Rekindling Hope: Tuning Our Hearts To The Key Of The Future

Outline: https://www.ecclesianj.com/_files/ugd/092876_b24a0b7bc47141b58081bcf47a701904.pdf

Pastor Ian Graham looks at the scriptures’ glimpses of the future and what it means for our present.

Transcript

Cold Morning And The Treadmill Metaphor

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Morning friends, how are we doing? It's good to see you all cold. Really? Well, we will solve that. I was like, man, we are gonna fix that. It's a joy to be together. Yeah, it is so cold outside. I have lived here a long time. This is the most prolonged cold snap that I can remember. And uh I'm over it. Um I I like to run outside, which is related to my experience of the cold. Uh and so if it's hot, I'm from Oklahoma, we have 100 degree summers for months on end. I'll take that. When it's cold, I usually can stand it up to about 25 degrees. I have found my limits this week. I do not go outside to run when there is a single digit attached to the temperature. But what I had to do, because again, I running is almost a spiritual practice for me, is I had to get on what's called a treadmill. Now, the thing about treadmills is you get on it and you actually enter into a time and space continuum vortex or something. Because you swear you have run for 30 minutes and you look at that darn little indicator on right in front of you, why they put it there, I don't know, and it tells you that you've actually run for three minutes. And the only logical response when you have that experience is to stop, just get off, right? Uh I have learned some tricks. Some of you who run on treadmills will know this. You have to take whatever garments you have and cover, right? This is that you have to trick your mind, and then you have to play games with yourself. But I was on a treadmill on Thursday. I was there was a sunny window in front of me. That was nice, a little bit of sun, but I literally had the thought, I was like, I don't think I'm ever getting off this thing. And I don't know why I had this thought, but I was also like focusing in, like I could see my legs a little bit and the reflection just churning endlessly, and I had that like hamster on a wheel, and I'm just like, I will be on this treadmill forever. And treadmills are an interesting uh insight into our psyche because one of the hard things about treadmills is you can quit at any moment, right? Like if you're a runner, you know that running out and then running back kind of taxes you to have to do both legs of it. You're like, well, I've already made it this far, I might as well get back. But on a treadmill, you could just be like, hey, guess what? I'm done.

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Beep.

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Bye. And so there's this

Life Feels Like A Treadmill

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whole set of tricks that you have to then adopt. And I'm having all of these thoughts on this treadmill, and it sort of illuminated for me this larger concept that we've been talking about, this concept of hope. And for many of us in our lives, like the treadmill is not an inappropriate picture of how we feel our lives are going. And we just often get this sense that we're staring at ourselves, we're like, I'm gonna be here forever. I'm gonna be on this treadmill, just running at this pace forever. And it's something very different when you know that there's an end in sight. And not an end where you just give up and surrender, but an end where you meet the goal that was laid out before you. Today, what I want to do is look a little bit at what the scriptures illuminate as the goal of walking with Jesus, of following him, the reward, if you will. What the scriptures call the heavens or heaven. And I want to do that because when we've talked about hope, we've made it a very pronounced point to say that hope is not just about the future. Hope is not just about sometime else, as we'll see. Hope is about the presence of Jesus operating in the places of despair or disillusionment in our lives right now. But hope is also about the future. And there is a great and glorious future that is promised to us, that is secure in the hands of Jesus, that

Setting The Goal: Heaven And Hope

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have given themselves for the world, and he holds it forevermore, abundantly, extravagantly, and he wants to give it to us. And so it's important for us as Christians at times to just stop and put ourselves on that timeline, to use our imaginations and to see the hope that Jesus has for us and to reflect on the beauty and the endlessness of that which awaits us. So, today as we conclude this New Year's teaching series on the concept of hope, we're gonna look at orienting our hearts towards the destination that Jesus has promised us. And we've been coming back to this question throughout this series over and over again. Where are you looking for hope right now? And we could slightly modify that question to ask you, where are you going? You know, so often the places that our feet, our eyes, our desires take us are really just expressions of the answer to that question: where are you looking for hope? So often we declare where we're looking for hope by the things that we spend our time doing. And we convince ourselves that if I can only be this, or if I can only accomplish this, if people will only see me this way, then I will have hope. But that is not the kind of hope that the scriptures give to us. That is a manufactured hope. That is a hope built upon our own strengths or accolades or the perceptions of others. And Jesus has a much better hope for us, as we've talked about in the past. You can catch up on this series on your own time on our podcast there. But today we want to look at the destination, the end, for which the Bible calls and C.S. Lewis so beautifully illuminates, is just a new beginning. A way of orienting both the compasses of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength towards its true north, and of training our steps and sight for walking in the meantime. Alright, I want to give to you what I think and believe is truly the most hopeful phrase

The Most Hopeful Phrase In Scripture

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that has ever been uttered. That's a bold proclamation. I don't like making sweeping pronouncements, but I'm gonna tell you. The most hopeful phrase that has ever been uttered, Mark 1, verse 14. Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, the time is fulfilled. And the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe in the good news. Now, this is the first thing that Jesus says in Mark's gospel. And if you want to do a great Bible study, go to the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Just pay attention to the first words that Jesus says. And the implications of what they might mean for what Jesus is up to, and the implications for what they might mean for what you mean to God. The time is fulfilled. The kingdom has come near. Jesus proclaims to a people who have been asking themselves the question, what is God up to? And he takes up his ministry, preaching, casting out demons, healing, forgiving sinners with this phrase that will only be illuminated as Jesus walks out all that he is about to undertake. The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of heaven is near. Now, perhaps you grew up with a version of the Christian story that sounds something like this Jesus loves me, He has forgiven me, He is with me to some extent, and the goal for my life with Him is heaven. Some version of that. I'll

What Is The Kingdom Of God

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fly away, old glory, I'll fly away. Right? Now, I say none of that to criticize. You could do a lot worse with your theology of what is being told in the Bible than that. I don't think it's less than that. I think it's a lot more. We look here in Mark 1. Let's look at what Jesus is saying because we have to hear what Jesus is saying about this idea of heaven. We're gonna ask three questions. Oh, I should pause. I am not type A. I love you people who are type A. Dear. And one of the things I've learned about you people is that your love language is outlines. So I have made an outline. Because, as I previously stated, I love you. You to please, like that's what it's for. And the to tell you how not type I am, I forgot about it until right now. So there were things. But we're gonna ask three questions about the idea of what we'll call the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. Those three questions are what, when, and where. And we can surmise all of these from this short little verse in Mark chapter one. First, let's focus on the kingdom of God. What is the kingdom of God? Well, we did a whole teaching series on the kingdom of God back in the fall of 2024 when there was an election year. No coincidence. You can go back and listen to that. Dallas Willard calls a kingdom the range of one's effective will. It's easy for us to be inoculated to the language that is used in the Bible, especially if we grew up in church. But don't let it be lost on you that a kingdom is a political arrangement. You guys understand that, right? Like we live at least nominally in a representative democracy. And especially if you're a lobbyist, we live in a representative democracy, right? But we have at least the perception of being able to influence the levers of power. Guess what? In a kingdom, you don't get any of that. The kingdom is arranged at the whim and behest of

When Is Heaven

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the king. The king does what the king wants to do. And this puts you at the mercy of the king. If it's a good and merciful and just king, the people can be elevated. If it's a king who is going to take and lay heavy burdens upon his people, the people will be crushed. We see this throughout history. But Jesus comes and he declares a political arrangement, the kingdom of God. This claim is made amidst one of the most integrated, complex empires that the world has ever known, the Roman Empire. And Jesus is here in Galilee, in some backwater town in the ancient Near East, saying, actually the real kingdom? Right here. It's a bold statement. But the kingdom of God is simply where God is king. Now, the next couple questions we have to ask ourselves are when is this kingdom of God present? The gospel writer Matthew is shorthand for this phrase, kingdom of God. The phrase that he likes to use can be interchanged is kingdom of heaven. Our conception of heaven, if we're honest, and usually the one that we've received is usually, if we want to use a fancy word, we could call it spatio-temporal, which is just a fancy way of saying space and time. But notice what Jesus has said. When is heaven? When is heaven? For us, if we're honest, that orientation is usually somewhere else when we die after this life, right?

Where Is Heaven

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But Jesus says the time is fulfilled. The word for time here is the Greek word kairos. It is not simply about telling the time on a clock, but the resonance of time, the meaning of a specific moment. It's popular in our culture right now to talk about a cultural moment or how do we meet the moment? That's not all that dissimilar from what Jesus is talking about. And Jesus is saying the significance of this moment is that he is now here. He is speaking that the kingdom of God has come near. The time has come. So when is heaven? Right now. The second half of that spatio-temporal declaration is equally weighty. Where is this kingdom of heaven? There's a famous sort of apocryphal story about the Russian cosmonaut who was the first one to go into orbit, who said, I've gone into heaven and I didn't find God. Now, interestingly, he was a Christian. He didn't say that. But that's the story that's been told. Where is heaven? Is it somewhere above, beyond the atmosphere, somewhere else? Because if we're honest, if you watch the news or you just live life for long enough, it would suggest that heaven has to be somewhere else. Because this place often feels like something quite different. But look at what Jesus says. Where has the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God, where has it come? Has it come somewhere else to some other people? No. It's come near. Where is heaven? Near. Here. When is heaven? Now. Right now. The kingdom of God is present wherever Jesus is present. And we believe that because of what Jesus has done, he wasn't just present 2,000 years ago,

Present-Kingdom Faith And Its Politics

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and these are nice mythical fairy stories that we read to make ourselves feel better, to give ourselves a hope of heaven that somehow gives some significance or direction to these meager lives that we live. No, we believe that because Jesus died, was raised on the third day, and poured out his spirit, that the promises that he gave to us, that where two or more are gathered, or many, many more, he would be present with us. He is here in our midst. That we have seen his face in the face of another even this morning. He is present. The kingdom of God is near. The kingdom of God is now. Matthew Bates says this. He says, We're prone to an immature faith if we don't take Jesus at his words. And the damage done to our practical faith in Christ and in his government at hand by confusing heaven with a place in distant or outer space or even beyond space is incalculable. Of course, God is there too. But instead of heaven and God also always being present with us as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away, and most likely at a much later time, not here and not now. One of the most famous examples from American history of this kind of assumption and bleeding its way into practical life, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson believed in God. He even took a Bible and just cut out the parts he didn't like. It's a great way to be able to live this thing out, right? Are you having trouble following the scriptures? Like, just get rid of it. Thomas Jefferson believed that God had wound the world up. You learn about this in high school history class, deism. And that it left the world to its devices to be run by presumably great men. And he lived and governed in such a way. You could see how the assumption about what God's kingdom is, about when God's kingdom is, about where God's kingdom is, would lead you to make certain decisions. It would lead to certain kinds of politics. N.T. Wright says this Heaven in the Bible is not a future destiny, but the other hidden dimension of our ordinary life, God's dimension. God made heaven and earth, and at the last he will remake both and join them together forever. And when we come to the picture of the actual end in Revelation 21 and 22, we find not ransom souls making their way to a disembodied heaven, but rather the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, uniting the two in a lasting embrace. Now, what does that begin to look like in our lives? Well, I love what John Wesley does. He takes that big cosmic reality and says, this is what this begins to event itself in the lives of a person, a people. This is a longer quote, but I believe in you. Blessed is the man, or rather happy. And now again, Wesley was an 18th-century revivalist and church man and theologian. He wrote at a time when talking about men would cover women

Signs Of The Kingdom In Us

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too, but it's important to say. Blessed is the man, or rather happy, whose unrighteousness is forgiven, and whose sin is covered. He it is that inspires the Christian soul with that even solid joy which ariseth from the testimony of the Spirit that he is a child of God, and that gives him to rejoice with joy unspeakable in the hope of the glory of God. Hope both of the glorious image of God, which is in part and shall be fully revealed in him, and of that crown of glory which fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for him. This holiness and happiness, joined in one and sometimes styled in the inspired writings, the kingdom of God, and sometimes the kingdom of heaven, it is termed the kingdom of God because it is the immediate fruit of God's reigning in the soul. So soon as he takes upon himself his mighty power and sets his throne in our hearts, they are instantly filled with this righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. It is called the kingdom of heaven because it is the extent to which heaven opens in the soul. John Wesley is saying, when you see love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, all this fruit of the Spirit that you maybe learned in some Bible class when you were little. It's a testimony to what God is up to in the entire world. Some of you have moved countries to be here. You literally uprooted your whole life and you found that America is uh different. Some of you are from different regions in the country and you found that America is different. I grew up in Oklahoma, as I mentioned. I've lived here for longer than I lived anywhere, so I'm from New Jersey now. But I do love to watch people from places I would call the Bible Belt in the South have their first experiences with uh the Northeast and with New Jersey. Uh sometimes they can be a little bit wide-eyed and like, wow, did they just say that? It's like, yeah, yeah. All the pretenses of nicety are off. Now, the truth is, people are extremely nice here. Uh, but sometimes those exteriors of niceness are just kind of rubbed off. So you've had this experience of coming into cultural and custom collision at some level in your life. Now, suppose you were preparing, you got to pick a place you were gonna move, but it was gonna be a place with different customs, language, cultural assumptions, and expectations, a different way of being, a different way of accounting for time. Have you ever been in a culture where they did not account for time like Western white people? You're like, when is this happening? They're like, Yeah, this afternoon. Okay, that's helpful, right? Very different way of being. And you either get on their time or you spend all your time kind of kicking and screaming. There's your choice. But if you had that opportunity

Training Desire With Revelation’s Vision

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lying in front of you, you would probably undertake some preparations. You pull up the Duolingo or whatever people are using to learn languages these days. You would try to enculturate yourself as best as you could, so you would not be so viscerally shocked when you arrived. Again, I know I'm describing for some of you not just a hypothetical, but a very real experience that you've already gone through. NT Wright says of the incarnation of Jesus: when the playwright takes the stage, the play is usually over. But the incarnation of Jesus inverts that. You know, if you go to a play and the director of the play steps off, that's usually at the end, the encore. Well done. But what Jesus has done is stepped onto stage, the playwright, the author and perfecter of our faith, the image of the invisible God, the firstborn and fall of creation. He has stepped onto the stage in the middle of history. And he has inaugurated a new, truer story, a new humanity, a new creation that's breaking forth right in the midst of this one. And he's done that by his life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, his pouring out of his spirit. And as Wesley notes, the fruit of the Spirit are the testimony, the signs of the kingdom of God. We are the people who are indwelled by the Spirit of God to speak the language of heaven, to live in light of its customs, to treat our neighbors how we will treat them for all of eternity. Think about that. How would you treat somebody in heaven? Maybe differently than you would treat them today. To govern with God's justice and mercy, to believe that Jesus believes what he says, means what he says, when he says, Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And to believe that that is an actual, real, actionable politic. To be a people of defiant and profound joy. Amidst a world that is hurting, to share that joy with them and to know that no matter what, death has been defeated. You can lose nothing. My boys are have have become wrestlers. And uh I took one look at wrestlers in high school, in our high school gym. I was dribbling in basketball, and I saw these guys with their trash bag suits trying to lose weight, and I'm watching them run up and down stairs, and I was like, those people are crazy. And I was like, back to basketball. But my kids have become wrestlers. And wrestling is such a brave and courageous endeavor. It really is. Like I have so much admiration for my eight and five-year-old sons. They go out into the middle of this ring and go into combat, and it elicits visceral reactions in their father, I gotta be honest. But one of the things, because what comes with wrestling for most young people is losing. And I don't know about you, like my sons hate to lose, and they get like really affected by it. And one of the things, I'm I'm not a genius parent, but I try to just be consistent. One of the things I always say to them, I ask them, hey, what's the most important thing in the world? That Jesus loves me. And I ask them, will that change if you lose this wrestling

Holiness As The Way To Joy

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match? No. And just to transpose that onto the hope that we need at times, hey, there are things that are heavy in life, there are things that are hard, there are things that feel desperate and hopeless. But I assure you that the gospel remains true. That the most important thing that has ever been spoken over you, the most important gift that has ever been given to you, will not be taken away. It is safe and secure in his hands. Death and sin have been defeated. You are in his hands forevermore. That is always true of you. And sometimes just framing that reality, no matter how immense the circumstances we are up against, can remind us that God will not leave us, he will not forsake us. But the question we want to address: how do we begin making preparations to live in light of this eternal future right now? How do we see with Diedrich Bonhoeffer that heaven is torn open above us humans? The joyful message of God's salvation in Jesus Christ rings out from heaven to earth as a cry of joy. I believe, and in believing I receive Christ, I have everything, I live before God. He wrote that from a German prison camp. Defiant joy, defiant hope in the face of his circumstances. I want to look at three ways. These are not all the ways, but three ways that we can live in light of that sure and certain future, orient our hearts and the compass of our lives towards that, and walk in that way with Jesus right now. God has created this master symphony. He's an artist. And we see bits and pieces of it. But he's also, he's not just created the symphony to surround us, he's created the symphony so that we might find our lives tuned as instruments to join along. No matter what kind of virtuoso you are, no matter how quickly you can run up and down the scales on the guitar, if your guitar is out of tune, it's going to sound terrible. And so the first thing that God is up to is He's tuning our lives to the rhythms of heaven. He's tuning our lives to his ways. He's giving us his words. We've already referenced, blessed are the poor, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. This is not Jesus saying you have to find a way to be hungry and thirsty for righteousness. This is him saying, This is what it means to be my kind of people. He's tuning our hearts and our lives. And

Putting On The New Self

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he creates this symphony so that we might play our small part and join in harmony with what he is up to in the world. And eventually at the end, we will see and hear and be immersed in the music. The music of goodness, of love, of beauty, of truth that God has prescribed for us. So, how do we begin living in light of this sure and certain future? A couple things. First, God is training our desires, our longings. In Revelation 4, and again, it's important that we say this, Revelation 4, like hope, is not just about the future. Revelation is about life right now as it really is. And again, we find the scriptures running up against the pretensions of the Roman Empire. And what happens is John is exiled on an island, far from the centers of power, and yet God immerses him in a vision of true reality. And we see this especially in Revelation 4 and 5. Revelation 4, beginning in verse 6, says this Around the throne, and on each side of the throne are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and back, the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature like with a face like a human, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle. Clear enough, right? We're good? All right. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside, day and night without ceasing. They sing holy, holy, holy, the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and is to come. Now I wonder what you envision when you hear that or when you read that. It's easy for us in this strange scene to see in the key of somber, ritualistic, even scary. I think for many of us, this can tap into some of our worst fears about the kind of heaven that we're talking about, and thus the kind of king we're talking about. Like, really? This is what we're gonna do for all of eternity? I mean, you don't have to raise your hand, but I know some of you were like, is the singing over yet? Are we done? And this is like really good singing. Like, not just decent. I imagine they can sing pretty well in heaven, but you're you're kind of having a little bit of uh consternation, shall we say? A little bit of fear. It's like, is this all we're gonna do? All day and night? But we misread Revelation if we don't hear the music and the key of sheer unbridled joy. The victory of the Lamb has been won over every pretentious political figure and order, over the despair of sin engraved. The image of the inaugurated end in Revelation 19 is a feast. Look at Revelation 19, verse 6. Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters, and like the sound of mighty

Renewed Desire And Daily Practice

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thunder peals crying out, Hallelujah! For the Lord God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. To her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure, for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, Write this Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb. What kind of party would you have if you knew the party would never end? What kind of food would you eat if you knew there was no limit to the budget, to the culinary skill that was available, to the grocery items? What kind of table would you set if you could feed the entire world? The scripture's way of training us for this kind of party may seem a bit counterintuitive. Because we associate holiness with loss, with sanctuary, with narrowness, but the Bible invites us into a different way. The scriptures are saying the way into this kind of unbridled, liberated joy is by yielding our lives to the ways of God, by allowing Him to tune our lives, to take us out of the former things, which enslaved us, which had empty promises and didn't deliver, and merely created this treadmill effect that you would never get off of. And to be brought instead into the kingdom of his eternal light, to be saved, liberated, set free. I want to read a long section of scripture over you because I think it's important that we do this. This is from Ephesians 4, where Paul is reflecting on the before and the after. He says this, beginning in verse 17. Now this I affirm, and insist on in the Lord, you must no longer walk as the Gentiles walk. In the futility of their minds, they are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They've lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ. For surely you've heard about him and you were taught in him as truth is in Jesus. To put away your old way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God and true righteousness and holiness. It's easy just to pass over Paul's imagery there. The metaphor he's using is as simple as putting on a garment. Every one of us got dressed today. Every one of us had a simple moment of decision about what you would wear. And sometimes we have all of these delusions that faith is always this extravagant declaration and testimony. Often it's quiet, it's steady, it's simple, as simple as putting on your clothes. So then, putting away falsehood, let each of you speak the truth with your neighbor.

Acting Now With Eternal Weight

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For we are members of one another. Be angry, but do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger. That's a good politic. And do not make room for the devil. Also good politic. Those who must who steal must give up stealing. That's also a good politic. All right. Rather, let them labor doing good work with their own hands so as to have something to share with the needy. Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is good for building up as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice. Be kind to one another. Tenderhearted. Forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you. Paul's like, I just said a lot of words. Let me summarize it for you in verse 32. This is what God is like. He is kind, he is tenderhearted, he is forgiving. Augustine writes that the whole of life of the good Christian is a holy longing. That is our life, to be trained by longing. The Holy Spirit wants to tune our lives to make music alongside Jesus. And He's invited us to live in light of this grace. Kurt Thompson, a therapist and interpersonal neurobiologist, that's fancy. He says this everything we imagine we must do to practice for heaven by creating beauty in the ash heaps of our world. Be they marriages or toxic waste dumps, begins with desire. In this world of brokenness, that which is broken is not always so. It is merely the outgrowth of defiled desire. And for the world to be redeemed, God does not destroy desire. He resurrects and renews it while using it to renew everything else, beginning with us. Alright, second thing. How do we orient our hearts? We act. We obey. You know? You ever heard the phrase? So set on heaven, no earthly good? We as the people of God are so set on heaven that we are intent upon bringing glimpses of it into our neighborhoods, into our lives right now. How would you live if you knew that every action of love towards God and your neighbors would compound exponentially and infinitely in eternity? What would you do? I mean, you're talking about compound interest, the kind of investment that you can make. Like you could buy Bitcoin like 20 years ago, like that kind of investment, right? But we're talking about little acts of love sown into the soil of God's eternity. What would those become? Every blessing, every bit of food shared, every poem you wrote, every time you stood up to the bullies who harassed your people in the middle school lunchroom, in the courtroom, or down the street. In John 6, there are some 5,000 people in

Imagine The Unending Feast

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a desolate place, and the day grows long, and they need food. The only provisions available are a few loaves of bread and a couple fish. Not enough to feed even a fraction of those amount of people. And those provisions are brought to Jesus, and Jesus takes them, these meager offerings, into his hands. He blesses, he breaks, he gives them to the crowds. And there's not just enough for everybody to have a little taste, a little bite, a little morsel. There is over and above, abundantly more. There's so much that they have to gather up the fragments so that nothing would be wasted. Heaven reminds us that there is a soil beyond this one, that all of our seeds sown in love, no matter how daily and mundane they may seem, will show their flowers, their fruit, their trees for what they are. You know, when Jesus says in Matthew 17 that if we have faith as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, be cast into the seed, it would be. I don't know about you, but I have had moments in my life where I'm facing something that is too big for me, and I'm trying to conjure up that kind of faith, right? I'm like, God, I want faith that can move mountains. I want to be the kind of person who holds so dearly to your promises that not only do you know that I believe in you, but you act, you move. And I don't think that's the only thing that Jesus is saying here is that if somehow we could conjure up that kind of faith, that he's going to respond. I think what Jesus is saying here is that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, it is cast into the soil of God's glacial, geological longevity. Think about mountains. They stratify over millennia. What would our love become? What would our faith become held in the hands of Christ, given eternity to grow? We act. Not because the outcome is apparent, not because we are guaranteed that everything will go well for us, we act because we are obeying and following our good Father, revealed in Jesus through the power of the Spirit. Wendell Berry says this. And this then is the vision of that heaven of which we have heard, where those who love each other have forgiven each other. Where for that the leaves are green, the light, a music in the air, all is untangled, all is undismayed. Last we imagine. It goes almost without saying, but I need to say it anyway. Heaven will be so much better than we can even begin to imagine. This doesn't diminish the present, far from it, it transfigures it. No eye is seen, no ear is heard, no mind can see what God has prepared for those who love him. John writes in Revelation 21, I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord, God the Almighty, and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it. For the glory of God is its

New Creation And Cultural Treasure

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light and its lamp is the Lamb. Now we see just clearly here this is temple imagery. And the temple, throughout the scriptural story, is a place of restriction. It is a place where not everybody can go. And that's increasingly true as you get to the inner and more holy parts of the temple. And what John is saying here is that the city itself, the entire thing, is a temple. And we have light that illuminates between us. We have light that guarantees that we can see each other, that guides the progression of days and seasons. That often, even though we don't notice it, is the distance between us. And what God, what John is saying here at Revelation 21, what would it look like in this New Jerusalem city if love were the distance between us? And think about this. Any of you who have ever been in any kind of relationship, friendship, marriage, you have a parent. How often our relationships are defined by misunderstanding, by misplaced expectations, by wanting people to heal things in us that they can't heal? What would change if the distance between us were not misunderstanding, misplaced expectations, lack of healing? What would change if the distance between us were the love of God? What if you could communicate fully and integrally how much you love someone? And what if that were to be true from the deepest parts of who you are? This is what John is saying. Heaven will be so much better. Because he is making us new. We will be something that we can't even conceive. The nations will walk by its light, the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. I don't know if you realize this. Heaven is not just an individual place, it is a social place. Did you hear what John just said? The nations of the earth will bring their treasures. How many of you are from a culture that you're proud of? Please raise your hand. I am the inheritor of Scottish warrior poets. We don't have good food, but we got good words. Some of you, you're like, if they if these people knew what we serve at our potlucks. And this is what is happening here in Revelation. All of these things, different cultures, different borders that we have put up, the brilliance and the genius of these cultures are not being erased. They're being transfigured, they're being offered in worship to the king. They're being seen for what they really are. Robert Chow Romero and Jeff Liu, they say this By God's design and plan, every ethnic group of the world possesses cultural treasure and wealth that is of eternal value. What sociologists call community cultural wealth. We will spend eternity partaking of this cultural treasure, and all God's people said, yes and amen, offering up to God in worship

God With Us And Every Tear Wiped

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and seeking the healing of the ethnic wounds we have received while walking in this broken and fallen world. What if the strife that so easily defines us, the stereotypes that ring so loudly in our heads were to be silenced? They will be. John then writes, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. Now, those of you who love the ocean, despair not. The sea is an image of chaos in the book of Revelation. It's about all that threatens God's people. I still think it'll be water, especially if you read Matthew's gospel. Jesus really likes water. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, adorned for her husband, and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them, they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and be their God. Do you know that the exact reason that you exist, the precise reason that you were made was to see God. And to see in his eyes that he likes you. Do you know that? And doesn't that change everything? You don't have to despair or wonder or be perplexed about what the point of living is. The point is to see him. He could have put his home anywhere, and he puts it right in our midst and says, I want to be with my people. And then he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Ecclesia, it bears endless repeating how intimate of an action this is. Have you ever wiped a tear from a friend's eyes or a child's eyes or a spouse's eyes? This is not something done at a distance. It's done up close. And I don't think the tears will just be ours. I think Jesus will be. Death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. And the one who was seated on the throne said, See, I make all things. By the story that he has lived out and given to us as a gift. His death. His resurrection. All drawing all things to be gathered up in him in the words of Ephesians 1. This is your future that animates and orients our present. An old song, Christian Contemporary Radio. Some of you who are a little your wells are a little deeper in life will remember it. I was sort of new to like Christian culture, and I heard this song and just started crying. I was like, this is so beautiful. It's by a band that I don't like very much, but the song is really beautiful. It's called Mercy Me, and the song's called I Can Only Imagine. There's a bunch of people shaking their head, they know what it is. And now I don't know what you would Gen Z and Gen Alpha are like. You can Google this later. Maybe we can make this uh TikTok famous or something. But the song is a very simple reflection on what will heaven be like? And uh yeah, I've got Brandon over here. He's playing a pad and some music, and that is emotionally manipulative. Seriously, keep going. Because we are not

Invitation To Imagine And Pray

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simply creatures that are logical thinking, we are embodied creatures. And so I'm gonna invite you right now as we pray for the Holy Spirit to come. Just to use your imagination. What picture is God painting for you of what heaven will be like? What healing do you see? Some of you have suffered so greatly. And again, I know that the only thing that we're living for is not heaven, but we need heaven. We need the promise that all will be made new. We need the promise that that which has been lost, that which the locusts had stolen and eaten, that he will restore. So I just invite you. How is God meeting you, ministering to you where you are? Just close your eyes. And imagine what that may be like. It may be pure unbridled joy for you right now. It may be the face of a loved one. We diminish Jesus so much when we think we can't want the things of this life. He will transfigure them, he will do it. But this is the hope that we have in him is that we will see his face and that by the power of his healing presence all will be mended, all will be well. So we pray, Holy Spirit, come on. Holy Spirit, comforter, healer. God, we carry around gaping wounds, Lord. God, we carry around uncertainty about whether we'll be okay, uncertainty about the future, Lord. Perplexities and anxieties about loved ones, Lord. Lord, in this moment we just ask that our the vision that we see from the book of Revelation, God. The vision of hope and future, Lord, that we see would empower our present, God. Would help us to see you now. To see the truth that we've never been alone. Even when we didn't know it or weren't aware of it, Lord, you have been there all along.

Prayer, Ministry, And Worship Response

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And you have invited one and all to take their seat at the marriage supper of the Lamb. Lord, you've set a place for us, God. A place specially for us. And said, come sit and eat. Rejoice forevermore. God, we praise you and bless your name for your presence here. We pray that you continue to minister as we stand and respond here in this place. We ask these things in your name, in the blessed name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen. Echo see you. Just in that posture of prayer, I'm gonna invite you to respond and worship. Just allow the Lord to minister to you here in this place. In a few moments, we'll come to the table. Let's worship together.