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Welcome to the Ambassador Church Podcast, a church in the city for the city, on Milwaukee's East Side. We pray this message meets you where you are, challenges your faith, and draws you closer to Jesus.

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If it's your first time, great. If it's your 20, whatever, how many weeks have we done this? Maybe like 24 or something like that, 23? I don't know. Long time. If it's your 24th time, also happy that you're here as well. Uh tonight we are in the final week in our salvation series, uh, as Mac mentioned in announcements. And so uh week one, if you missed it, was how to receive salvation. Uh, week two was justification, week three was sanctification, and this week we will finish with glorification. Um so if you missed any of the sermons in this series, they're posted on Spotify and uh Apple podcasts if you're like that. And uh so take a listen to them if you can. Um it's been a joy to walk through this series. I think we've seen um a lot of good things come out of it. So tonight we're gonna talk about the next and final step in salvation, and that is glorification. And like the rest of this series, what I want to do is I want to start with a uh definition of glorification so we can all be on the same page tonight. So it should come up on the screens for us here. Um, glorification is God's final removal of sin from believers. Once Christ returns, transforming them into holy immortals, where they will spend eternity in paradise with God. So that's a lot to write down. I get that. Um, so take your time writing that down. The verses that this definition comes from and is built out of is Romans 8 18, 2 Corinthians 4 17, and Romans 5 2. So as you can see by the definition, glorification is a pretty big deal. Okay, so tonight what I want us to do is to take a look at a passage in the book of Philippians. So as you're writing that definition down, you can get your Bibles out and start turning them to Philippians chapter 3. We're going to be in verse 20. And if you don't have a copy of God's word, you can borrow one in our pews. There's Bibles all over the place. Feel free to borrow one of those tonight. Um, and if you don't have your own copy of God's word, we'd love to give one to you for free at the connect table in the back after the service. Or right now, if you want, you can go grab one. It's yours. And so while we are turning to Philippians 3, I want to start with a question for the room. Okay, and that question is where do you call home? Where do you call home? For a lot of us, we are imagining the place where your parents raised you or your hometown. Okay, uh for me, I grew up in a super small town in southeast Iowa called Mediapolis. Okay, not Minneapolis, Mediapolis. It means the city between two cities. And let me tell you, a lot was happening in Mediapolis with 1,500 people. Okay. That's my hometown. That's what I picture when I think of home. Okay. But for some of us, maybe you're even thinking about where you are at right now, like where you currently live, your house or your apartment, the city that you live in now. Maybe you don't consider your hometown in the sense that I considered it your home. But maybe your home kind of travels with you wherever you move, and that's where home is. For a few of us, you might even be thinking that you don't even have a place that you would call home. All right, and maybe even that question of where do you call home can conjure up some bad or difficult negative emotions for you. But whatever camp you find yourself in today, when it comes to the place you call home, what we need to understand is where you called home in biblical times was actually a really, really big deal. Okay? In the ancient Middle East, where our passage tonight was written, the Norman society was to be identified by your first name and then your home. Like if you were running around in 30 AD when Jesus was alive and in the flesh and you heard about this guy named Jesus, you wouldn't hear somebody call him Jesus Christ like it was his last name. Okay? Christ is a title, all right? You would have heard people say, Jesus of Nazareth, okay, or Jesus the Nazarene. That's where Jesus was from. That's the city where Jesus called home. There was a piece of your identity that was tied in your home or where your citizenship was. And today there's so much less emphasis on where our citizenship lies or where we call home that it's kind of maybe hard for us to understand how important it was in the time that this was written. But what we need to know for us here in 2026 is that where we call home matters. We might not identify people by their first name in their hometown as much anymore, right? We don't really do that in conversation, but where we call home is something that should be incredibly important to us. Okay, so with that in mind, let's jump into our passage in Philippians 3. Okay, we're gonna start in verse 20. If you got it, go ahead and say, got it. It feels like you maybe should have been here by now, but I'll just go ahead and read it for us. Uh, Philippians 3, verse 20 and 21 says this. He will transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of his glorious body by the power that enables him to subject everything to himself. Okay, so this letter is written by a guy named Paul. He wrote a lot of the New Testament, and Paul isn't writing this letter to just anybody. Okay, he's writing this letter specifically to a group of Christians in a place called Philippi. It was named after Alexander the Great's father, I believe. Okay, and so we need to know that when Paul says this phrase, our citizenship, in verse 20, what Paul is addressing is the Christians only here. Okay, he's not addressing everybody, he's addressing Christians. He's assuming that the people who are reading it have already placed their faith in Jesus for the forgiveness of their sins. He's assuming that these people have been already justified before a holy God because Jesus paid their sin debt on the cross. He's assuming that people who are reading this are being sanctified through the power of the Holy Spirit to look more like Jesus and less like their sinful selves throughout their lives. And ultimately, he's assuming the people who are reading it, it's their citizenship or where they call home. It's somewhere other than earth. He's telling these Christians who are so like accustomed to having their identity, their name, their likeness tied to where they call home, that their home is not their hometown anymore. He's telling them their new home is somewhere else, somewhere not of this world. He's telling the Christian three things in our text tonight, and the first one is this it's gonna come up on the screen. Your home is heaven. Your home is heaven. So for me, um, it may not look like it, but uh I have four family members in my family who are from other countries, okay, um, all over the world, uh Mexico, Turkey, Puerto Rico, Chile, um, a lot of different places. And uh these family members that I have, three out of the four of them, had to go through a process to obtain permanent citizenship. Okay. Eventually they applied for it and it was given to them. And for each one of them, where they consider their home, shifted from their home or their native country to their new country along where they lived and held citizenship. Okay, for each of my family members, what happened is that legally they were now citizens of the United States. Okay, and what that means is that they've been given a right to live here, to work here, and to be free. And when that happened, this place became their home. Like they might have started somewhere else, but they now get to call this place home for the rest of their lives. Now, why do I share that story about my family with you? Because when Paul writes to us Christians about where our citizenship is at now, it's an awful lot like what my family members went through to gain citizenship here. Like they started out as citizens of another place. Like their home was not here, it was somewhere else. And they had the desire to come to this new place, this new home, to ask for citizenship, and it was ultimately granted or given to them. Like they gained a new home and they now have freedom. And now their new home is where their focus lies. Okay, they're not thinking as much about their old home anymore. They're focused on their new home. And what Paul wants all Christians everywhere, not just the ones in ancient Philippi who he was writing to to focus on, is their new collective home in heaven. Okay, or in other words, as one of my pastor friends puts it, in Christ, every Christian has the same hometown. Okay, see, all Christians, when we place our faith in Jesus, we no longer have the same home that we did before. But we're given a brand new home that's shared with all Christians everywhere for all time, including the Christians that Paul is writing to in the letter. When we get this new collective home, we shouldn't act like our old home does not exist. Okay, we don't act like earth is now gone. We still live here, we still work here, but we should be embracing our new home as our focus for our lives. Because the reality is, is that our old home, Earth, is in fact passing away eventually. Like eventually, the place that you call home, wherever that is on this blue planet that we live on, it will be gone at some point. Okay? In Revelation 21, John he writes about a future vision where everything that you see around you, the earth, the sky, the sea, everything that you see will pass away. Like Thanos and the Avengers movies, it's inevitable. This reality of our current home passing away should actually not uh let us just laugh about it, right? But it should actually do something within us. Okay, this should stir in us not just to go on like everything is totally normal once we place our faith in Jesus. Like we should just keep on pursuing the things that don't actually matter in eternity. Okay, we can't live like money and possessions and trivial pursuits are the point of our lives. That is for people who don't have hope in eternity. They live like this is all they have, like this is all there is. And as Christians, we just can't live like that anymore. Because we know what they don't know, that this life isn't everything. And this home we have is not forever. We have to live for our eternal home, not our temporary home. And as we live for eternal things, our focus should be on our new home in heaven. What should happen is that the people around you without hope, you all have people that don't have hope around you. Those people without faith in Jesus should notice you living differently. People without a new home in heaven should be able to watch your life at any point and say, why are they living like this isn't it? Why do they act like so many things that I care about don't actually matter to them? They should be asking questions like this. And the answer is that you've been given a new home in heaven, where every choice you make for Christ, every move you make for Jesus will be a treasure that you store up in eternity, and unlike the things of this earth that will pass away, what you store up in heaven will not. And when we live differently than the rest of the world, when those without a new home in heaven ask those questions, what you can do as a Christian is you can point them to your Savior who's coming from your new home again. This leads us to our second point to Christians from Paul, and it's this your Savior is coming. That's right, it's time. Could be right now. That's like the third week in a row we've had an alarm go off. Is that the same alarm? Oh my goodness, it's the same one. You gotta turn that thing off. 8 30. It's a bad time on a Tuesday. We'll talk later. Um sorry, she's probably super embarrassed right now. I just outed her like that twice in two weeks. Um okay, anyways, our Savior's coming, right? Paul tells us that not only do we have a new home, not only are we going to get to heaven, but while we are here on earth, we are to, if you caught it, eagerly wait for a savior from our new home. A new savior from heaven, a savior that is the Lord Jesus Christ. Okay, but what does waiting eagerly mean? Okay, the Greek word here for eagerly wait actually conveys an attitude of expecting eagerly. Okay, or in other words, you know that Jesus is coming back and you are pumped about it. That's what that word means. Paul wants the Christian to know that when Jesus says he's coming, he means it. The Christian can bank on Jesus doing exactly what he said he would. This isn't going to come up on the screen, but in John 14, 3, Jesus says this. Okay, this is the direct words of Jesus. He says, if I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and I will take you myself, so that where I am you may be also. Jesus says he's coming back himself to get you. Jesus said he'll come back, and if he said he'll do it, we need to believe it. Paul wants us to know that Jesus will return, and as Christians, we need to be excited about that reality because there's nothing better that can happen for Christians. Okay, there is nothing better in this life if you call yourself a Christian than for Jesus to come back for you. Like the fact that Jesus will come back should be reason for us to celebrate. Okay, Jesus is returning for you. And if you are a Christian, your Savior, the one who took the punishment that you deserved upon himself, the one that died the death that you deserved, the one that abolished sin and death and rose from the grave after three days for you is coming back. Come on. And it's because of what Jesus has done for us that we should be elated about his coming return and waiting expectantly for it to happen. So while we wait, while we're in this period of time that nobody knows the end of, we need to be ready. Okay, we need to live like heaven, not earth, is our forever home. But we also need to live like Jesus is coming back soon. Because when Paul pens this letter, he, nor anybody else, knows when Jesus is going to return. Okay? Paul doesn't say this like he knows the day or the hour. It could be a hundred years from now, it could be ten years from now, it could be ten days from now or ten minutes from now, ten seconds from now. We don't know. But we know it will be soon. Jesus himself says this in Matthew 24, 36 of his return. He says, Now concerning that day or the hour, no one knows. Neither the angels of heaven or the Son, except the Father alone. Okay, and later on in that same passage in verse 44, he says, This is why you, his followers, are also to be ready. Because the Son of Man is coming at an hour that you do not expect. This means we don't know when that day will come. But we need to live like it could be any second now. We can't act like we have all the time in the world. Like we can't act like there will be a next interaction with that person that you want to share the gospel with. Like we can't act like you'll have all these other chances to make changes or do different things because we don't know how much time we have. And the reality of this is that, yes, we who are Christians should be waiting eagerly, excited about Jesus' return, but those who don't yet know Jesus, they might not have that much time left to know. Those who aren't Christians, it's actually not exciting that Jesus is coming back soon to them at all. Because their eternity does not look like the Christians. But more on that later. The Christians' eternity, it's glorious. Which leads us to our third point that Paul tells us in our passage. Okay, verse 21 says this He, that's Jesus, will transform the body of our humble condition into the likeness of his glorious body by the power that enables him to subject everything to himself. You know how I like to describe my current condition here on earth? Humble. Okay. I'm not the most fit person, obviously. Okay. I have awful vision. I need contacts, right? I have a right ankle that's just kind of holding on by a thread. I've broken it three times in the same spot, right? I broke my nose in third grade, it's a little crooked if you look close. Uh I wake up in the morning from a memory foam, cushy mattress, and I feel like I just fought a grizzly bear for 10 rounds overnight. Okay. Like my condition is pretty humble, I would say. You boy's struggling some days. I know that even though you might not feel all that old man wake up stuff like I do, you might have something that you consider to be part of your humble condition. Okay, the reality is that every single person in this room is imperfect. And we have bodies that are like the rest of the world passing away. Even when you're in the athletic prime of your life, like me. That's not true. I'm not in the athletic prime of my life. Statistically, it's 25. I've passed that. Okay.

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What I

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Love about Paul's way of describing our current condition here on earth is that he uses a term, it's not really mean, but it's also not really super flattering because God still did design us in this way. But we got some issues as long as we're alive on earth. Okay, and the reason why I love that is because in comparison to our humble bodies on earth, our heavenly bodies, as Paul describes here, will be infinitely better. How do we know this? Paul tells us that our humble bodies will transform or change into Jesus' glorious likeness. Okay? This is Jesus we're talking about. This means for us that all of those imperfections that we think that we have, all of those odd things about our bodies right now, all of the struggles that we go through as humans with our body, that they will cease to exist because the power of Jesus when he returns. Okay? In other words, when Jesus returns, he isn't going to leave us with all of our problems and just kind of beam us up, but he's going to transform us into perfected people like our Savior. Okay, and it isn't just our bodies. Think back to the definition of glorification from earlier. Gavin, can you click that again? Glorification is God's final removal of sin from believers once Christ returns, transforming them into holy immortals, where they will spend eternity and paradise with God. Okay, did you catch that? Holy immortals. That sounds like something out of a movie, right? But it's real. Jesus isn't coming just to make our bodies not be broken and battered anymore. He's coming to remove our sin and make us perfected as holy immortals. Guys, we don't just look our best in heaven, but we will be our best in heaven because our sin will be gone. Jesus leaves no stone untouched when it comes to our glorious transformation. And for the Christian, this is incredible news. Okay, in all of our struggles here on earth, dealing with the curse of sin and the effects of that in the world as Christians, we will have not just temporary relief from the struggle, but we will have a permanent, lasting transformation in heaven. But here's the best part of glorification. Okay, it's not the fixed bodies, it's not the relief from the struggle, but it's the fact that we get to spend eternity in paradise with God Himself. Okay, getting to spend eternity with God is the goal that we are pressing towards. Getting to be with Jesus, our Savior, our Lord, forever, that is what we're striving towards in this life. Through all the struggle, through all the ups and downs, we eagerly, expectantly wait for Jesus to come back, to make all things new, and spend eternity with him forever. Jesus is the point. And I realize that there's some of us in this room who are sitting here like, dude, like I'm not even a I'm not even a Christian. Like, what was the point of all this? Like, what's the point of talking about glorification? Well, it's Jesus. It's what Jesus has done for us while we were still sinners. It's what Jesus has done for us while we were still enemies of his in our sin. It's what Jesus has done for us when he took all of the sins and shame of the world upon himself and died a brutal death that we deserve. It's what Jesus has done not just in staying dead, but rising from the grave after three days for our sins. It's what Jesus has done for us when all we deserved was to be banished from God's sight and presence forever. It's all about Jesus. And if you don't know Jesus, and you're here tonight, here's the harsh reality for you is that you're not going to be glorified. Your home is not heaven. Your Savior is not coming. Your eternity is not glorious. But there's always a but. The glory that awaits every single person who has ever placed their faith in Jesus can still be yours too. Every single Christian of all time was once in your shoes. Okay? Away from God, an enemy of God. But the beautiful thing about the gospel is that when Jesus did what he did for all of us, he did it while we were still his enemies. And Jesus doesn't just extend the invitation of grace to people who like him. Okay? He extends the invitation of grace to all people because at one point we were all enemies of God. And all we need to do, all any of us need to do to receive this grace is this. Romans 10, 9, it tells us the simple truth. It says we need to confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord, and we need to believe in our heart that God raised him from the dead, and you will be saved. It's literally as simple as that. And if you come to him tonight, if that's you and you're not a Christian in the room, and you come to him tonight and you honestly, genuinely approach him and confess with your mouth and believe in your heart, you are now saved. You don't need to come up here and talk with me. I don't need to lay hands on you. You can make that decision right there in your seat. And when you're saved, your new home is heaven. Your Savior is coming. And your eternity is now glorious. And if that's you, if you made that decision tonight, let me be the first to say, Welcome home. But as I close, I have a couple of points of application for us to leave tonight. They're not going to pop up on the screen. I was too late. Okay. The first is this. This is for the non-Christian. We just talked about it. But be repentant. Like if you're the non-Christian in the room, make tonight the night that you come to Jesus. You do not know when Jesus will return. You don't know how much time you have. Don't wait. Don't put it off because you don't know when he will return. Two, for the Christian, it's be ready. Live like your home is not the earth, but it's heaven. Like your savior is coming. Like your eternity is glorious. Because Jesus is coming back soon. And just just imagine that if as Christians we all remembered the reality of our heavenly home, our Savior's return. Our city would look, our campuses, our world would look if we believed that. And we live that out. Let's pray that this would be true of us tonight. Heavenly Father, I thank you for this room. God, I thank you for bringing each and every person here. God, I thank you for dying, a brutal death that we all deserve. Thank you, Lord, for your sacrifice on the cross and rising again after three days, all so that we can have a new home with you. Jesus, you are coming. Jesus, you have made our eternity glorious, God. I pray that each one of us in this room, if we haven't yet put our faith in Jesus, that we would put our faith in Jesus, but Lord, if we have already done that, that we would live like our home is in heaven. Lord, that we would live like you are coming back soon, and that we have eternity, a glorious eternity to spend with you. God, I pray you would use us to change our campuses, change our neighborhoods, change our city, change our world as we go from this place to live in that reality. I pray that that would be true of us tonight. Amen.

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Thanks for listening to the Ambassador Church Podcast. To learn more, visit ambassadormke.org or follow us on Instagram at AmbassadorMKE. And if you're in the Milwaukee area, we'd love to see you this Sunday at 9 or 11 AM at 2308 East Bellevue Place. Grace and peace.