ALPHA AND OMEGA

Transcript

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Hello everyone. This is Pastor Dean Thompson with a word of hope. Alpha and Omega. I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and was and who was and who is to come the Almighty Revelation chapter one verse eight. God introduces Himself in this book with the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet Alpha and Omega, the A to Z of a frightened church's vocabulary. It is a way of saying every word your life will ever speak begins and end in me. There is no chapter of your story that falls outside the alphabet of God. The title comes paired with a curious phrase, the one who is and who was and who is to come. We would expect the order to run past, present, future. Who was, who is, who is to come. Instead, John leads with the present, who is. Faith does not finally rest on what God did long ago or on what he will do at the end. It rests on the living present tense of God right now. He is. Whatever else is uncertain this morning, that is not. And notice the strangeness of the third clause. We expect who will be, instead we get who is to come. Ho Erkomenus, the coming one. God's future is not a static state He will eventually occupy. It is an arrival. He is not merely going to exist tomorrow, He is moving toward you. The future for the believer has a face, and that face is coming closer. That is why faith is reasonable, even when the evidence in front of us is grim. The early Christians who first heard these words were not naive about suffering. Some of them would die for the name of Jesus, but they staked their lives on the conviction that the one who brackets all of history, who was there before the first letter and will be there after the last, could be trusted with the sentences in between. If God holds the alphabet, he can be trusted with your syllables. There's also a deep rest in this title. So much of our anxiety comes from believing that we must be the Alpha and Omega of our own lives, that we must originate our own security and guarantee our own outcomes. Faith is the relief of handing both letters back to God. He is the source you did not invent and the destination you cannot earn. Your task is only to live the middle of the alphabet faithfully and leave the book ends to him. When the weak feeds like a jumble of disconnected letters with no word forming, return to this verse. The one who is and was and is coming has not lost the thread. He is spelling something with your life that you cannot read yet. Trust the author of the alphabet. Today, hand him both ends. Let him be your beginning that you need not justify your existence, and let him be your end that you need not control your future. Between Alpha and Omega, you are held. O Lord God, Alpha and Omega, you are our beginning and our end. We hand you both. Hold the middle of our story today and let us rest in the one who is and was and is coming. Help us to rest in you. Amen. God bless you, brothers and sisters.