.

And in fact, Jan Holden did a study of 93 cardiac arrest patients who claim to have a near death experience and make verifiable observations like that. And she found that 92% of their observations checked out as completely accurate.

So 92% completely accurate, another 6%, you know, some details may vary. Only 2%, which turned out to be one patient in the study, were inaccurate. So you're talking about something grounded in our reality.

Here's, here's the way to imagine it. So we're living a three dimensional experience, right?

But imagine if we're living this experience on a flat two dimensional painting in your, in your living room. So we only have up and down and side to side. We don't even have the dimension of in or out. We don't have a third dimension.

So imagine at death your soul is separated from your two dimensional world.

So that flat two dimensional self peels off that two dimensional world and now all of a sudden you're out in this three dimensional world room that was around you all the time because your flat world was contained within it. And so you can even look and see what's going on in the flat two dimensional world from another dimension.

And you experience three dimensions and color.

And then imagine getting resuscitated, press back into two dimensions and you now have to describe three dimensions of color, but in two dimensional black and white terms.

And when I've used this experience, when I've used this with near death experiences, they say that's exactly why it's so difficult and that's why they have to interpret.

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And when I've used this experience, when I've used this with near death experience, they say that's exactly why it's so difficult and that's why they have to interpret.

There's so many things that stand out to me, but I remember there was two stories and I won't be able to tell the stories, but one of them was someone, you know, was seeing their family out in the hall in the hospital and I think like a stepfather or something saying something almost negative about them and when they came back to life they actually asked if that was a real conversation. And I think it was.

I think there was someone else who saw something above the fan, like blue piece of tape or, or something like there was all of these crazy stories.

The other thing that's really interesting to me is you interviewed all these people from different countries and different religions and it seemed like they had these consistencies on who they were experiencing in God when they were having a conversation with them. Can you tell us what struck you the most about your findings?

Well, the consistency of it, it makes no sense. Why would someone, I mean, so just. I'll do a skim across some of the stories that you can read and imagine the God of Heaven.

Santosh grew up in India.

He's a Hindu manufacturing engineer who has only read the Hindu scriptures, never read the Bible, and yet when his heart codes, he's taken by this divine light, he says, this brilliant divine light that he knows is God brighter than the sun who takes him. And he's looking out over what he described to me as this giant compound. Now, I've been to India many times because we helped build a hospital there.

And a compound is like a walled, gated community. They're everywhere over there. But he said this was thousands of miles long, square shaped.

And he said, just gorgeous inside these high, beautiful walls, gorgeous grounds, inside buildings of this otherworldly building material. And he saw people in there, and he was like, my heart longed to be there. He said, this is where every human is meant to be.

And so he wanted to go in, and he looks for a way in. And he said, I counted there were 12 gates all the way around.

He said, your eyesight is telescopic there, so you can see like thousands of miles, like it's right up close. Which again, you would think, okay, well, that's not biblical. Oh, yeah, actually it is.

In Revelation 21, you know, John is taken in the spirit up to a very high mountain looking out over the holy city of God, the exact one Santosh is describing, never having read Revelation 21. And John from up on this very high mountain, which nd ers who have seen it have said is higher than the Himalayas.

He can read the names on the foundation stones. How? Because his eyesight was like telescopic, just like nd ears report. So there's all these wild things.

But Santosh sees the holy city of God, describes it perfectly. He then sees a vision of hell, which he describes as this abyss of darkness that he would drop into with a lake of fire at the bottom.

And then he sees the Almighty on his throne, but now in the form of a human in a robe with, I mean, light coming from him. But his eyes, he said, I looked up at his eyes, and his eyes were like lightning. And immediately my whole life flashed before me.

And I saw all my sins and I fel my knees and I said, forgive me, Lord. Forgive me. Forgive me, Lord. And he was expecting God to cast him into hell.

And he said, but instead I heard in his voice such mercy and tenderness and compassion. And he said, santosh, I'm sending you back. Now, I won't get into all of it. You can read it.

But it's wild because basically Santosh concluded it was Jesus God in human form. And he gave him a parable that Santosh comes back seeking with all his heart.

And he realizes, he told me, he said, I started reading the Bible, and I found that everything I experienced was in this book. And he became a follower of Jesus. Bibi is a woman I interviewed from Iran. She was in Tehran when she has a heart attack. Her heart stops.

She's there before, describes the same brilliant God of light who comes to her, but in the form of a man, a regal man, she said, like a king with a scepter, and says, I am. This booming voice thunders in her soul, I am. And she's back in her body, but with a joy and a peace that was unexplainable.

And it sets her on a years long journey of searching. Like, who is this God who says I am and gives me such joy and peace?

And she discovers, oh, the same God who was up on Mount Sinai in this brilliant light that didn't burn the bush and said to Moses, I am who I am. And then Jesus said, you know, to the Pharisees before Abraham was born, I am right about himself. And so, you know, you do.

You see this all over the globe. These people are having. And it's different. Each one is somewhat unique. Sidi was this imam, a Muslim imam in Rwanda.

He dies and he dies of blood cancer. And his mom was actually, she worshiped the goddess Bako. His dad was a Muslim mom. They did everything to try to heal him. Couldn't.

His mom, in desperation as her son is dying, goes to the Anglican church in town and said, I've heard sometimes people are healed in Jesus when they pray to Jesus. And she said, will you pray for my son? And they said, yes, if you will pray to Jesus with us. And they fasted and prayed for seven days.

Well, Siddiq ends up in a hellish place. And he said, I mean, these horrific creatures are basically about to attack him. And into the room comes a man of light, white robe, beard.

Holds out his hands. And Suiddiq sees the holes or the scars where the holes were in his hands.

And then he knows who it is because he got three free passes to movies when they're in Kirigali and he accidentally saw the Passion of the Christ, even as a Muslim he saw it. And he's like, I know who this is. And Jesus doesn't say, I'm Jesus. He says to him, I died for mankind. You are among those I died for.

Never deny it and tell it to everyone. And Sidi comes back and he becomes an Anglican priest who has had seven attempts on his life because he won't shut up about Jesus.

And he's in a Muslim, you know, you can't do that, you can't convert. So. And I mean, you know, there's 70 other stories like that of.

And these people are people, they're engineers, they're anesthesiologists, they're surgeons, they're, you know, commercial airline pilots. People who have nothing to gain by making up wild stories of dying, going to heaven and seeing God.

And yet they say, this is the most real thing that ever happened to me. And even people of other religions are testifying that this wasn't the God I expected, but this is who I met.

And I believe, Willow, I believe God is doing this. I don't know if it's our last days, but it sure feels like things are heating up. And as evil is heating it up, God is heating up his testimony.

And you know, he's always been the God of all nations. All the way back in Genesis 12, 1:3, he calls Abraham and Sarah to create this nation, the Jewish nation.

And he says, I'm going to bless you and you will be a blessing to all nations.

And of course, that is the whole story of the Bible, is God's love story for all people that he created and, and how he's been working out his plan to redeem people from all nations who turn to him in faith.

One of the things that was also really fascinating to me was maybe I expected to hear about people who were having this, these near death experiences.

Then when I heard that they were, regardless of faith or religion, where they were in the world, they were experiencing Jesus, which was crazy, but they wanted to stay. They didn't want to come back and live. And that was mind blowing to me because I think all of us see death as this terrible, terrible.

No, I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I love to die. I love to die. What struck you about that?

That people were experiencing something where they didn't want to come back to earth with their loved ones. They wanted to stay in heaven. They wanted to stay in heaven.

Well, yeah, and that's so consistent. It's so consistent. And what they say is that's where we belong. You got to remember two things.

First, everything you love about this life, it's because God created it that way. You love it because God created you to be able to love it. And the thing you love, every single thing.

And we can take these good gifts and we can use them in bad ways. Yeah, but they're all good gifts from God. And what happens in the life to come is not less life. It's life as it was meant to be.

Because the other thing you have to remember is that this life, According to Romans 8 is laboring under death and disease and famine and just decay. It's, it's not what God intended. It's a temporary life. And it's temporary because it is our time of choosing.

Will we choose God and His will and learn to love and follow God and His will? Or will we keep saying, no, my will be done?

And you know, it's very interesting because that is what people say who've had hellish near death experiences and their. There are a lot of those too. And what they say is I realized I chose this.

I chose this like I chose rejection of God and he's giving me what I wanted.

But they didn't realize that what that is is separation from all the light and life and love and joy and every good gift you've ever thought of or wanted or hoped for. And it's not hopelessness of pulling away. It's a hopelessness of pulling away from God.

What has this done for you personally? I mean, you've learned so much about heaven and you know, I'm sure the Word drove you to.

Interview people interviewing people drove you back to the word. You just have learned so much about heaven. How does that inform you personally in such a powerful and different way to live here on earth?

In every way. I mean, in every way.

And honestly, Willow, that's why I wanted to write and that's why I'm now spending full time trying to help people see this, is that when you understand this life in light of eternity, then we can actually do the things Jesus told us to do. You know, he said, don't store up your treasures here on Earth.

They're going to go away, moth and rust and you know, thieves are going to, it's not going to last. Invest in the life to come. Well, how do we invest in the life to come? Well, these near death experiences tell us, but it's nothing new.

It's just that we don't like really get it. You know, they consistently so one of the commonalities is in God's presence. First of all, they feel such an unconditional love.

They are known to their very core because look, there's no one else who has been through everything with you. God's been through everything with you even when you didn't believe in Him. You know, he is the sustainer of all creation.

So he's never missed a moment with you. So no one gets you like he does. And yet no one is crazier about you than he is. That's what they testify to. But it Also so.

So it helps, I think, us read things in scripture like God is love, or God loves you with an everlasting love. And those are just words.

But when you hear these people again and again and again describe what that feels like, then all of a sudden you're like, oh, my gosh, he is what I've always longed for. You know, every relationship you've ever had. You'Re just experiencing a filtered taste of the love God has for you through all of them.

And so it helps you live for him. When you realize that this life is not the end, it helps you go through suffering. You know, we all suffer in various ways.

Everybody thinks they're the only one. I know because I've counseled people for 30 years and I've felt it. And you do feel like that, but you're never alone in it.

And it's not God doing it to you. It is the reality of a world separated from God. And it's temporary.

And so it helps you realize that we can go through it, but we can go through it with a purpose. And he's in it with us to take us through to the other side and truly make it for our good.

And when you hear near death experiencers who have been through horrible stuff and then in God's presence, they're like, oh, it all made sense. Like, it all made sense.

I think about Crystal, who I interviewed, who had been through horrible abuse, and she always said, if I ever had a chance to talk to God, I would ask him, why? Why would you allow this to. Why can you let, you know, children starve on this earth and why don't you do something about blah, blah, blah.

And then she met him. You know, her heart stops. She's there in his presence again. Light brighter than the sun, but love unconditional.

And she said, I just fell to my knees in worship and in awe and just so overwhelmed with the joy and the bliss and the love. And I said, why. Didn'T I do more for you while I was on Earth? That's what she said. That was the question.

She said all the other questions were answered in a. In a second, in an instant in his presence. It reminds me of Job, right? You know, Job is like, you know, why God? Why? Why?

And then God shows up and he goes, I shut my mouth. You know, it's like it will one day make sense. So how we go through suffering, how we love God better, but also how we enjoy life more.

You know, I have a whole chapter near the end in Imagine the God of Heaven of the God of joy.

And I think so many times, you know, we turn away from God because we don't realize he enjoys us enjoying life with one another because he gave us all that. And when you start to realize that God laughs, you know, God enjoys. We didn't come up with all that. We are created in his image.

He's not lesser than us. And that God actually enjoys when we are grateful just doing life with him and gratitude for the things he's given. And so there.

I mean, I could go on and on. Willow, it's changed my life in every way.

One of the things I noticed too, that I heard a lot from the stories is almost this sense that God gives people a second chance. There was a lot of people who didn't know him or pushed him away or hated him, and it almost seems like they have this near death experience.

They're in his presence and like you say, they almost like melt from his love and his mercy and he kind of sends them back to have a second chance at life, which is really interesting to me. I wonder, you know, how often God, we don't have to die to have the second chance, but he gives us a second chance on the regular.

And I wonder even if your work has been used to usher in that sense for people that, that they have a second chance to live life here on Earth differently than they have been.

Yeah. And let me say a couple of things about that that I think can be confusing, especially to Christians.

You know, one, sometimes people are like, well, why would a Hindu or a Muslim or see the same God of Yahweh and the God of Jesus? Why? You know, they didn't believe in him? Well, a couple things. Two things.

One, a near death experience is not crossing over into either eternal life or eternal death. So Hebrews 9:27 says, it's appointed for mankind to die once and then judgment. Right. This is not that.

And one of the clues that helped me understand that is that about 30% in this journey in the afterlife come to a border or a boundary. They said, I knew I could not cross over that and still come back to Earth. And so this near death experience is kind of like this liminal in between.

It's the process of full biological death and crossing into. And I believe once you cross, there aren't second chances. Because if you think about it, a second chance requires linear time, right?

One moment to another to another. You fail here, but somewhere down the line you get a second chance.

Well, consistently near death experiencers say what Peter said in 2 Peter 3:8 to the Lord, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. That's what they say. Time is different on the other side. It doesn't work linearly like ours.

So second and third and fourth chances are in this temporary world where we are given grace. But once you cross over the angels, the angels had free will and some of them chose not God, like no, my will, not your will, God.

And there was no second chance for them. He created this place called hell where he would say, okay, you know, have it your way. It's the place of no light, darkness, no love, hatred.

No, I mean it's all the opposite of God, right? The non existence of God and all his qualities. So yeah, I think. It'S important to understand that these are glimpses of the life to come.

And that's why people even in their near death experience, because there is still some tied to our temporal time. Ian, in hellish experiences sometimes they cry out to Jesus and he comes and rescues them.

You know, I have multiple people in both books that happened and I think that is because they haven't fully crossed over. Now the other thing, why would God show himself? Well, think about Paul. You know the apostle Paul was Saul.

He was a Pharisee who was arresting and even killing and persecuting Christians because he didn't believe in Jesus. Just the opposite. When Acts 9, this brilliant God of light appears to him. Sound familiar? And he says, who are you Lord?

And he says, I'm Jesus, who you're persecuting. So Jesus didn't tell him the gospel. He didn't explain what to do. He later sends Ananias, a human to explain it. And then Paul still had a free will.

Is he going to get baptized for the forgiveness of his sins? And that's the same with near death experiencers. They're having an experience of God just like Paul did. He doesn't tell them what to do.

That really confused me for a long time why it took me so long to write a book. Because I didn't understand, like why wouldn't you just tell him? And then I started to realize, well wait, he's not limited. There's a reason for it.

And the reason for it is that when we seek him with all our heart, we will find Him. There's no barriers. He's taken away all the barriers in the cross. There's no barrier between us and God. Our sins have all been paid for and removed.

The only barrier is our pride. If in our free will we say, I'm good God, I don't need you. Or I choose not to believe in you. And then, you know, in great sadness, I put that in.

Imagine the God of heaven too. The people who experience the sadness. Truly the brokenheartedness of God over his children rejecting him. But he says, okay, your will be done.

I know I could ask you a million questions. I think I have two more questions for you. And one of them is, and I might be opening up a can here.

But I feel like a lot of us as Christians almost put a stop clock to when someone dies and how they accept, expressed what they believe in their faith to us. And we kind of put a stamp. Like they're either with God in heaven or they're with God in hell.

Yeah, without him. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, without God in hell.

And I think one of the things that was really interesting to me was you telling stories of a God who meets people in their sort of near death experience, where he's going to have conversations with them. I'm not privy to those conversations. I'm not there. I'm not. Like, how do I know that God didn't meet my dad when he was fighting cancer?

He wanted nothing to do with God his entire life. And I remember the week he died, my family went and we stood around him. And I have never.

I mean, my dad literally didn't like Christianity or Christians. And he was reciting the Lord's Prayer in Latin. This is about five days before he died. He was seeing. Like something in the room up in the corner.

He was hearing noises and music. Noises. I guess what I'm trying to say is how do we know? Like, is there a stop clock? Like, we don't know we have the stop clock.

But God can have conversations with, like, his spirit can have conversations with other people's spirit. And we have no idea what happens in those conversations.

You know, Dean Braxton, a guy I interviewed, he was the guy who, hour and 45 minutes dead in the hospital records. And he said when he looked into Jesus eyes. First of all, he felt like. And so many of them say, this is wild.

He said, I felt like, wow, he loves me so much and the love is growing. And I felt like I was like the only one he loved. And he said, I thought about others.

And I realized, oh, he sees them like they're the only ones he loves. And then he said. I also realized he wants everyone there.

And he said, you know, I saw my Aunt Barbara there, and that really shook me because I actually had her in the other place. And he said, what I came to realize is. Jesus knew her heart, I didn't. And that's not my job to know someone's heart.

My job is to tell them so that they can know God's heart. But my job is not to judge where they go and I can't. And you're absolutely right.

And I will say two things I've seen through these near death experiences is God is the hound of heaven. He is on their heels, pursuing them to the very last minute.

And I mean there's so many examples in Imagine the God of heaven of these people who weren't believers, but they know when they're dying and he is. Reminding them of things or he's bringing things to them or they're, you know, and. He doesn't force their free will, but he will do well.

Look, anything. He went to a cross, he died the worst possible death. He entered our suffering to bring us to the other side.

Why would we think he wouldn't do everything possible? And he does. And so I agree with you that we don't know. We don't know what God does.

But the other thing I'll say is I've also heard so much testimony from near death experiencers. You know, I just talked to someone last week who meets his dad in heaven and his dad would never go to church with him.

He would never, you know, he just didn't want anything. Kind of like what your dad and his dad in heaven said.

Thank you for praying for me because your prayers helped me get here and it was a last minute kind of thing. But you can't underestimate how God really does here. And these prayers actually do things. They move things in the heavenlies.

That's so beautiful. John, my last question for you is for people listening who have a big, big, huge glaring fear of death. What's your encouragement to them?

Well. Read and study more. But I would also say, just remember this, that. Jesus said God is not the God of the dead, he's the God of the living.

That we think we're alive here. But what near death experiencers consistently say is, no, no, this is the shadow. That's the real thing.

This is, this is just a, like a shadow of life, you know, cast on the ground. But there's so much more to life and it's not going to be less, that is not going to be more and even better there.

Such a good word. And John, thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you for all the ways you're living here on earth, bringing blessing and pointing us to Jesus. I appreciate you so much and I know there's people who are going to want to get your book and all the things. How can they do that?

Yeah, anywhere you buy books.

Imagine Imagine Heaven is the first book Imagine the God of Heaven and we have a devotional coming out, the Imagine God devotional as well to meditate on the attributes and really think about God in heaven in a daily way and then come back to earth to tell me about it. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

Keep colliding, friend.

We'll catch you next week friend. I hope that you were just encouraged that we have a God of life, a God who pursues us, a God who loves us with everything he's got.

A God who is the hound of heaven chasing us down because he wants relationship with us. He wants to be with us. And when we finally get can be mind blowing. Not only does it change how we live here, but it changes how we see.

It reframes everything. When we begin to realize that heaven is real, it will change our life on earth. So I hope that you are encouraged today.

I hope this causes you to draw closer to Jesus, to open his word to read more about the heavenly realms, to pick up this book, see what you think, listen to the stories of over a thousand people who've had experiences with Jesus in heaven and then come back to earth to tell you us about it. Truly fascinating. Keep colliding friend. We'll catch you next week.