Sermons tagged with Glorification

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, my name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. I've got a couple of things for you before I just dive into the sermon. The first thing is that Kyle, who did our announcements, is engaged, man. Yeah. That's right. And she's pretty okay. He's getting older. This is right. No, in all honesty, I can't say much, Kyle. I can't say much. I'm so excited for you. I was sitting over here trying to think about what to say. And I just started like tearing up as I thought about all the things because you guys are perfect. So I'm excited and the church is too. The other thing, let's move away from that quickly so that I can actually preach a sermon. The other thing that I want you to know, and I wanted to say it during this part of the service, not during the announcements, because I actually want you to know about it if you're catching up throughout the week or if you're listening on a walk or whatever it is. I want the whole church to know about this and be prayerful in this. At the end of this year, 2020, what is it, two? Goodness. At the end of 2022, we're going to have three spots available on the elder board. So we're going to spend the rest of this year nominating and naming up to three new elders. And I feel like this is a really big deal because we only have eight elders, including me, max. And so we have an opportunity, or in addition to me, I'm the ninth, Max. And so to put three people on the elder board is a big deal. It impacts the culture of the church. It impacts the culture of the board. And I happen to feel that the people who go on the board are of the utmost importance because I'm trying to constantly remind the elders, this is not Nate's church. It's Nate and Jen's church as much as it's your church, as much as we are partners here and we care about the things that happen here. But this is not my church to lead. This is the elders' church to lead on behalf of the partners of grace. I have been asked to steward grace, but under the direction and leadership of the elders. And the elders, again, represent the wishes of the partners. And I would argue that there is no single portion of grace that has a greater impact on the health, integrity, and character and fitness of the church than to have a board that is healthy and fit and integral. So it's important who goes on that board. So if you are a partner, you're invited over the next month to submit people to be considered to be an elder. The process is we take a month to submit names. We take two months for our nominating committee to kind of talk to those folks and vet those names. And then we take a month for the elders to discuss the people that get there. And then we present them to the partners for a partnership vote. I'll say up front, I don't nominate anybody. I try the best I can to stay out of the process and just receive the people that are nominated by all of you guys. And then we discuss all of that. But I don't want to get too deep into the weeds. I just want you as partners to prayerfully consider who you might nominate to be an elder if you feel led to do that. If you look at the Grace Vine this week, there's a link there. If you scroll down, this announcement is in there. There's a link where you can go to the elder page and there's an online form. We have some forms that you can fill out in person if that's your preference. We just don't have them yet this morning because I oopsied this week and forgot to do that. But we'll have them next week on the information table. So please prayerfully consider that. Now for this week as I get into the sermon finally, sorry for such a long preamble, we're talking about repentance. We've been moving through Lent and kind of pulling different Lenten themes out each week through the devotionals and through the sermons. As I've said each week, I hope that you're being ministered to by those devotionals. I've really, really enjoyed reading through those every week and love all the voices speaking into grace. This week we focus on repentance. And as I got into studying repentance, I was taken aback, honestly, by how often repentance shows up in Scripture. It's all over the Old Testament, this call to repent, to throw off our sinful ways and to move towards God. It's all over the New Testament. All through the Gospels, Jesus calls us to repentance again and again. All of Paul's letters call us to repentance. A lot of the general letters call us to repentance. The end of the Bible, Revelation calls us to repentance. We're called to repentance throughout the whole of Scripture. And as I read that, and as I saw that, and as I studied it, I honestly, I'm not saying this to make a joke. I'm not saying this to make light of anything. I genuinely felt a prick of conviction that I have been your pastor now for five years. Next Sunday is five years, and I have not preached on this. It is to your detriment that I have not. No, it doesn't mean that we haven't talked about the idea of repentance in the service, but I have not slowed down and focused our collective gaze onto this issue that comes up over and over and over again in scripture, and I do sincerely apologize to you for that. I believe I have shortchanged you in not discussing this. And if it is not a part of our regular Christian life, then we have shortchanged ourselves in how we are applying the Scripture. So this morning, I want us to sink in and talk about this principle, this act of repentance. To do that, it's important that we're all on the same page and that we understand what it is. Because repentance can be one of these churchy words like sanctification that we say sometimes and we hear church people say, but if we asked you to say what it was, you would feel very uncomfortable about that. Now, half of you in the room probably know a good definition that I would agree with, which by the way, if I would agree with it, that makes it good. Sorry that that snuck in there. That sounds arrogant. But you would probably have a good definition. But half of us maybe not. So for the sake of the sermon and for the sake of the conversation this morning, we're going to define repentance this way. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. Repentance is to turn away from sin and move towards God. The word literally means to turn 180 degrees. So the idea of repenting is I'm moving this way. I'm committing this sin. I'm suffering from this addiction. I have this habit. I say these words. I hate this person. I'm moving towards sin and I realize it's sin and I stop. But I don't just stop moving towards that sin. I turn and I move back towards Jesus. So there's an action in repentance. Repentance is not a mindset. It's not a place of sorrow that we reach, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. It requires action of us to actually move away from what we are doing and back towards the Father because, I don't know if you've ever thought about it this way, but it is impossible to be actively sinning and not also actively drifting away from God. If there are things in our life that ought not be there, if there are things in our life that God would tell us, hey, I don't want that to be a part of your life, then that's sin. And to keep it in our life is to actively and intentionally choose to move away from God. And so when we repent, we acknowledge that that is sin, and we stop it, and we move back towards God. So that's the definition of repentance. As I studied this, I also thought it would be worth kind of detailing, and this is my thought, okay? This is me. You guys are adults. If you're Christians, you have the Holy Spirit. You read the scripture. You decide what it means to you. But for me, I actually see in scripture two different kinds of repentance. I see in scripture kind of a call for what I'm thinking of as initial repentance and then a call for ongoing repentance. So in scripture, I see these calls to initial repentance and ongoing repentance. And I'm going to tell you what I mean. We see a picture of initial repentance in Acts chapter two. In Acts chapter two, Jesus has died. He's come back to life. He's appeared to the disciples. He's ascended up into heaven. He's told them to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, the Holy spirit. And they don't really know what that means. And Jesus told them, just sit in this room and wait until the Holy Spirit comes, and then you'll know what to do. And they're like, all right. So they just sit around in this room and they wait. And they wait, and they wait. And then one day, at what we call Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on them like flaming tongues. And they go out on the porch and they begin to preach the gospel. And everybody who's there hears the gospel in their own language, in their own tongue. And it's important that we note that the people who are there are presumably the same people who days earlier insisted that Pilate crucify Jesus and kill him on the cross. It's the same crowd, right? And so what is Peter preaching to them? He's preaching to them this message of, hey, you know that guy that you killed? That was Jesus. That was the son of God. That was the Messiah who came to take away the sins of the world. That was the one that Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel had been prophesying about for all those years. All those scriptures that you learned growing up, he was the fulfillment of those things and you killed him. So, whoops. And then their response is, oh no, you're right. What do we do? How do we fix this? How can we be in with God? What we would think of, probably, as being saved. How can my relationship be repaired with God? And Peter answers them this way in chapter 2, verse 38. And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is an invitation to what I'm thinking of as initial repentance. And before I go on to explain that as an aside, I'm so glad that this morning the Lord laid on my heart a passage that speaks about baptism because we have Easter coming up. And I think at Easter we're going to have the opportunity to baptize at least two folks. And the whole service really is going to be wrapped around those things because baptism is a picture of Easter. You understand? It depicts the death, the burial, and the resurrection of Jesus. It's a reminder of that. It is the oldest of church traditions, and the early church would only baptize on Easter. So if you are one that the Lord has been pricking your heart towards baptism lately, would you please reach out to me? And let's make this Easter one of the most special ones that you've ever had in your life by moving you through the rite of baptism. But Peter calls them to repent and be baptized. And I think an interesting question is, repent of what? Perfectly repent of all your sins? If you need to be right before Jesus, then you need to perfectly repent of all your sins and be baptized and move forward? Well, certainly that can't be the case because no one can repent of their sins perfectly. It occurred to me this, this is true, not even Jesus can perfectly repent of sins because you have to sin first to perfectly repent. Jesus does not know repentance. So literally no one has ever repented perfectly of their sins. So this can't be the instruction of Peter. I think, and again, this is me thinking, that this initial repentance, that what Peter is calling them to repent of is repent of who you thought that Jesus was that you crucified. That guy that you killed, repent of who you thought he was and believe that he was who he said he was. Repent of thinking that he was a teacher or a prophet or an insurrectionist or just some guy or just a carpenter. Repent of those things and believe that he was who he says he was, who is the divine son of God incarnate who came to live a perfect life to die on the cross for you and for me to gain our citizenship in heaven, to secure us a seat at the table for the marriage supper of the lamb for all of eternity. And so I would invite you this morning, if you're here this morning and you're not a believer, you wouldn't yet call yourself a Christian. You have an invitation to the exact same initial repentance that the people in Acts got called to. And I would invite you this morning, if the Spirit so moves in you, that you would repent of whoever you thought Jesus was when you came in here. A historical figure, a humble teacher, a prophet on par with Muhammad or Confucius or Buddha. Repent of who you thought he was and accept that he is who he says he is, the divine Son of God who died on the cross for you and for me to secure your seat in all of eternity and to rectify your relationship with your Creator God. That's who Jesus is. And if you didn't believe that walking in here, you're invited into the initial repentance of walking away from who you thought Jesus was and walking towards who we now believe him to be. That's the initial repentance. But I think after that repentance, that's the moment when our salvation begins. The Bible teaches salvation as a process. So when you're saved, are you saved? Are you secured? Are you going to heaven? Yes, but your process is also ongoing. It reaches its completion in our glorification as we enter into heaven. So yes, that begins the process. But then as we enter into this process of salvation and sanctification that is secured for us, that is guaranteed for us, that we will experience in glory, God continues to call us to ongoing repentance as a portion of our Christian life. And he calls us to repentance in verses like this. I'm gonna read it again. Ed did a great job of reading it as we started, but in Romans chapter 2, do you suppose, oh man, you who judge those who practice such things and yet do them yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness them that God has enough grace to cover over all of your sins. And no, that doesn't mean that you should just go on sinning so that God's grace may abound. That means that you need to realize his grace as kindness and understand that his kindness and his goodness and his grace and his overwhelming patience with you is designed by God and bestowed upon you by God to lead you into a position and a posture of repentance over and over and over again. God's kindness leads us into repentance. We need to be people of ongoing repentance because we are people of ongoing sin. Because we are people that no matter how far we go, there will always be things in our life and in our heart that don't belong there. John Owen, one of my favorite authors, writes about sin that the only way to win the battle against sin is to die fighting it. Otherwise, we just give up. So we are meant to be people who are a people of repentance in an ongoing way. And I think one of the reasons that we don't talk about this as much, and one of the reasons that we get confused about repentance is because we kind of equivocate it with some other Bible terms. We equivocate it with conviction and with confession, I think. That we kind of lump all those together and we make them all mean the same thing. I'm convicted about this sin. I've confessed this sin to God. I'm repenting of this sin. And I think sometimes we equivocate those things and make them mean the same thing, but they are all a part of the same ongoing process of repentance, but they are very different things. So conviction is feeling badly about your sin. Confession is agreeing with God that what it is is sin, and repentance is to actually do something about that sin. Conviction is that prick from the Holy Spirit that we get. Hey, that doesn't belong in your life. Hey, God doesn't want you doing that. Hey, It's really unbecoming to talk to people in that way. Maybe you should think about doing something about this anger issue. Maybe the way you treat your wife, maybe the way you take your husband for granted, maybe that's not holy. Maybe this pattern or practice or habit in your life is not something that pleases God. That's the prick of the Holy Spirit. That's the beginning of conviction. That's where repentance starts. But then from conviction, we're called to confession, where we confess our sin before God, which basically means to agree with God that it is sin, to agree with God that the thing that we're doing that we now feel guilty about is actually sin and is something that doesn't belong in our life. That's confession. And the good news is that 1 John 1, 9 teaches us that if we confess our sins, that God is faithful and just to forgive us of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. So again, I'm not talking about repentance as we earn our salvation. Our salvation is secured. The process begins at that confession, and then we begin to move towards glory as God works to sanctify us, and we work in ongoing repentance. But the idea of repenting requires us to actually do something about it. To illustrate this, I'm going to share this thing about me, and I don't want to share it, all right? This is the very first example that I thought of when I thought of this sermon, and I needed a good example to illustrate this point. And I went to Jen, and I was like, here's what I got so far. I don't want to share it, but I can't think of anything better. And she's like, yeah, think of something better. But I couldn't. I couldn't. I snore like bad. I snore a lot. And I do want to tell you this because A, it's embarrassing, and B, some of you love me and you want me to not experience any displeasure in my life. And so you have advice for me. You have a device or you have an uncle or you have a husband and this worked for them and you're going to want to tell me about it. Okay, but I just, I'm not in a place in my life where I'm ready to receive that. So if you could just respect my privacy during this time, that would be great. But I snore. And when I snore, it makes it hard for Jen to sleep. And when it's hard for her to sleep, it's hard for me to sleep. And I feel bad about it. When we go on family trips, like my sleeping accommodations are sometimes annoying because I snore. And it's a real issue. And every now and again, we'll come to this place where she's like, you should really, like our life and marriage would be better if you would take care of this. And I say, you're right. I agree with you. I've been pricked by you, the Holy Spirit, of my conviction. I confess, I agree with you that it is wrong. It does not need to be a part of my life. And I am sorry that it has gone this far. And then what do I do? Nothing. I go to sleep and I snore. Do I get the devices? Do I like eat well and run and try to get in better shape so I don't snore as much? No, I don't do anything. I agree, I'm pierced with conviction. I confess and agree this is wrong, but I don't do anything. I don't actually take any steps. And listen, if your process ends with confession, then you're just sorry. If your process of conviction ends with confession, then you're just sorry. Do I mean that in the double entendre way of you're sorry that you did this and you're sorry as a human? Yeah, yes I do. I do mean that, let's be very clear. Because you're stopping short of repentance. You're stopping short of action. Sorries don't mean anything. Sorries mean I'm ready to start the path of repentance. Falling on our face before God, you're right, I'm convicted. This doesn't need to be in my life. Give me the courage to get rid of it. That's great. But that's the starting line, man. What are you going to do after that? What are you going to actually do about it? What actual steps are you going to take to make sure that this sin cannot exist and cannot grow in your life? And the other thing is, if we stop at sorry, eventually our hearts get seared. You can't sit in sorry year after year after year and still mean it. Once you sit in sorry long enough, and you who have had crippling and debilitating and ongoing sin throughout your life, you know that I'm telling you the truth. Once you say you're sorry enough times, you stop meaning it and you can't bring yourself to say it because you know that it's as empty as your intentions. And that thing that used to prick you is scarred over now. And that's seared. And we don't experience the conviction that the Holy Spirit has for us. Because we've learned how to mute his voice out of our life by stopping at sorry. When we stop at sorry, we just see our own consciences, and we short-circuit the repentance process. So we have to actually do something. And I work very hard to preach here that it is not human effort that God is looking for. It is the power of the Holy Spirit in us. It is not human effort. It is focusing our eyes on Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith. I preached a sermon in Colossians in February talking about if we want to put on the new self, what do we do? How do we overcome the old self? Will we focus on Christ? And all that is true, but when it comes to repentance, the rubber meets the road and you got to do stuff, man. So think of it this way. The Holy Spirit empowers, but we act. The Holy Spirit empowers us for repentance. Before you knew Jesus, repenting was impossible. The only thing you could possibly repent of was who you thought Jesus was and then move in faith and the Holy Spirit breathed life into you and now it's possible to repent of all the other things in your life. That's what Romans is talking about when it says that we are no longer a slave to sin. Now we have the option to repent. So the Holy Spirit empowers us to repent, but it is us that must take the action. It is us that must produce the activity of repentance. If that's true, then what does it mean to repent? What does it mean to actually repent of a sin? And this is the part, honestly, that I'm most excited to talk to you about. So if you've tuned me out because my word salads have just gotten confusing up until this point, then pay attention now because this is important. How do we actually repent? By taking steps to make it as darn near impossible as we possibly can to not allow that sin to on-go in our life. How do we repent? By taking actual action steps to remove temptation and distraction from our life that will cause us to commit that sin again. Not just white-knuckle discipline of, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that, but to figure out why you do that, to figure out when you do that, to figure out what triggers you to do that, and to remove those things strategically from your life. If your issue is looking at things on your phone that you shouldn't look at, saying another prayer and saying another I'm sorry and doubling down on how much you mean it isn't going to do anything, and you and I both know it. So invite some accountability into your life. Have a scary conversation with someone who will meet you with grace, I promise. Take action steps to reduce your screen time on that phone. Let someone else put a passcode on your phone so you can't get to the apps that tempt you. Do whatever it is you have to do, but take the steps so that that can't tempt you anymore. If you struggle with anger or anxiety to a point where it cripples you and it begins to be harmful to the people around you, if you struggle with those things, go to counseling. Don't just pray, God, please make me a happier person. Make me a more patient person. Please don't let me be angry. God's gonna answer your prayer by going, great, here's a wonderful counselor to help you figure out why you're angry all the time. Go to counseling. If your marriage is rocky, yeah, start praying with your husband or your wife. But also pray that God would find you a good marriage counselor so that you can work those things out. If we want to move away from a bad marriage, we have to move towards a good one. If we want to move away from anger, we have to move towards peace. Take the steps that are necessary to get that sin out of your life once and for all. If it's an addiction that hounds you, shed some light on the dark corners of your life. Tell people about your addiction. Ask them for their help. Get the things out of the house that you're addicted to and refuse to bring them back into the house until you know you can handle them responsibly. Take the steps that you need to take to move away from the sin that is in your life that is entangling you and causing you not to live the life that God wants for you, not to be the person that God created you to be and is experiencing this stunted Christian life here that God does not want for you because we keep the sin in our life. Get rid of it, man. Take the steps. Do what it takes. Don't just be sorry. I don't care if you're sorry. And sometimes, eventually, according to Isaiah chapter 1, God doesn't care if you're sorry either. Do something. Let's take some steps and move away from the sin that hounds us. When we do this, when we repent, if it's true that sin pushes us further away from God, then when we repent, we are choosing a pursuit of his presence. We are choosing to be obedient to what Peter writes as he reiterates Leviticus, be holy as God is holy. We are choosing to pursue holiness and we are pursuing the very presence of God. To repent is to move away from sin and to pursue the presence of God. And my Bible in Psalm 16 tells me that in God's presence, there are pleasures forevermore. the full so that when I pursue the things of Jesus and when I pursue holiness and when I move away from the things that have been dragging me down for years, that I'm actually going to begin to experience the life that God always wanted for me. The rewards of repentance are intuitive. What would it be like to finally walk without guilt for that thing? What would it be like to finally be the person that everybody else around you thinks you are but that you know you're not? What would it be like to finally live a life free of this sin? That's the reward of repentance. The reward of repentance is the presence of God. And here's the thing that dawned on me this week. Repentance affords us the opportunity to begin to experience the fruits of our salvation here and now. Here's what I mean. Salvation is a process. Salvation is not completed until we are glorified in heaven forever. You are secured. I'm not preaching against that, but the salvation process goes on throughout the rest of your life. And in heaven, one day you will be glorified in your new body and you will experience the presence of God. And if we repent, and if that repentance takes us closer to the presence of God, then you have a very real opportunity to begin to bring heaven down into this place to experience flashes and moments of what heaven will be like here in this place when we walk in the goodness and the gifts that God gives us. When I sit with my family and we're all smiling and we're all happy and Jen and I can't believe the blessings that we are experiencing on this sunny day on the floor of our living room, I've got to believe that that's just a taste of what heaven is like. And when we repent and we move into God's presence and into the good things that he gives us in our life and away from the things that would seek to thwart these good things in our life, I have to believe that we are experiencing the presence of God and the pleasure of God and just a small fraction of the eternity that awaits us when our salvation is complete. So when we repent, it affords us the opportunity to begin to experience some of the fruits of our final salvation here and now. I want you to see desperately because it can be a scary thing to repent. If I take the steps I need to take to be serious about this thing in my life, I'm going to be ashamed. Some people are going to think differently than me. I'm going to give up some freedom that I don't want to give up. I'm going to have some accountability that I don't really want to have. And so there's some things about repentance initially that could bum us out. But I've experienced this in my own life and I know that it's true. Greater joy awaits us on the other side of genuine repentance. I don't know what else to tell you, man. On the other side of genuine repentance is a joy that's so much greater than whatever it is that's dragging you down. So I pray that grace will be full of people of repentance. Will be full of people that the Holy Spirit convicts. That we move to a place where we say, yes, this stuff does not belong in my life. Will be full of people who confess and say, yes, God, you're right, I'm sorry. But full of people who don't stop at sorry, but allow the Holy Spirit to empower you to actually move away from things. My prayer as I got up to preach was that God would soften even the hardest of hearts, and that those of us who have soft hearts, that God would cradle those two and usher them into a gentle repentance. Because there is so much greater joy found walking away from sin and towards our God. Maybe that's why we're taught in Romans that it's God's kindness that leads us to repentance. Because he knows what waits for us there. Let's pray. Father, Father, I pray that we would be people of repentance. Give us eyes to see the things in our life that don't belong there. Give us ears to hear your spirit as he convicts us. Give us tenderness in our heart as we confess. And God, empower us through your spirit to move towards you, to leave behind the things that drag us down and to move towards you who gives us life. God, give us the courage, the conviction, the desire to repent, to name the things or the thing that doesn't need to be in our life right now and offer it up to you. And ask you for the power to move away from it and give us the courage to take the steps that you lay out before us. That we would not be people who simply stop at sorry. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

Sometimes in life, we simply need to pause. We need to stop and sit and rest and think and reflect. In these moments of rest, often what we need most is for God to refresh us. We need Him to speak to us and breathe fresh life into us. We need for God to move and restore and encourage. This is why we observe Lent. It is a moment for us amidst all the busyness of our years to pause and focus on Jesus. Lent reminds us of what Jesus has done for us, how much he loves us and how he relentlessly pursues us. So let us together right now, be still and set our collective focus on Jesus, asking him to speak to us in this holy pause. Good morning, everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be one of the pastors here. It's good to see you on this Sunday. As your pastor, I should tell you that if you attend church on Spring Forward Sunday, you do get an extra jewel in your crown in heaven. That's just scriptural. It's in Revelation. You can look it up yourself, particularly if your basketball team lost last night and then you got up anyways. Boy, howdy. That's two jewels. Well done. Good for you. The love of Jesus is strong in you. That's great. Or maybe after your attitude, you just needed some church. I don't know. One way or the other. Before I just launch into this, I don't do this very often, but I kind of thought it was pretty sweet, and I wanted you guys to be able to just, I don't know, celebrate it, know it too. But Jeff, he's standing up over there, so we can all look at him again. He led us in Amazing Grace. He shared with me before the service that that was the first time that he led Amazing Grace since his dad's funeral. So we're grateful for Jeff. Thanks, man. All right, that's good. Just relax. It's tough enough as it is. Yeah, so we're in the middle of our series called Lent. We're observing Lent as a church for the first time since I've been here, and I sincerely hope that you guys, if you're a partner of grace, that you have been following along, that you've been participating. We've got the devotionals available. There's still some on the information table and they're available on the website in PDF form if you prefer that way. But hopefully you're following along and reading those every day along with the rest of the church. I love all the different voices that speak into it. And as an aside, what a gift when you're a pastor to get to, for me, I write sermons on Tuesday. So what a gift it is on Tuesday to sit down and be like, okay, I'm preaching on this topic this week. Let me open this handy book and see what five wise, godly people in my church think about this topic and then steal their ideas and make it my sermon. Like, this is fantastic. We're going to do a lot more devotional writing, I think. But it's been really cool to let other voices speak into us, and I've really enjoyed that. And I hope that you're fasting as well, that you picked something to fast from during this period. And just by way of reminder, if the fast to you never gets past just grinning and bearing it, like I've given up sweets or I've given up Coke or I've given up whatever it is, and all you're doing is getting through another day and going, yes, I didn't do the thing I wasn't supposed to do, then it's really, the fast isn't really serving you spiritually because a want for that thing is supposed to take us and put our eyes on Jesus. It's supposed to remind us that this is how we should long for Christ. So there's a second place to go when we fast, and I hope that you're going there as you're experiencing your fast as well. Now this morning, as Kyle said at the beginning of the service, we're focused on stillness. We've been talking about stillness in the devotionals this week. That's what you have read this week to kind of prepare our hearts for this service. And that's where we want to put our focus is simply on being still. And so as we put our focus there for the sermon, I would bring our attention to the same place that one of our devotional writers brought it, to Psalm 62. Kelsey Healy wrote this devotion, and I loved the psalm that she kind of used as her launching point, and so I thought I would start us here as well this morning. But in Psalm 62, the psalmist writes this, And I think that that struck me this week as I considered this message and this topic because of that word silence. And I thought to myself, and I wanted to pose to you guys this morning, when is the last time you experienced silence? When is, like, seriously, when is the last time you comfortably and by choice sat in silence? And I don't mean lack of audible noise. I also mean lack of mental noise, lack of distraction, in silence with nothing else, simply waiting on the Father and inviting him to speak. I started out the devotion, I wrote a little note to kind of set up this season of Lent, and I use the passage from Samuel when he says, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. When is the last time in our lives we sat in silence with no noise or clutter to distract us, and we said, speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Like, God, talk to me. I'm listening. I'm here. I'm waiting. Whenever you're ready to speak, I'm ready to listen. Because there's a waiting there. I think sometimes we go, okay, God, I'm ready to hear from you. And then it doesn't happen right away. We don't look up and see the sun shining on a particular bird that tells us a thing that we were wondering about. And so we just go, well, God's not speaking to me today. And we go on with our day, and we didn't sit in silence. And it just made me wonder, when's the last time you chose silence? When it was quiet. And to stifle the quiet, you didn't pick up your phone. You didn't let your mind start to race about that thing that's making you anxious. You didn't start to solve the unsolvable problem and start to try to control the uncontrollable events. When is the last time we sat in silence? And here's the other thing that occurred to me about the effort to sit in silence and stillness before God and wait for him. We exist in a period of time in all of human history where it is incredibly difficult to choose silence. It has never, ever, ever been harder to avoid distraction than it is in 2022. And I mean, I kind of think about that and just the clutter and the noise that exists in our life and how it would be processed by someone who was around in the time of the Bible, by someone who was part of an agrarian society 2,000 years ago, and how they would process all the noise and clutter in our life, I think it would be a little bit like taking them on a tour of a gym. Whenever I go to the gym, which is all the time, I chuckle a little bit because I look at all the contraptions that we have set up and they're really just set up to simulate ancient life because we don't need to do any of that stuff anymore. And I've thought about how fun it would be to take like an ancient hunter-gatherer and bring them to lifetime and just let them look around, you know? And be like, what's that over there? Well, that's a treadmill, man. Well, they're just walking. Like, yeah, that's what you do on a treadmill. Well, why didn't, like, they don't live here, do they? Like, no. Why don't they just, like, walk here? Well, we have, dude, we have cars. What do you think, man? Like, we got cars, buddy. We drive here so that we can walk in place around other people. We don't need to do that anymore. What's that guy doing over there? Well, that's called the bench press. Why is he doing that? Well, so he can develop muscles in his chest. Why doesn't he just like hunt? And like, doesn't his life require him to pick up heavy things? No, never. We pay people to pick up heavy things. We don't do that. Basically, if we don't come to the gym and simulate your life, we waste away as frail and fat, like just fragile people over the course of time, if we don't try to simulate your life. I think it would be so foreign to them what happens there that I think similarly, trying to explain to a person who would have originally read Scripture, to whom Scripture was originally written, trying to explain to them the clutter in our life would be equally challenging. Before electricity, you put the kids to bed, and what do you do? They didn't have books. Only the most wealthy people had scrolls. And if you do, I mean, you've only got a couple. How many times are you going to read that scroll, man? Like, what do you do? You can't pick up your phone and scroll Twitter. You can't turn on the TV. You can't grab a magazine. You can't call a friend. What do you do? You sit there. You just be still. You think about your day. Talk to your spouse. When you're on the hills shepherding all day and the sheep are eating and you can't pick up the phone, what do you do? Well, you sit. You're silent. You wait. And it's worth, I think, pointing out this unique challenge that we face for stillness and silence in our lives. Because it is so vastly different from a large swath of human history. And it makes me wonder, can this possibly be good for us as people, for our spiritual health, for our mental health? Can it possibly be good for us to be so distracted and so diverted all the time? Can it possibly be good for us to cure our boredom this quickly? That can't possibly be healthy. Surely, surely the enemy looks at our devices and is delighted with the distraction that they provide. And surely the Father looks at the clutter and does not marvel at the fact that he struggles to make it through that clutter into our hearts and into our lives and into our ears. And so, I think that the point that my wife Jen made this week as she and I were discussing this is a good one. That being still requires an action step. Now more than ever, if we want to be still, if we want to be silent, we're not going to stumble into it. It's not going to happen by default. It's not going to happen while we're watching the sheep, right? We're not going to stumble on it. We have to choose stillness. It requires an action step. It requires us to actually do it. And this is modeled for us by Christ. Jesus models for us this choosing of stillness. And I can't imagine what it must have been like to be Jesus in ancient Israel. And every city you go to and every little town you go to and every street you walk down, people are clamoring towards you and they want and they want and they want and they need and they need and they need. So the only way for Jesus to just take a breath was to do what is said in Mark 1 35 that Doug read for us at the beginning of the service when he says, and rising very early in the morning while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place. And there he prayed. Jesus models this choosing of stillness for us. And that's not the only place it shows up in the gospels. He does it over and over again where he goes away to pray. And without fail, this is not the point of the sermon, but it's just worth pointing out about our Jesus. I marvel at the fact that he would go and pray and be still. And as soon as he would say amen and take a step back towards civilization, he was covered up with people who wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted, wanted. And to me, I don't need anything else to prove to me the moral perfection of Christ than to see his relentless patience and grace with the crowds that swarmed him. Because let me tell you, who would not have that patience? I marvel at that. But Jesus models for us this need to choose stillness. And so I wanted to put in front of you this morning the thought exercise. Let's take a minute, and actually I'm inviting you into this thought with me. You answer this question in your head, not to one another, because that would be distracting to me as I try to preach, but answer this question of what would it look like for you to choose stillness? What would that require of you? What kind of action step do you need to take to choose stillness, to join God in the stillness that he's created for you and invited you into? Is it a quiet car ride? Maybe there's a consistent car ride throughout your week. To work, back home from work, to lunch, something. Maybe there's a daily time when you're in the car and maybe for that car ride, you could choose to put the phone in the center console and refuse to look at it and not be notified about anything and not turn on the podcast and not turn on the music to just drown out the noise, to distract you from the silence, but choose to sit in silence and talk to God and wait on him to speak to you. One of the things that I've tried to start doing with varying degrees of success is that this helps me have a moment of stillness in the middle of my day. When I have a lunch meeting, I usually try to get to the lunch meeting early because I don't like to be the pastor that shows up after the people with real jobs, all right? So I feel like I need to show up early and look good and get a good table for us. And so I'm usually, I've got about 10 to 15 minutes to spare. And I try to sit there and not pull out my phone during that time. And just say, okay, God, I'm here. What do you got? Is there something in this conversation? Is there something in this meeting that I need to listen to or lean into? Is there something coming up? You know, my heart's restless about this. Help me trust you. Whatever it is. it's just a little pocket of stillness that I've intentionally chosen. Like, okay, here I can be quiet and not invite other noise into my life. When I was running, past tense, I would, I looked forward to the runs because I would put in my AirPods and listen to a book. And there were good books. I mean, it wasn't like, you know, anyways, I thought of 12 jokes there that I was like, nope, nope, no, no, can't make that joke. So anyways, they were good books, all right? They were helpful books. But one day I forgot my AirPods. I think I went home from church to run and I left them here. I was like, oh shoot, this is going to be the worst. But I ran in silence with my thoughts and it was great. And so then I started picking one run a week where I'm just going to do this one with just me and God and no other noise. And it was a good time. Maybe for you, you get up early. You go to bed early, earlier than you normally do so that you can get up earlier than you normally do, which I realize is a particularly cruel challenge on Spring Forward Sunday, but let's just consider it. Maybe when we eat lunch in our office, we don't turn on the thing that we normally turn on or read the thing that we normally read. Maybe we just sit and we invite God into that space. What does it look like for you to choose stillness? And as I contemplated stillness this week, it also occurred to me that you don't have to be still to be still. You don't have to be still to be still before God. You can be still before God while you do your yard work. You can be still before God while you go on your hike, while you go on your run, while you fold clothes, while you do the mindless things that life requires of you. We can all choose pockets to be still before the Father, to crowd out the rest of the noise, and to invite him into that space. And to say, speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm listening. What do you have? And in that silence, as we're told in the psalm that we started with, wait. Wait for him. Focus on him. Wait. Allow God in his time, in his way, to speak into you. Don't rush him. His timing is perfect. He will move when He wants. The Spirit will move when it wants. But we need to choose these moments of stillness because we need to acknowledge that they will not happen by default. They will not happen by accident. God ushers us into them, and we should respond to that. All through the Bible are calls to stillness. The most famous instruction is Psalm 46.10, right? Be still and know that I am God. Just calm down. Just stop. Just quit thinking about all the other stuff. The stuff that your mind is racing on, the things that you can't control. The things that you're anxious about. The unsolvable problems that are keeping you up at night. Be still and know that I am God. Trying to figure out Christianity and all the things and what to believe and where to go and what to do and what's going to please God and how do I even navigate this and am I doing it right? Be still and know that he is God. Let's start there. There's a reason that God throughout scripture invites us into stillness with him. There's a reason that Jesus throughout his ministry intentionally seeks that stillness with his Father. And I think that there are more reasons than this, but the three reasons I would give you are this. Stillness tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God where we wait for him in silence. Tunes, settles, and anchors our hearts. Stillness before God tunes our heart to his. It aligns our heart with God's heart. It sets us in the morning. It sets us in midday. It sets us in the evening where we are aligning ourselves with God's heart, where we are making space for him to speak into us, where he reminds us that we are his child. The psalmist writes that if we delight ourselves in the laws of the Lord, that he will give us the desires of our hearts. And that doesn't happen. That makes it sound like if we just love the Bible and we love God and we delight ourself in God's laws and he's going to give us what we want. We're going to have yachts and like lots of money and sweet golf course memberships. If we just delight ourselves in the laws of God, then we're going to get all the things that we want. And that's not really how that works. The way that works is the more we delight ourselves in the laws of God, the more we delight ourselves in the presence of God, the more we take joy in the things that bring joy to the heart of God, the more our hearts begin to be attuned with God and beat with God for the same things. And so by delighting ourselves in God's law and in God's love and in God's presence, he aligns our hearts with his so that our will becomes a mirror of his will. And we know that sovereign God brings about his good and perfect will. And then lo and behold, all the things that we want because we've delighted in him and allowed him to attune us to him, they happen. He gives us the desires of our hearts. Why? Because we are attuned to him. Because we are aligned to him. Through making space. Not because we pursued him. Not because of something we did. Through simply choosing to make space for God to speak into us. And I think, for what it's worth, that this is how we be obedient to all the verses that I kind of think of as consistency verses. The instructions in Thessalonians to pray without ceasing. How do you do that? How do you go through your whole day in a conversation with God? Well, I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God. I bet it starts with making some stillness and seeking his presence and setting that as the beginning of our day and setting a midpoint and setting an end of our day. I bet it starts with pursuing the presence of God. Philippians 4.8, you know, finally, brothers, whatever things are true or noble or trustworthy or praiseworthy or of good report, think upon these things. How do we do that? How do we think upon things that only honor God and none of the garbage that doesn't honor God? I don't know, but I bet it starts with tuning our heart to God in stillness and in prayer. I think being still intentionally and regularly is something that begins to tune our hearts to God's heart and makes us grow in who we are as believers and walk in obedience to those consistency scriptures that seem so challenging to us. Stillness not only tunes our heart to God, but it settles our heart before God. You know, there's, this has been for the Rector family a little bit of a stressful week. Not for anything extraordinary, just life stuff, man. Just stuff going on. And it's been stressful. And I went to bed last night thinking about things, and I woke up this morning thinking about things. And I was thinking about everything but the sermon. And I got to my office, and I sat down, and I was having a hard time focusing, and so I just prayed. And it occurred to me, I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or just me actually drinking enough coffee to think, but it occurred to me, why don't you, like, just for once, practice what you preach and be still for a second? And so I was still. And in the stillness, I was reminded, hey, the things that you care about, I care about too. The things that matter a lot to you, they matter to me. And guess what? I'm God. So I'll work it out, man. And the things that are supposed to happen are going to happen. And you can't control them. So why don't you just rest easy in me? Because I've got a plan. And then it's like, cool. Great. Sorry. Sorry about all that. The last 12 hours were dumb. I apologize, God. And then you can just preach and go and do. When we seek out stillness and invite God into our space and wait and listen, the things that seemed such a big deal, the things that seemed so heavy, God takes from us. It settles our hearts. He says, you don't need to carry that anxiety. I've got it. You don't need to try to solve the unsolvables and conquer the unconquerables. I've got it. Why don't you just be still and know that I am God? When we choose stillness, it settles our hearts before God. It offers us that peace that passes all understanding that Paul talks about in Philippians. When he tells us in prayer and in stillness, don't be anxious for anything, but through everything, with prayer and petition, present your request to God and the God of peace, who transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Where is that found? It's found in stillness before the Father. It tunes our hearts. Stillness settles our hearts. And stillness anchors our hearts. The world will send us a lot of messages about who we are. You're attractive or you're not. You're valuable or you're not. You're successful or you're not. You're loved or you're not. It'll tell us a lot of things about who we are. But in the presence of God, we are reminded, no, no, no, you're my beloved child who I dearly love, who I sent my son to die on the cross for, to rescue you and claim you into eternity with me. I love you so much that I wanted to share my perfection in heaven with you. And even though you're so broken that you can't get here on your own, I sent my son to die for you, to claim you into my kingdom. I love you. And when we sit in the presence of God, he has a way of reminding us, you're enough. You don't have to perform. I love you as much as I possibly could. Yeah, I know you messed up. I forgave that already. Just sit still and be easy with me. He reminds us that we are a beloved child. We are a beloved child of the Father. He reminds us that we're good, that we're clothed in the righteousness of Christ and that we are enough. He reminds us that he has a plan for us. And in experiencing that, we're ready to go out and our cup is filled and we're ready to go out and pour out for others, but we are anchored in the knowledge that God loves me, that God invites me into his presence, that it doesn't matter where I've been, that he always is waiting on me like the father of the prodigal son, anxious for my return, that he is always seeking after me, that he is relentlessly pursuing me with his spirit. And when I sit in his presence and allow myself to be caught and held, I am reminded that he loves me. So stillness before the Father anchors us in the knowledge of his love. It settles our hearts when we are anxious about things. It reminds us of his sovereignty and it tunes our heart with his heart, and aligns our will with his will, and allows us to walk as we are called to walk. I would tell you that I believe it is fundamentally impossible. See what I'm talking about? I mean, they're everywhere. It is fundamentally impossible to flourish in our Christian life if we do not choose stillness. If this is the closest semblance to stillness you get every week, worship and my sermons, and then until next Sunday, you can't possibly flourish in your Christian life. And I'm not saying that to convict anybody, make anybody feel bad about the noise and the clutter that exists in all of our lives. I'm just saying that as a friend and a Christian. How can we possibly grow if we don't seek out stillness, if we don't intentionally choose it, if we don't invite God into that space with us? And then here's the thing, and I love this point that Alan Morgan made in his devotional this week. God creates a stillness and invites us into that stillness because he's waiting on us there. He is waiting to meet us there. He's waiting for us to slow down and to settle down and to calm down and to put everything else away in a stillness that he created, that he invites us into, in which his presence is waiting on us. And unless we allow ourselves to sit in that presence and be tuned and be settled and be anchored, how could we possibly expect to flourish and grow in our love for the Father and in our experience as Christians. So this morning, Grace, I just want to press on us to choose that. And normally, when I press on something, I kind of finish a sermon and I say, so this week, focus on blank. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say, so this week, Grace, let's focus on stillness. I'm gonna say, so for the rest of your lives, all right, as long as you've taken in air, make this a priority. Not this week. Not today. Forever. Make this a priority. And choose stillness. And sit with God. And be comfortable in silence and just sit there and invite him in. So I'm gonna pray and we're gonna sing and worship together. As we worship and as we sing, I wanna invite you to do whatever feels most appropriate to you. Stand and sing if you want to sing. Kneel and pray if you want to do that. Sit in silence and invite God into that moment. And then at the end of the song, we're going to have a chance to be still together before we launch back into our weeks and all the things waiting for us outside those doors. Let's take a minute in worship and then in literal stillness to invite God into this space with us. Let's pray. Father, thank you for the way that you love us. Thank you for sending your son for us, to claim us, to die for us, to love us, to show us, to model for us, and your spirit to empower us. Father, we live such noisy lives. You cannot possibly be pleased by all the access to screens and information and distraction and diversion that we have that cannot possibly make you happy. So God, I pray that we would be people who choose stillness. That we would be people who identify and abhor distraction. And I pray for fresh life breathed into us this week by simply choosing to sit and wait on you in silence. Would you please do that for us, God? Would you meet us in the stillness that you've created for us and invited us into? It's in your son's name we ask these things. Amen.

The Yo, good to see everybody. Thank you again for being here. This is the sixth part in our series going through the book of Revelation. I have really very much enjoyed going through Revelation with you all. And honestly, you guys have been more enthusiastic about it than I expected because Revelation can be a slog. It can be tough. We just took three weeks working through the tribulation, talking about the wrath of God and all the mechanics of the tribulation best we can. And to me, that feels tedious, but you guys have been incredibly supportive and incredibly kind. And it seemed like y'all have enjoyed going through this with me. As folks have asked me, how is Revelation being received? I say, it seems universally good. However, no one's going to tell me it's bad. No one's going to email me and be like, just so you know, really are looking forward to when this series is over and we can talk about something else. So that might be out there. And if that's you, I'm so sorry. Thank you for hanging with us. But for those of you who have enjoyed this, thanks so much for the encouragement because it's been really, really neat to get to go through it with you guys as a church. This morning, we arrive at Christ's return, the return of Christ. And I said last week that this needs to be the best sermon that I've ever preached in my life, to do adequate justice to the grandiosity of what's happening in Revelation 19. This will not be the best sermon of my life. I just wish that it could be, okay? So let's temper our expectations now. This is a B minus, all right? But in this sermon, we arrive at Jesus' return, at kind of the culmination of God's wrath, the final nail in the coffin. I said we've been walking through the tribulation. We've kind of looked at it through three different lenses. We looked at it in the first week to understand the wrath of God that's poured out in the tribulation, and we defined it. We defined it that week when we looked at Revelation 4 and 5, and Jesus steps forward as the Lamb of God, qualified to open up the seals and begin to open up God's wrath on his creation. We said he's beginning the seven-year process of tribulation. Now, what is tribulation? Well, we define that as the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on his creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. And this week, he reclaims it. This week, he does the last part of the tribulation. Then we looked at kind of the flow of it, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls, and then we looked at the figures of it, and we'll talk a little bit more about the beast, the Antichrist, today. But where we're at in the narrative of Revelation is we're at the end of the Tribulation. God has poured out his wrath. We've had this great battle. There's been a great earthquake. God has sent darkness onto the kingdom of the Antichrist. And then he sends his son to finish up the work. He sends his son to answer the voice of the martyrs that cries out in Revelation chapter 6, the fifth seal. The voice of the martyrs below the throne of God that say, how much longer, God, before you avenge our death? You know who killed us. You see us suffering as your children. How much longer will you let this keep going? And we talked about in that week how we cry out with the martyrs, that every time something in our life happens that seems difficult or hard to understand or seems unfair, every time there's a school shooting, God, how much longer are you going to let this go on? Every time we lose someone too soon, God, how much longer will you let this world be broken? Every time we see something that we can't understand, we cry out with the martyrs and we say, God, how much longer, oh Lord, will you put up with this? And when he begins to open up the seals and begin the process of tribulation, he says, no more. And when he sends his son Christ, when we see Jesus in Revelation 19, that is God putting the final nail in the coffin of evil and saying, now I will make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. Now I will rectify things. Now I will restore creation. Now I will answer the groanings that Paul talks about in Romans chapter 8 when we are told that all of creation groans for the return of the king. When we're told that we yearn inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters to experience eternity in the marriage supper of the lamb, we wait for this. We long for this. This is the hope that persists in our faith and keeps us anchored to our savior because we believe that revelation 19 is going to happen one day, that he's going to come get us, and that when he comes back, you guys have heard me say this before, he's not coming back as the Lamb of God. He comes back as the Lion of Judah. And we see this description in Revelation 19, beginning in verse 11. So if you have a Bible, you can read along with me. I love this description of my Jesus. Every time I read it, whether it's out loud or just in private, I get chills. I love this picture of him. And I don't know, I don't know if everybody can relate to this. This may just be silly. This may just be me being a dummy, and that's fine. I'm familiar with this territory. It's not unfamiliar. But when I read this passage about my Jesus, that part of me as a little kid that loved to see the hero win in movies, that teenage boy that loved to watch Braveheart win, that loved Gladiator and seeing Russell Crowe's character stick it to him, that little boy that loves Star Wars, that loves to see the hero win against evil, against all odds, that part of us, and I'm sharing that with you because I think that God lays that in us intentionally. I think we love the hero because the hero is a shadow of this reality that Jesus becomes. We grow up learning to love when the day is saved and when the hero makes an appearance because God wove that, I think, into our hearts to appreciate the appearance of his son when that hero returns and appears once and for all. So it's with that preamble that we'll read the description as Jesus comes back to reclaim his creation. This is the description of him that John records. Chapter 19, verse 11. And behold, a white horse. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty on his robe and on his thigh. His name is written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Gosh. That's Jesus, man. That's Jesus. That's our Savior. When we think of Jesus, when we pray to him, when we sing to him, when we think about him, when we think about being reunited with him in heaven, I believe that it's our tendency to think about the gospel of Jesus, to think about the crucified Christ. And I don't think that's anybody's fault. We have four gospels. We spend time there all the time. I revisit a gospel every spring with you guys. We focus on Jesus at Easter. We focus on Jesus at Christmas. And we see the teachings from Jesus come out of the gospel. And so it's right and good to think about our Jesus as the crucified Christ. It's right and good to think about our Jesus as gentle and lowly. We're actually reading a book, as the staff right now, called Gentle and Lowly, and what it tells us, and I did not know this, but that the only time that Jesus is ever asked to describe himself in scripture, or rather the only time that he actually does it, he describes himself as gentle and lowly. And I think that when we think about Jesus, we think about a humble Nazarene from the country. And that's fine and that's well and good. But that's Jesus in human form. Revelation 19, that's Jesus. You understand? That's who's waiting on us. That's who's coming to get us. That warrior king written on his robe and on his thigh, king of kings and Lord of lords as a callback to Isaiah so that we know exactly who it is. And when you read through this passage, it's unbelievable to me how rich it is with allusions to other parts of scripture so that there is no doubt about it that this is Jesus coming from the very beginning. It says that he was called faithful and true, capitalized. This is a deity. This is Jesus coming. And then it says that only he knows his name, which is, that's Exodus chapter three and four, when God refuses to share his name. That's a throwback to that. And then he says that he was called the word of God, which John is referencing his own writings at beginning of John, the gospel, when he says that the word was with God in the beginning was the word, the word was with God, the word was God through him, all things were made without him, nothing was made. And then at the end, king of kings and Lord of lords. John, in this description of Jesus is weaving together all of the scripture to point us to our savior. This is the Jesus, the one who has fire coming out of his eyes and a sword coming out of his mouth with which to strike down the nations. The one who rules with the rod of iron, who has the armies of heaven arrayed in linen, following down as he thunders down to conquer the beast and the dragon and the antichrist. That's the one that sits at the right hand of the Father and intercedes for you. That's the one that rules for all of eternity. That's the one that we pray to. And that's the one who's coming to get you. So I want to at least take some time this morning to encourage you. When you sing to Jesus, when you pray to him, when you think of him, when you anticipate meeting him, anticipate the conquering Christ. Anticipate this Jesus. Anticipate the warrior king coming down to settle the score. Anticipate the lion of Judah coming down to wreck shop. To once and for all sweep evil off the face of the planet. And when you do that, when you focus on the conquering Christ, to me, it really caused me to think about this a lot this week, that the conquering Christ renders the crucified Christ all the more miraculous. The conquering Christ, Christ conquering renders Christ crucified all the more miraculous. Because this description in Revelation 19 with a robe dipped in blood and a sword coming out of his mouth and a rod of iron that he rules a nation with, he's gonna tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God with all of heaven's armies arrayed behind him, thundering down to wreck shop. That Jesus hung on the cross for you. That Jesus walked away from all of that, condescended to take on our form, walked with us for 33 years, nurtured disciples to birth a church that would become his true kingdom that he's coming back to rescue so that you and I can sit in here 2,000 years later. He did all that, meek and mild. And when he describes himself as gentle and lowly, yeah, you're not kidding, man. Because look who he is in earth and look who he could be this whole time. This description, this guy, this God, this warrior king, he hung on the cross for you. Not just some sage from the hills of Israel. God condescended for you. He chose to hang on the cross. So I love that moment with Pilate. He's like, are you really a king? And he's like, don't worry about it, Pilate. If I wanted to, this whole place would be smashed. At any moment in Jesus' life, he could have called down these armies and just crushed anybody who opposed him. Caiaphas, the high priest, is sitting there thinking he's got Jesus right where he wants him, and Jesus is just thinking, you have no idea who I am. He dies, he's separated from God. Satan thinks he's got Jesus right where he wants him. Jesus says, you have no idea who I am. Christ conquering, to me, renders Christ crucified as all the more miraculous. And when I think about my Jesus, this is who I think about. He comes to get us and to take us back up to heaven and to start off eternity. And when he comes to get us, he takes us back, we're told, to what's called the marriage supper of the Lamb. He's defeated the beast. He's defeated the Antichrist. He locks them up. It begins the thousand-year reign. We're going to talk about that next week. There's an encore of evil, and then Jesus once and for all throws them in the lake of fire, and that's it. But he comes down. He captures the beast. The armies conquer. He takes his children, he wipes evil off the face of the earth, he purifies his bride, and then we have the marriage supper of the Lamb. And I feel bad for how I'm covering the marriage supper of the Lamb in this series. Because I'm not gonna do it justice. I'm not gonna adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this series. Because I'm not going to do it justice. I'm not going to adequately cover it. And I'm not saying that in this way of false humility, like, oh yeah, I'm really not doing that good of a job with it. Like, no, I'm not. We just don't have enough time to sink in to everything that's here and even all the symbolism in the marriage supper of the Lamb. But a simple way of thinking about it is the marriage supper of the lamb is the greatest celebration feast of all time. It is the greatest celebration feast that ever was and ever will be. And this should hit home with us. Because what do we do? What do we do when we want to celebrate? I got a little bit of good news last week. Such good news that I went straight to the butcher's market. I bought myself a big old ribeye and I had that for dinner when the kids went to bed. I had myself my own personal private celebration feast. When your team wins, what do you do? You have a feast. When something good in life happens, when you graduate, you have a feast. When people come into town, what do you do? You have a feast. What are we going to do this week? We're going to get together with friends and family. We're going to reflect on the blessings that God has given us, and we're going to have a feast. This is what we do to celebrate. When your kid gets married, and you celebrate kind of transitioning into that season of life. This one has passed. We've formed a new family. What do you do? You get all your friends together and you have a feast. This is what God is doing. It's the greatest celebration feast of all time. In the days of old when kings would conquer and they would come back from conquering another king, what did they do? They feasted. And Jesus is bringing us back to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Why is it called the marriage supper of the Lamb? Because Jesus is getting married. Who's he marrying? Us. The church. His bride. We see throughout Scripture that the church is referred to as the bride of Christ. We see in Ephesians that God purifies his bride. He prepares us. We are made pure for Jesus so that we might marry him in eternity. I don't know how all that works out. It's a word play, but we are made pure by our savior. How are we made pure? By the crucified Christ hanging on the cross. He died for us. He covered over you in righteousness, made you good, purified you, prepared you for this very moment, for the marriage supper of the Lamb, where the church and Christ are united for all of eternity and perfect bliss. And so it's right and good to have a feast to celebrate the marriage. And this feast, man, it's going to be a good feast. The ones that you've lost, they're going to be there. I don't know for certain. I can't find it in Scripture. But I'm pretty sure they're going to serve catfish at this feast. Because my papa is going to be there. He loves catfish. And I know he's got some waiting on me. Your loved ones are going to be there too. Your dads are going to be there. And your moms. And the children that you never got to meet because you lost them too early, they're going to be there. All the saints who have come before us, all the saints that you've loved, they're going to be there. And listen to this. They're going to be the best versions of themselves. They're not going to be sick. They're not going to be unhealthy. They're not going to be unwell. They're going to be the perfect versions of themselves. They're not going to have all the brokenness that hurts us sometimes. Do you understand what I'm saying? Your dad, who you loved, but man, that guy had a temper. In heaven, he doesn't have a temper anymore. He's just love. He's just all the best parts of him. The people who we love, who made it sometimes hard to love them. Jesus has prepared those brides too. Their brokenness is wiped away. And they love you with purity. And you're made perfect too. All the crap in your life, all the stuff that you wish wasn't true of you, all the things that you hope nobody finds out, all the brokenness that spills out of you and hurts the people around you when you don't want to hurt them and you hate that side of yourself, that side's gone at the marriage supper of the Lamb. You're made perfect there. You're made your ideal self there. You're made your eternal self there. And you can love other people finally with the purity that God loves you with. We see the best versions of the folks we love. I am convinced of this. We finally walk in the best versions of ourself and don't have to wonder what it would be like to not have to walk through life as a selfish, egotistical jerk. That one's just for me. I don't know what your thing is. That feast is going to be remarkable. And everybody's going to be there. And Jesus is coming to take you to that. And I think that's pretty great. And as I thought about these things this week, the triumphant return of Christ and the marriage supper of the Lamb and all that it represents and what Jesus really won with that victory. What does it mean for us? Yes, evil is smited. Evil is gone and all the wrong things are made right and all the sad things are made untrue. All that is very true and God wins once and for all and that part of us that loves a hero gets to see the actual hero come storming out of the clouds. He wins those things for us. We see our God claim victory and that's great. But there's something else that occurred to me too. I was prepared. I knew this was going to happen. We're not even to the hard part yet. Jeez, old Pete. Something else occurred to me as I kind of asked the question, what has Jesus won? And what are we celebrating at the marriage supper? And I was reminded of this idea that I have long carried with me, but I've not heard too many other people talking about it. I've actually never heard a pastor talk about this. It doesn't make it a unique idea. It's just one that I've not heard other people mention. And maybe it's because pastors aren't supposed to say things like this and the other ones know better and yours doesn't. But I've long carried with me this idea that faith and hope are burdens. Faith and hope are hard. We celebrate faith and hope in our belief system. We're told that the greatest of all these things is faith, hope, and love. We celebrate faith and hope. We want those. We name our children faith and hope. They are good things. But I, in my life, in my most honest moments, experience them often as a burden, as something to be carried, as something to be chosen. Because faith is a belief in things that you can't see. Faith is what we choose when facts fall short of certainty. Do you understand? There's things that we can know about the universe and about our God and about scripture and about the claims and about life. There's things that can be scientifically proven and broken down and rendered as factual. And then there's what we choose to put our faith in. Then there's certainty. And when facts fall short of certainty, we fill that gap with faith. Whether you're a Christian or whether you're an atheist, there's no way to be totally certain of what you think's going on in the universe. So when we reach the end of facts and we have to arrive at certainty, we fill that gap with faith. So faith is a choice. We choose it. We exercise it. We learn it. We let God speak into it. We let him strengthen it over the course of our life. The longer you walk with God, hopefully the stronger your faith gets, but it gets stronger because it's been tried and it's been tested and it's been a burden that you've chosen to continue to carry. Hope is a burden. Hope is a belief that one day something can be true that I want to be true. Hope, to even have hope, is an admission that right now things are not the way that I want them to be. Right now things are less than ideal. Right now things are not what I want, but I hope, I believe that one day the things that I want can be brought about. Hope is an admission of a shortfall. People who are not yet parents and desperately want to be hope that one day this can be true of us. We, as believers, we read scripture, we hear the stories of Jesus coming down out of heaven, and we hope in that day. We place our faith in that day. We believe that there's going to be a marriage supper. We place our hope in that. We place our hope and our faith in the idea that our prayers are working, that they get to God, that they are powerful and effective and they're not just bouncing off the ceiling. But sometimes, life makes hope heavy. Sometimes life makes hope heavy. When you lose someone too early and your Bible teaches you that your God could have done something about it and you have to be confronted with the fact that he just simply didn't. In that season, you choose hope. And in that season, it's heavy. And sometimes, when life gets hard, and when faith and hope become burdens, and they become heavy, we see people put them down and walk away from them and say, I can't carry this faith anymore. I don't know how to believe in a God that would let that happen, so I'm gonna set down this faith. I don't know how I can still cling to hope when I've been disappointed in these ways, so I'm going to set down this hope. Sometimes faith and hope get heavy, and they get hard to carry. When you grow up in church, being taught a simple faith, and then you become an adult adult and there are things that happen in your world that just don't align with what you were taught when you were a kid and you have to learn how to find this new faith. You have to cling to it and you have to hope and you have to choose hope and you have to find ways to make what you were taught and what you're experiencing mesh and you have to find a whole new way to understand scripture and understand God and to understand how he speaks to you. In those moments, faith can get hard and hope can get heavy and we have to choose them. And I am convinced that the Christian life is simply a series of the decision to choose faith and to choose hope in Christ over and over and over again until we make it to the finish line. My prayer as I prayed before I preached this morning was that if there is anybody in here that's carrying heavy hope that it would get lightened just a little bit today. That we would have the strength and the faith to continue to carry it for a little bit longer. Just get down the road just a little bit further. Because sometimes faith and hope get heavy. And I hate that we don't talk about that as much because we should. And if that's true, if I'm right that they can be burdens, then one of the best things that Jesus wins when he comes sweeping out of the sky is on this day, he lays to rest faith and hope forever. And he says, here, you don't need these anymore. You don't need faith and hope anymore. Maybe that's why Paul writes in Romans 8, he says, for in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. When Jesus shows up, we don't need hope anymore. When he shows up, we don't need faith anymore. There's no more gap between facts and certainty. There's just Jesus. There's no more hoping for one day. There's just Jesus. One day has arrived. Do you understand that when Jesus sweeps down out of the sky, that he lays to rest for us for all eternity, faith and hope. And he says, you can set them down, weary traveler. You're here now. Let's feast. And I think that's a remarkable blessing. Because to be a Christian is to believe that one day these things will be true. To be a Christian is to believe that one day God will set all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. One of my favorite songs in the world is this song called Farther Along. Farther Along, I like the version from a guy named Josh Gerrels, and it opens up. And he says, I wonder why the good man dies and the bad man thrives and Jesus cries because he loves them both. And the chorus is, farther along, we'll know all about it. Farther along, we'll understand why. And it's just this acknowledgement, I think, that faith and hope are hard. Faith and hope are hard, but one day, I won't need those anymore. I can lay that and everything else down at the feet of my Savior. And on that day, when Jesus comes back, there are no more one days. On this day, Revelation 19, marriage supper of the Lamb, on that day, there are no more one days. It is one day for all eternity. There's no more wondering, there's no more hoping, there's no more struggling, there's no more pain. Because on that day, he puts an end to waiting on one day. And I kind of wonder now if that's why Paul didn't say what he said in Corinthians. When he gets to the end of talking about all the spiritual gifts and he says, but now these three remain, faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these, Paul says, is love. And I've always read and accepted that teaching, and it's made sense to me. Love binds. Love is the very nature of God. Love is what unites us together. It makes sense to me that love would be greater than faith and hope. But now I wonder, in light of what I've thought through this week, if maybe love isn't the greatest because when Jesus comes back and lays faith and hope to rest, that love is the only thing that exists for all of eternity. Maybe love is the greatest because it's the only thing left after Revelation 19. And we live in an eternity of perfect love that God designed us for, finally. As I was thinking through this sermon this week, I was pacing in the lobby. And as I was out there, just kind of walking back and forth, thinking through these things, asking myself the question, what has Christ won for us? I noticed on the information table, a bracelet, like a little ringlet. And I picked it up and I saw an inscription there. And I thought, oh, what is this? God, are you talking to me? Let? Speak, Lord, your servant hears. I'm working on the sermon. There's a bracelet here. You've got to be working in this. So I reach over, and on the bracelet, it just says, it is well with my soul. Also, if that's your bracelet, it's right out there. It just said, it is well with my soul. And I thought, oh, I love that song. But that's not really helpful. Okay, God's not speaking. And I just kept pacing. And I got done and I kind of had a fully formed idea. And sometimes on Tuesdays when I get a fully formed idea, I get a little bit excited about the sermon and I'll go and I'll tell Kyle because Kyle's always up for a conversation. I said, Kyle, I got it. Listen, I told him about this idea of faith and hope being burdens and that Jesus is going to put those to rest for us. And Kyle started to get a little teary eyed. And he said, he said, that just reminds me of my favorite song, my favorite line from my favorite song. And he quoted me these lines from it as well. And I was like, oh my gosh, God is speaking. I'm just dumb. I always say God speaks in stereo. And Kyle quoted these lines. And he started crying. And I got misty, and I knew that this is what we were supposed to share, and I knew that we were supposed to end the service today with it as well. Because in these lines, we see the author of this song admitting what we've just talked about today. The faith and hope are burdens, and so it is well with my soul. We often sing this song in a response to grief as an admission that I am going to choose faith and hope even though it's heavy today. Now let's sing it looking forward to the day we can lay those things to rest and Jesus has won the final victory and forever we will say it is well with my soul. Stand and let's sing together.

The Pretty epic, huh? I mean, looky there. The sermon is half as good as the video. Y'all are going to leave here with your hair on fire. This is great. Well, good morning. My name is Nate. I am one of the pastors here. So thanks for being here. I thank you for watching online or catching up during the week if that's what you're doing. This is clearly the start of our series in the book of Revelation. I have been studying and prepping for this as far back as the summer because Joseph was a fun series. I loved doing Joseph. I love narrative series where we're just telling stories and seeing what we can learn from the story. The prep time on a Joseph sermon is about two and a half or three hours. The prep time on the Revelation sermon is 10 times that for each one. So you got to start those early. But because I've been doing so much studying, I'm very happy to tell you guys that I have all the answers for you. I'm going to tell you very clearly what happens in the book of Revelation. You can't ask me a question that I won't be certain about. And this is going to be a very productive time for the church. So I'm very much looking forward to it. Revelation, for some of us, has a lot of baggage. For some of us, it doesn't have very much at all. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s. And when you grew up in a Baptist church in the 80s and the 90s, Revelation was a big deal. I don't know if you guys realize that or what your church contexts are, but there was a season in church life when having strong opinions about the tribulation and the rapture was just a part of church. I actually talked to a church one time in a former life. I was a teacher at a private high school, and one of the churches was a small country Baptist church. And they said, hey, we're looking for a pastor if you know anybody. And I said, okay, well, you know, I'll keep my eyes out. And they said, but we're only going to hire people if they believe in a pre-trib rapture. That's a non-negotiable for us. And I started laughing. He's like, why are you laughing? I'm like, oh, you mean that? Like, that's really important to you. And they're like, yeah, absolutely. Well, are you not pre-trib rapture? Because if you're not, I don't want you teaching my daughter Bible. I'm like, rapture is not coming up. All right. We're not covering that in 10th grade Bible. Don't worry about it. I wonder how many of you though have had, like, when I say pre-trib, mid-trib, post-trib, 1260 days, the four beasts, the man, the eagle, the lion, the ox, the 144,000 Jewish males from the tribes. How many of you know what I'm talking about? You've heard those things before. Okay. And then I won't ask the rest of us, how many of you are like, I got no clue, man. Like, no idea on this. You don't have to raise your hand. But yeah, so like, how do we approach like that wide of a swath of information and knowledge about this book? Because there's some of us that have been a part of really in-depth Bible studies and there's some of us who we've avoided it all together. So in thinking about how to approach the book of Revelation for these next seven weeks, I really thought it was worth noting the tendencies that we kind of tend towards as we approach the book of Revelation. Because again, some of us are very experienced with it, and some of us have never opened it because it's scary or intimidating or whatever. So as we begin, I kind of wanted to begin the series with this thought as we think about how do we approach the book of Revelation. I would contend that most people either overcomplicate or oversimplify Revelation. Most people in their approach to it have a tendency to either overcomplicate it or vastly oversimplify the book. And what I mean is we can overcomplicate it so that we miss the forest for the trees. We can overcomplicate it so much and drill down on things so much and ask so many questions about it. When is the rapture actually going to happen? Because of this verse, I think it's going to happen in the middle of the tribulation. When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? When is the tribulation? When's that going to happen? Are there Christians going to be on the planet during this part of the tribulation? Are people, can you still get saved during the tribulation? What are the four creatures and the beasts and the angels and which angels have which wings and what do they represent and what's going on with the dragon trying to eat the baby and all these different things? what is the mark of the beast? Is it the vaccine? What is all that stuff, right? And so we can kind of drill down and the answer is no, stinking no, that's not the thing. The vaccine is not the mark of the beast. Anyways, we can get so concerned in drilling down on these details that we kind of miss the message of the book. And the thing about all those details that we'll talk about in a little bit and throughout the series is many of them are really not knowable. So to try to figure out what is the creature that comes out of the abyss that has a tail like a scorpion and stings you and it ails you for five months? Is that an attack helicopter or is that a scorpion? I don't know. And you don't either. And there's no way to know. So let's stop worrying about it, right? So we can overcomplicate it and get so mired in the details of the book that we miss the message. But we can also oversimplify it. I had somebody in my men's Tuesday morning Bible study who he's involved in a study in Revelation right now with another small group. He's cheating on me with another small group and it's hurtful. But he said, we were talking about Revelation and he waved his hand and he goes, Jesus wins. That's all you need to know. And listen, that's true. And this is a man who clearly he cares about Revelation and I don't mean to disparage him, but in that moment of just going, meh, Jesus wins, I would tend more towards that camp in my own interpretative approach of it, but that's not enough either. What happens when we overcomplicate or oversimplify the book of Revelation is that both approaches cheapen the message of the book. Both of those approaches really end up cheapening the message of the book in general. If we get so caught up with the details that it matters to us deeply who the 144,000 are and we search through the Bible to try to piece that one together, and we miss the overarching message of the book because of it, then we cheapen the message of the book. If we just dismiss it and say, listen, Jesus wins, that's all you need to know, then we cheapen the message of the book as well because there's a reason that Revelation exists. There's a reason that God called John up to heaven and gave him a vision of what's going to happen at the end of time. There's a reason he told him to write it down. There's a reason that people have died for the preservation of Scripture over the centuries. There's a reason that this book was canonized, was put in the Bible as part of every Bible that's ever been printed. There's a reason that God ends His revelation to us with this book. There's reasons for that, and so it's worth studying. And I would contend that the book of Revelation matters very much to God. And I would actually base it on the way that he starts the book. This is John writing it. Revelation chapter 1, verses 1 through 3. Listen to this. This verse, particularly the third verse, tells us that revelation is important to God. This book is important to God. And it says, blessed are those who read aloud, because this was a letter. It was written to the churches. And so there wasn't a bunch of copies. Gutenberg hadn't showed up yet. So there was just one letter and one person would read it aloud. So it's basically blessed are those who read it, blessed are those who study it, blessed are those who invest time in it. So God says that we will be blessed by doing this. And, you know, I was talking to Erin Winston, our great children's pastor, I think a year and a half or two years ago when we were talking about series ideas. And she just mentioned to me that she can't remember Grace having ever done a series in Revelation. And I thought, well, goodness, our church needs to know about this. Our church needs to know this book. We need to kind of demystify it and walk through it and see what we can learn from it. And we wanted to do it for a long time, but then the pandemic hit and this didn't feel like what I wanted to do strictly over video, right? I wanted this to be in person because some of the stuff that we have to talk about in the book is hard. That's not this week, but it's coming. And so I thought that it would be worth it to do this series together. And it'd be worth it to not overcomplicate things, to try to train ourselves to focus on the message of portions of it, rather than get mired in the details, but also get into it enough that we feel like we can understand it. So as we approach Revelation, we do need to do some background work to really understand why it was written. It was written by John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. He was in exile on the island of Patmos about 90 AD is what we think, is when we think it was written. So about 60 years after the death of Christ. He's the last living disciple. All the other disciples have died a martyr's death. He is the last stalwart of the disciples and the bastion of the early church. John really lived a remarkable life. And so God calls him up to heaven and shows him a vision and he writes it down and that becomes Revelation. And what we need to understand is that Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. Revelation was written to bring hope to a suffering church. To be a Christian at this point in history is to take your life into your hands. To be a Christian is to put yourself and your family at risk. It's to go into the catacombs, into underground graveyards, to have your Easter worship service because you cannot be seen in public doing this because you will be killed. It's to know friends and loved ones who have been dipped in tar and used as live torches to light the path into Rome. It's to watch your friends and loved ones get taken and thrown into the gladiator arena with animals that rip them apart. It is a tough time to be a Christian. And so John wrote this letter to them from God to give them hope, to encourage them, to help them hang in there, to help them see a path to a better day. And so when reading Revelation, we can never separate our understanding of it from how the original audience would have understood it. We can never make it mean something that it wouldn't have meant to them. But that also means that it's right and good for us to approach it, mining it for hope. That's the best reason to approach Revelation. It's not necessarily to know what's going to happen at the end of times with great detail, but to cling to the hope that the book offers us throughout it. This is why I love Revelation. If you've heard me preach any messages for any time at all, you've heard me say things like there's coming a day when Jesus is gonna make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. You've heard me talk about Revelation 18 and 19 where he comes down with righteous and true tattooed on his thigh. He comes back not as the Lamb of God, but now as the Lion of Judah and he's coming to wreck shop. You've heard me talk about that because I take great solace in that in my personal faith. You've heard me talk about Revelation 21 when God will be with his people and we will be with our God and there'll be no more weeping and crying in pain anymore. You've heard me talk about that because it's in Revelation and it's hopeful and it's what we cling to. So when we read it, our top priority, our first priority ought to be to mine it for hope and to let it encourage us in our faith. That's far more important than some of the other details. And it's important enough to dig in and to see how it might offer us hope the same way it did the early church. As we seek to understand and interpret the book of Revelation, a couple rules of thumb for us as we walk through it together. The first is, it's not completely linear, but sometimes it is. It's not completely linear, but sometimes it's linear. And when I say linear, what I mean is just event after event from start to finish. The gospels are linear. The gospel of Mark starts at the beginning and moves through the story of Jesus to a crucifixion and then ascension. That's linear. It's just, it's all happening on the same timetable, right? Well, Revelation's not like that. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it moves through and it moves, this event happens, and then the very next thing he talks about is the event that follows the one that he just described. But sometimes he jumps. He says, I turn and I saw. And I'll show you in a second what I'm talking about. He says, then I turned and I saw, and it's something else is going on. And the thing that he's talking about over here happened before the thing he just got done talking about. Or it happens years after the thing he just got done talking about. And then in the next chapter over, he's going to talk about the stuff that happens in the middle. And then the next chapter over, he's going to talk about stuff that happened before that. So sometimes it's linear. Sometimes it's not. So you just have to know as you're reading it that he's not presenting us from chapter 1 to chapter 22 all the things in order. Another thing you should know is that it's not completely literal, but sometimes it is. It's not completely literal all the time. Sometimes it's figurative. Sometimes it is literal. Sometimes the words that you're reading are actually going to happen. They're descriptive of a thing that really will take place. Sometimes you're reading it and it's figurative language to describe to you in the best way that John can what it will be like. Or because God is intentionally using powerful imagery, it's a picture of other events that have already happened. So as we're reading it and as we're studying through it, and there's a reading plan that will be, it would be on the, is it on the table this morning, Kyle? Okay. It's there and it'll be online as well beginning tomorrow morning. I hope that you'll read through Revelation with us. I hope that you'll be talking about it in your small groups together. But as you read and study, we need to be asking ourselves as we look at the text, is this literal or figurative? Is this linear? Is this happening in order? Or have I jumped back or to a different place? We'll need to know this as we read. Now, some examples of where it's figurative and nonlinear or literal and linear are easy to find. So I'm going to read a passage from Revelation chapter 12. You don't have to turn there. You can just listen to my words as I read. This is a famous scene in the book of Revelation. Just listen. I don't know what diadems are. I think maybe crowns. Cool. Let's just go on to the next thing, right? What's going on there? Well, what's happening there is that John is neither being literal, nor is he being linear. Most scholars agree, and it's not certain, so I don't say it with certainty, but most scholars agree, believe it or not, that this is a picture of Christmas. What if I preached that this December 25th, right? What if I made that the Christmas message? Boy, that would be something. Most scholars believe it's a picture of Christmas. It's figurative. It's powerful imagery that God is using to drive home a point. And that in this depiction, the woman very likely represents Israel. The baby is Jesus. The red dragon is Satan. And Satan is trying to thwart Jesus, thwart the efforts of God. But God rescues Jesus back up to his throne, which means God's throne and Jesus' throne. And then Israel is nourished in the wilderness, which could be a reference to their exile in Egypt as slaves, or it could be a reference to the flight of Mary to the wilderness once Jesus is born and they have to go to Egypt for a couple years because Herod is trying to find and kill baby Jesus. The tail sweeping a third of the stars out of the heaven down onto earth, that's a reference to the fact that when Lucifer was kicked out of heaven and became Satan, that he took a third of the demons with him. So this isn't linear because it's Christmas. This happened 90 years before John even wrote it. And certainly not in order with the other things going on in the book. And it's not even linear within its own depiction because it's talking about fleeing to the wilderness and it's talking about the demons falling from heaven, which happened thousands of years before any of this stuff and the rest of the story was ever happening. And then the 1260 days at the end of it is a reference to half of the tribulation period that Revelation divides in half often in months or in days. So it's literally, as far as the time frame is concerned, it's covering thousands of years in a paragraph. It's got a ton going on there. And it didn't literally happen. It's figurative imagery. So that's neither literal nor linear. But sometimes Revelation is those things. Listen to Revelation 21. At the end of the book, John is given a vision. He's carried to another place where Jerusalem begins to descend. A new Jerusalem begins to descend out of the sky. God is setting it Its length the same as its width. And measured the city with his rod. 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall. 144 cubits by human measurement. Which is also an angel's measurement. Which is nice to know. If you're measuring in cubits. You're measuring as the angels do. So well done. The wall was built of jasper while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, then sapphire, a gate, emerald, onyx, chameleon, chrysolite, beryl, and he goes on and on. And then he says, and the 12 gates were 12 pearls, each of the end of the book. It happens at the end of the story. It happens at the end of time. We can read that, see where it's happening in the book, and know that that's how it's going to happen in time. And it's literal. That's not figurative speech about the specific jewels that are going to be the foundation of the wall or the way that the city is going to look or the size of the city. That's a literal interpretation. So again, as we read, we need to ask, is what's happening here, is it literal or is it figurative? Is it linear? Is it happening in the order in which it's presented? Or in its proper context, should it go in another place? When I was explaining this to Jen this week, she was asking how I was going to approach it, and I was kind of walking her through portions of the sermon. And Jen, she's my wife, for those of you who don't know her, not just a lady I talk to sermons about, but that would be cool. I have one of those. When I told her what I was going to do and how it sometimes is literal, sometimes linear, and sometimes it's not, she said, yeah, but, and she's asked the question that you guys all should have by now. She goes, yeah, but how do you know? How do you know when it's supposed to be one and not the other? Well, that's the tricky part. And the only possible answer to it is you have to work hard. How do I know when it's literal and when it's figured if you have to study? Listen, some books of the Bible are really easy to understand. Proverbs. You don't need to study Proverbs. Just read Proverbs. And it says that we should consider the ant and work even when we don't have to. There's no mystery going on there. That's pretty simple. When it says whatever you do, get wisdom, that's simple. Revelation, not simple. If you want to understand it, it takes hard work. It takes discussion. You have to read a lot of sources. You have to listen to a lot of people. There's no easy path to understanding Revelation. I can't stand up here in seven weeks and explain it to you in a way that will make sense and get everything right. I just can't do it. And people who claim that they can are dumb. They're just being intellectually dishonest. Which is why I think it's important for me to kind of share this idea with you, not just for this series, but as you encounter Revelation as you move throughout the rest of your life, which is simply when it comes to Revelation, be cynical of certainty. When it comes to the book of Revelation, when it comes to who you're listening to and what you're reading and how you're talking about it and how people are presenting ideas to you in whatever form you would consume them, we are wise when it comes to Revelation to be cynical of certainty. Now there are some things in the book of Revelation that we ought to be certain about. Jesus is there. He's in heaven. God is sitting on his throne. He's surrounded by angels. There's going to be a new heaven and a new earth. Satan's going to be dealt with. People are going to be judged. We're going to be called up there. Like there's things that we can be certain about, but there's other things you simply can't be certain about. And for someone to present you information in a way where they are certain, where they don't even acknowledge that there's other theologians, there's myriad other views of this particular passage or this particular idea, and they don't even acknowledge that those exist, well now, I don't know if I believe you about anything. I was listening to a pastor that I really like a lot. He's been one of my go-to guys for years. And his church did a series in Revelation last year. And I thought, oh, well, shoot, I'm just going to listen to his and then steal it. That'll really cut down on the prep time here. This is going to be great. But as I listened, he got to a portion, I think it's in chapter four, where there's these four creatures, these four beasts that are really mysterious. And one is like a lion, one is like an ox, one is like an eagle, and one is like a man. And there's this incredible description of them. And the same four creatures are described in Ezekiel, in an Old Testament book of prophecy, with stunning accuracy and similarity to the four creatures in Revelation. There's very little doubt that both authors, that both John and Ezekiel saw the same four creatures. Now, what are they? And what do they represent? I don't know. But the pastor that I really liked when I was listening to him, he said, well, the ox represents this, the lion this, the eagle this, the man this. Does it not? And then he moved on. And he said it as if he was certain of it. And he said it as if there was no other possible explanation than the one that he just shared. When the reality is we only see them in Ezekiel. We only see them in Revelation. Very little explanation is offered about them in either place. So to presume that we know who they are, what they are, what they represent, and why they exist is not fair. It's not intellectually honest. The most intellectually honest thing to say about them is, they're pretty cool. That's it. They matter a lot to God. They're going to be neat when we see them. They're probably going to be scary. It's going to be awesome. What do they represent? I don't know and neither do you. And don't act like you do. We can make educated guesses. There's plenty of room for that. But we ought to be cynical of certainty as we move through this. And I'm saying that, hopefully, not for your benefit in this series, because hopefully I don't get up here and start teaching you things with certainty that I don't understand. Hopefully I'll teach them honestly and present the sides that exist and are merited. But I say that to you as you move throughout your lives and as you encounter other Revelation studies. Be cynical of certainty. So that's how we want to approach the book. I told you that we would mine Revelation for hope. And there's an incredible space to do that in the first chapter of Revelation. And that's where I want us to focus as we finish up the sermon today. I will also say this for those who know your Bibles well. Chapters 2 and 3 in Revelation are the seven letters to the seven churches. They are wonderful letters. They're hugely important. They're incredibly informative for us, not just of the ancient church, but what our modern churches ought to look like. They're a hugely impactful portion of the book of Revelation. They are so important and so impactful that we're going to skip them. Because I'm not going to reduce them to a week and preach them to you like that. So we're going to skip them. I'm going to set them aside. At some point in the future, we're going to come back and we're going to do a seven-part series as we move through those letters together. But if you know your Bible well, and next week we just open up and we get to chapter four, and you're thinking, why didn't we do the seven letters to the seven churches? That's why, because they're too important to reduce to a week. And Revelation would get too boring to expand to 14 weeks. All right, so we're going to do those later. But as we look at chapter one and we begin to move through the story, I wanted to bring us to what I believe is maybe one of the most poignant moments in all of Scripture. And we find it towards the end of the first chapter. We're going to start reading in verse 12. This is John writing. He says, And these are the words of Jesus now, which will always show up in red during the series. and I have the keys of death and Hades. I get chills every time I read this. John is swept up into heaven. He's told, you're gonna see some stuff, write it down. And he looks and there's someone who is white like snow, who is shining in brilliance, who has a voice like raging waters. And he sees him and he's so terrified that he falls on his feet. He falls at his feet. He collapses in fear. And we learn from those words in red that it's Jesus. And Jesus places his hand on John's shoulder, presumably. And he says, Behold, I am the first and the last. I have died and yet I live. Other translations say the Alpha and the Omega. And I have the keys to death and Hades. I've conquered them. Which is a remarkable moment. But it's more remarkable when we reflect on who John was and what John did. Do you understand that John calls himself in his own gospel the disciple whom Jesus loved? You should probably be pretty certain of your standing before Christ if you want to go around touting that nickname. This John is the John that was the disciple whom Jesus loved that may have been, some scholars think, as young as 10 years old when he was following Jesus. He was so close with Jesus. They were such intimate friends that at the Last Supper, Jesus was close enough to John that he was able to whisper in John's ear that Judas was going to betray him before anybody else did. He was able to communicate with John that closely at the Last Supper because John was, of course, next to Jesus because he was the disciple whom Jesus loved. When Jesus was hanging on the cross dying, when he's watching his savior and friend die, Jesus looks at John and Jesus only said a few things on the cross because you had to push up on the nails to do it. And he looks at John and he says, will you care for my mother? John, this is your mother, Mary, now. That's quite the commission. Can you imagine Jesus himself putting the care of his aging mother in your hands? And if you yourself knew that the end was near and that someone needed to care for your aging mother, who would you choose? Your most intimate and trusted of friends. And John went on from that moment and he cared for Mary. He went on from that moment and he led the church and the council. He saw them through this conversion of Gentiles, this difficult period in the book of Acts. He preached the gospel. He spread the word about his friend. And this whole time, he was promised by Jesus. You see it in the gospels when he tells the disciples, where I'm about to go, you can't go. And they said, we want to come with you. He goes, you don't understand. Jesus is telling them, I'm going to die and I'm going to ascend into heaven and you can't come with me. but where I'm going to go, I'm going to prepare a place for you and it's going to be great and you'll be with me there one day. Do you understand that John, he clung to that hope. He trusted his friend Jesus. He trusted his Savior and he spent the rest of his life caring for the mother of Christ. He spent the rest of his life proclaiming the message of Christ. He spent the rest of his life building the kingdom of Christ. But John eventually ended up as the head of the church in Ephesus, and there he discipled a man named Polycarp and Erasmus, who were the early church fathers that we begin now the church history that leads down to us. John is the linchpin in this. He watched all 11 of his friends, all 11 of the disciples die a martyr's death. And now he's an old man on the island of Patmos writing the last thing that he's going to write. And he's missed his friend Jesus. And he's looked forward to seeing his Savior again. And he spent every day living for his Savior. Every day building the kingdom for his Savior. Every day pointing people towards his Savior. And when he gets to heaven, he sees a figure that he doesn't recognize and he falls to his knees. And out of that figure comes the voice of his Savior, Jesus. Out of that figure comes the assurance that John has waited for and longed for his entire life. Out of that figure rushes the peace that only Jesus brings. He gets his reunion moment. He gets his welcome home. And it tells us that meeting Jesus is the best promise in the whole book. Meeting Jesus face to face, hearing his voice, seeing his eyes, feeling his embrace, that is the best promise in the whole book, man. There's other stuff that happens. We get to be with God. We get to spend eternity. There's going to be loved ones there. It's going to be perfect. There's no more weeping or crying or pain anymore. We're going to experience all of that. It's going to be an incredibly peaceful, joyful existence. But none of it, none of it is better than seeing Jesus in person. None of it is better than your welcome home moment. When he hugs you and he says, I've prepared a place for you. And he invites you to the marriage supper of the Lamb. I was thinking about it this week. What it would be like to finally meet my Savior. And how I would probably feel compelled to say I was sorry. And how he would probably just say, don't worry about it. I've covered over all those sorries. And how we would be compelled to say, I'm sorry, Jesus, I should have done more. And he would say, that's okay. I did enough. I did it for you. And I've thought about that moment when the burdens of hope and faith don't have to be carried anymore. When we can cast those things aside because our Savior is looking us in the eye. After all the stresses and all the struggles and all the triumph and all the worry and all the anxiety and anything else that we might experience, the loss and the pain and the sufferings and the joy, whatever it is, after all of it, we as weary travelers will end our spiritual pilgrimage in heaven at the face of Christ and he will say, welcome home. And maybe he'll even say, well done, good and faithful servant. But that's the best promise of the book. That if we believe in Jesus too, that one day we will see our Savior face to face and we can rest. And if you love Jesus, and that's not the part of heaven you're most excited about, I don't know what to do for you. I hope this series can change that. But more than anything else, as we move through this book, that's what we cling to. That Jesus is there waiting for us. And we'll get that reunion moment too. Where we get to meet our Savior face to face. Now, before I close, I never do this because if I tell you guys that I won't be here for a particular weekend, then what I've found is you don't come, which is mean. That's just mean to whoever is preaching that's not me. But I'm going to tell you this time that I'm not going to be here next weekend. I've got a bunch of my buddies I've talked about before. A bunch of us turned 40 this week, so there's going to be seven of us in a cabin in North Georgia making questionable decisions. We planned this back in the spring before I knew that this would be week two of Revelation, which is a week I'd rather not miss. So when I was thinking about who should I get to preach it, Kyle's great, Doug Bergeson's great, we've got plenty of folks here who would do a fantastic job with it. But there's one person who I know that knows more about the book of Revelation than anybody else I know. I'm not saying he knows the most about the book of Revelation, just more than anybody else that I know, and that's my dad. So dad's going to come next week and he's going to preach Revelation 4 and 5. And you'll get to see half of the equation of where all of this came from. To give you a literal picture of how deeply he loves this book, I wanted to take you to Israel with us. Dad and I had the opportunity to go to Israel, maybe about 2013. And we did the tour. We're up in Galilee. We were there for a whole week or eight days or something like that. And we get down to Jerusalem and we're in the Garden of Gethsemane. And from the Garden of Gethsemane, which is where Jesus prayed the night that he was arrested and then crucified, you can actually see the walls of Jerusalem, and you can see the Temple Mount. And so this is what you see from the Garden of Gethsemane. And you can see in kind of the bottom right-hand corner of the portion of the wall is a gate. That's the eastern gate. And when we were just walking along and we saw that, my dad said, that's the eastern gate. And I said, oh, cool. And then I looked at him and he was crying. And I said, dad, why are you crying, man? It's a gate. And he says, that's the gate that Jesus is going to walk through when he returns. And it moved him. And he doesn't get moved to tears very often. But he was moved by that. Because one day Jesus is going to come back and he's going to walk through that gate. And he knows it. And he believes it. And he knows his Bible. And he knows it so well and he believes it so much that it moved him to tears. So I couldn't think of anyone better to come and teach us a portion of the book of Revelation next week. So I hope you'll come. I hope you'll be kind to him. I hope he tells you some stories about me that make you laugh and like me a little bit less. And just you're thinking, oh, he must be an experienced teacher and have done this before for Nate to be asking him to do this here. No, he's an accountant. He's taught Sunday school a bunch of times, and I think it's going to be really, really great. So I hope that you'll give him a warm welcome when he's here next week and know that I'll be beaming from ear to ear watching him online with my buddies. So with that, let's pray, and then I've got an announcement for you guys, and we'll worship some more. Father, thank you so much for who you are and for how you love us. God, thank you for this book of Revelation. I pray that we would see clear and simple messages coming out of it. God, I pray that you would give us wisdom as we move through it. Give me wisdom as I teach it. Wisdom that I have no business having. Maybe just a special blessing for these next few weeks. God, I pray that we would always find the hope in it. That we would always see the justice in it, that we would always see the good news that we can cling to, God. Be with us as we go through the series. I pray that it will enliven our hearts to you. I pray that it will increase our passion and desire for you. And I pray that it will give hope to folks who might need it really badly right now. We pray all these things in your son's name. Amen.

Have you ever wondered if it was all worth it? All the emails and phone calls, special projects, late meetings, early mornings and out-of-town trips? Frantically shuttling bodies back and forth and cobbling together another meal just to check that off the list. Have you ever wondered if you have the balance right? Have we worked hard enough? Have we played enough? What will our children remember about us? Have you ever wondered if you've done it right? Is it possible to even really know that? Did we give our passions and energies to the right causes? Have we given ourselves to the things that matter the most? Or in the end, is it all just favor? Hey. That music trails off for a while. I didn't really want to step on it. But good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the senior pastor here. If I haven't gotten a chance to meet you or if you're watching online, thank you so much for making us a part of your Sunday morning. This is the last part in our series called Vapor, where we've been moving through the book of Ecclesiastes together and kind of pulling out some of the themes. And we've said all along that we've saved the dreariest book of the Bible for the dreariest month of the year. February has done its part for sure. Hopefully it'll finally stop raining and we can get some consistent sunshine. I think somebody told me it was going to get up to 76 degrees today. That's unheard of. That's amazing. I'll find a way to get outside. But as we finish up this series, it's important to remind you of something that I've said all along while we've done the series, which is that these are not four standalone messages. These are four messages that are meant to be one big long message. It's four parts of a whole. And so we need all of them and they build on each other. And we've been kind of getting to a place where we could culminate in this week. I've said the whole series that if you look at the realities of Ecclesiastes and face them with courage, that you'll come out the other end with a lot of things, but one of the things is a deeper desire for Christ. And so this morning, we're going to talk about how we get to that place. If you read the book of Ecclesiastes, and that's all we have. Imagine we didn't have the Bible. All we have is the book of Ecclesiastes. That's a pretty depressing book, right? If that's all we have, we don't have any hope beyond that. We don't get the book. We don't get the New Testament. They don't talk about Jesus. We don't see the other books in the Old Testament that talk about a promise of a Messiah and tell us more about who our God is. And we don't get to see the character of God revealed in those stories in the Old Testament, if this is all we have, if Ecclesiastes is it, then this is a tough book. That's a stark reality. Actually, what we learn in Ecclesiastes is, if Ecclesiastes stands alone, then fleeting joys are all that there is. If all we have is the book of Ecclesiastes, if that's all we can go on, then what we have to admit is fleeting joys are all there is. Most of the things we chased are going to be a waste of time. They're going to be vapor. We're going to spend our whole life chasing things, and we're never going to catch it. So chasing after the wind is like trying to grab smoke, right? In that life, in that chase that we're probably wasting, then we're going to experience pain. There's going to be hard days. There's going to be sad times. There's going to be a time for mourning and for death and for weeping and for loss. That's going to happen. And then last week, we talked about these joys that are God's gift to us to look around in our life and see people that we love, to look at our days and look forward to how we get to spend our days and to honor God. Those are God's gifts to us. And if all we have is Ecclesiastes, then that's it. That's all there is. Those fleeting joys. And really and truly, the people who say, eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you die, they're right. We should all just be Epicureans. If this is all there is, if Ecclesiastes is all there is. There's one little hint in Ecclesiastes that there's more than this. It's in chapter 3 when Solomon tells us that God has written eternity into our hearts. It's this inclination in us that there has to be more. And I think that after you read Ecclesiastes, that's really how you're left feeling. It's the way that I feel when I get an appetizer at a fancy restaurant, right? I like to go out to eat. I don't know how readily apparent that is as you look at me, but I like to go out to eat. I like it a lot. It's one of my favorite things to do in the world. One of the things I miss the most in the pandemic is going out to eat with my friends. I love doing that. And if you go to like a normal run-of-the-mill place like Olive Garden and you get the calamari appetizer, they're going to bring you this big basket, right? I like calamari. I don't know if you guys do, but I like calamari. They're going to bring you a big basket, and it's going to have a whole cup, like an extra ramekin, and you can just bring more, more of this sauce, the sweet and sour sauce or whatever it is. And if you don't watch it, you can load up on calamari, right? You can load up on this appetizer. But when you go to a fancy restaurant, when you go to one of those big deal downtown restaurants, and you see that they have calamari on their menu for the competitive price of $18, you think, I'm going to be the big dog. I'm going to do something for the table. Watch this, guys. Go ahead and get that calamari started for us, right? Look at me. And then they bring to the table, you've been there, you've seen it, they bring to the table the sample size, right? It's like, it's a rectangular plate. It's this long, it's thin. If your appetizer arrives on a plate shaped like this, you paid too much for it. Just a blanket policy. And they set that down in front of you. And there's four different, like there's two rings kind of just laid gently on each other with some cilantro over the top of it. And there's four of those. And you're like, thank you for these bites. I would like more bites, please. Like this is it? Everybody gets a taste of calamari? And then that's done. There's got to be more to it, right? I think this is what Ecclesiastes makes us feel. We finish it. You read it. You confront the realities. It ends with this sentiment. That's a wonderful sentiment. The end of the matter is this. All has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. So best case scenario in Ecclesiastes, you keep your head down, you honor God, and you hope that more good things happen to you than bad things happen to you. There you go. Kind of feels like someone just put a few pieces of calamari in front of you and you go, is this it? There's got to be more to it. And that's why I wanted to spend this week saying there is. There are 65 other books. Ecclesiastes exists within the canon of Scripture. And when you lay it against the messages in the other books, then you can really see that I believe Ecclesiastes is designed to point us to our need for Jesus. Ecclesiastes, I think, is designed to point us to our need for Jesus. That we finish reading Ecclesiastes and we go, gosh, there's got to be more than this. There's got to be more than just putting our head down and trying to be good people and hoping that not too many bad things happen to me and that I'm wisely investing my life. There has to be more than this. And there is. The more than this is Jesus. That's the more than this. So Ecclesiastes is there so that we read it and we absorb the messages of it and we let the stark realities hit us and we let those go. We let those say to us there must be more and that more is Christ. And here's how I know that this is true. I think that Ecclesiastes serves as a really great preamble to my favorite chapter in the Bible, Romans chapter 8. If you were here a few summers ago, you know that we did eight weeks in Romans chapter 8. It is, to me, the crescendo of hope in the Bible. It is a remarkable chapter. And I believe that Ecclesiastes, maybe better than any other book outside of Romans, lays the groundwork, lays a preamble for us to really be hit with the grandeur of Romans chapter 8. There's a particular portion of it, chapter 8 verses 18 through 30, that I think reads like portions of Ecclesiastes and then finishes with the hope that Ecclesiastes just leaves us wanting for. And so that's what I want to do this morning is look at Ecclesiastes as a lead-in to Romans chapter 8 and see what truth there is in Romans chapter 8 and how Jesus is this more that we've all been yearning for. So read with me. If you have a Bible, you can read along. If not, it'll be on the screen. It's going to be a long passage, but I think it's worth reading all of it. Verse 18, Listen to this. Now hope that is seen is not hope for what he sees. But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. And then on down to 28, this is so good. Ecclesiastes is all over that passage. Look at how Paul starts it. For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. The sufferings of this present time. That's ecclesiastical. That's what Ecclesiastes says. That no matter what you do, you're going to suffer. No matter what you do, it's going to sometimes feel like chasing vapor. The reality of this life is that it's hard. There are seasons of difficulty and grief and pain. The reality of this life is that divorce exists and cancer is a thing and that secret sins eat us alive and that people disappoint us and that we disappoint ourselves and that we lose people that we don't want to lose, that we watch people who are better than us go through pain that we don't feel like they deserve. It's we turn on the news and there's another school shooting. We turn on the news and there's another riot. That's the suffering. That's what Ecclesiastes acknowledges. And that's what Paul acknowledges in Romans chapter 8. But he immediately buoys it, balances that out. I consider that the sufferings of this present time, all that stuff we talked about in Ecclesiastes, are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. So then he starts talking about this glory that's going to be revealed, this hope that we look forward to, this thing that's the future, the more that Ecclesiastes leaves us wanting for. But if you go down through the passage, you see these connections. It says that creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it. And then it says that we know the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. Groaning for what? Groaning for Jesus. Groaning for what we groan for. For the adoption as sons and daughters. For the glory of God. We talked about this. This creation groaning. We talked about this in the second week. We talked about that everyone walks through pain. And I said that pain is not punitive, that God is not tightening the screws on us because we misbehaved or we didn't do enough or because we don't love enough. He's not punishing us. Pain is the result of a fallen and broken world. Adam and Eve sinned in the garden. It was perfect. It was exactly as God wanted it to be. But Adam and Eve sinned and they broke God's rest and they were separated from God. And then we come along in that sin, continuing to be separated from God. And we have this profound sense, just like Ecclesiastes says that eternity is written on our hearts, we have this profound sense that everything's not okay, that there has to be more than this, that it has to be different, that certainly, God, you look at what happens and it grieves your heart too. That's creation groaning, don't you see? Ecclesiastes was just describing the groanings of creation. That's the earth itself crying out for the return of God, for Jesus to come and make all the wrong things right and the sad things untrue. There's this picture in Revelation, I believe it's in chapter 6, where the voices of the martyrs are under the throne of God. The martyrs are under the throne of God, people who have died for their faith, and they basically say, how much longer, God, before you go make things right? That's how we feel when we lose someone too soon. That's how we feel when we try really hard to have a kid and we can't. That's how we feel when terrible things happen that we can't explain. It's ecclesiastical. It's creation groaning. When is this going to get better? And then it says, and I love this phrase, especially those of us who have the first fruits of the Spirit, those of us who have eternity written on our hearts, those of us who know Jesus, who are believers, who call God our Father and Jesus our Savior, it says that we, us Christians, because we know there's more, we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption of sons and daughters. We groan inwardly when creation, when these hard things happen. We groan inwardly when we watch our friends walk through difficult times, and we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons and daughters. We yearn for that. That's part of being a Christian, is in the midst of hard times to say, come, Lord Jesus, please, don't make us wait any longer. That's why when I watched my father-in-law pass away a month ago, I looked on him with a degree of jealousy because his eager yearning is done. His groaning is over. And now he has the glory that Ecclesiastes leaves lacking and that Paul alludes to in verse 18 and that we're going to talk about here in a minute. But this first part of that passage, 18 through 30, it's ecclesiastical. It's the same themes and things that Solomon brought forth there. And it points to something. He concludes it in a lot the same way that Solomon concludes it, Romans 8, 28. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good for those who are called according to his purpose. So, so far, it's pretty similar. So far, Ecclesiastes says, life is going to be hard. There's going to be some groaning. This is not going to feel right. You just need to understand that that's part of the deal. And then Romans, or Paul says in Romans, there's going to be suffering. Creation's going to groan. You're going to feel this eager yearning in yourself. You're going to feel that things aren't right, that there has to be a little bit more than this present reality. You're going to feel that in your bones. And his conclusion is, but we know, even though you feel that, we know that all things work together for the good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose, which is strikingly similar to the way that Solomon concludes Ecclesiastes, which is to say, the end of the matter is this, all has been heard, fear the Lord and keep his commandments. This is the whole duty of man. It's the same conclusion. These things, life is going to be hard. We're going to groan together for this better eternity. And so the best we can do right now is to just love God and hope for the best. Except Paul doesn't stop there. Paul doesn't stop there. He follows it up. Here's what happens when we love God and we hope for the best. on it this morning, but what I believe is that if you choose God, then he chooses you. And so if you are here this morning and you're a believer, then God has chosen you. If you say, God, yes, I'm in, I need you, then he chooses you too. And in choosing you, he's going to adopt you so that Jesus is the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. We are invited into this heavenly family. But the real word I want us to look at is that word justified. That word justified is an amazing word. Those whom he foreknewed, he also called, and those whom he called, he also justified. Justified is an incredible word. Because the reality of the condition of our souls is that we are guilty before Almighty God. We have sinned and offended him in myriad ways. Some known, some unknown, some before we knew who he was, and then we've been washed and we are grateful, some long after we knew who he was, some yesterday, some this morning. The reality of our souls is that we stand guilty before Almighty God. And there is nothing that we can do to fix it. And the penalty for that guilt is death, is eternal separation from God. We will never re-enter into the rest that he created us for. We will never experience the glory that Paul talks about as he's comparing it to the sufferings of this present time. When we are guilty before God, we do not experience the glory of being with God. And truly all there is, is this life. And truly all we can do is eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. And we are guilty. But Jesus condescended to become flesh, lived a perfect life, and died on the cross for us. And at the conclusion of that death, when he rose to life, Romans 8 tells us that he goes back up into heaven and he sits at the right hand of the Father and he is interceding for you. He has leaned over to God and he has said, I know that they were guilty. I know that they offended you, but I died for them. They're good. He justifies you. He makes you not guilty in the heavenly court of law with his death. Do you understand that with his death, that the way that he justified you is if you go back to your very worst day, if you go back to just the bottom of whatever your barrel was, that he died for that day. And he looks at that day and he says to God the Father, they're good for that day. I've paid the penalty for that. You can declare them not guilty. I've clothed them in my righteousness. You don't have to look at that day anymore. You can look at my perfection clothing them. They are justified. And to me, what's even more amazing than that is, think about the worst day you got coming up. Think about your potential to fall off the wagon and make poor choices and find yourself at the bottom of another barrel. Think about the wandering that you do after you accept Christ as your Savior. And know that Jesus died for that day too. Know that Jesus justified you for that day too. That he looks at the Father and he declares you not guilty for all the days. That's an amazing reality to me. And here's what's even better. If you want to be justified, I don't know if you are or you're not, but if you want to be declared not guilty of your sins and justified before Almighty God, all you have to do is believe in that justification. All you have to do is believe what I just told you, that you stand guilty before God and that Jesus came and lived a perfect life and he died for you. And in that dying, he justified you. He looked at your worst day and he said, it's all right. You're not guilty of that. And he looked at your worst potential and he said, it's all right. You're not guilty of that. I've got you. Now walk like you're justified. And then he says this. He doesn't stop with justification, which would be enough. That's what Jesus' death won us. But he says those who are justified are also glorified. This is the glory that Paul is talking about in verse 18. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth the glory that is to be revealed to us. And then the whole passage talks about yearning for that glory, for the redemption of our bodies, for the return of creation, that the creation groans, yearning for this perfect eternity. And then he says, Why? Because Jesus died for you and justified you, and now you're going to be glorified. He has got you, and one day you're going to end up in this perfect eternity. And that's what glorification is. And that's the hope that we have. That's how we can say it's all going to be okay. Because we don't have to admit that somehow it's going to make sense in this life or this world. But we know as Christians that one day our labor will be over and our souls will find rest in God and we will be in a perfect eternity with him. That's our hope. That's not vapor. That will not put us to shame. And if we want to know what that glory is like, the Bible tells us. In another one of my favorite passages, Revelation 21, 1 through 4. John writes this, city, 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, behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people. And God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and the death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. Ecclesiastes is done in Revelation 21. That's the end of the Bible. It's the new heaven and the new earth. It's a picture of the perfect eternity that is waiting on us, that Jesus has won for us, that he justified us to qualify for, and then we will be glorified into that eternity. And in that eternity, there is no more weeping or crying or pain anymore. There's none of the bad stuff. In Ecclesiastes, that passage, there's a time for mourning and there's a time for laughing. In heaven, it's all laughing, man. There's a time for death and there's a time for birth, not in heaven. In heaven, it's all births. It's all building up. It's all celebrations. It's no pain. The former things, the things that make our souls groan, the things that Ecclesiastes forces us to confront about this life, those things have passed away. Those things are no more. There is no pain, and there are nothing but happy tears in heaven. That is the eternity that Jesus has won for us. It is the glorification that Jesus died to justify us so that we would qualify for that glory. It is the hope that we hold on to. It is the thing that we know for certain is not vapor. It is the time we know for certain that pain will not hurt. It is that pain will not happen. It is the time that we cling to, that we hope for, so that finally all the things in this life that don't make sense, that we can't piece together, that we don't understand, that seem inconsistent and would tempt us into losing our faith or becoming embittered. It's in this glory in Revelation 21 that all those questions are answered, that we see the very face of God, that we understand all the things that we've struggled with. It's in that moment that we no longer have to fight against ourselves and our demons, in which we can no longer relate to Romans 7, O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death. That is the hope that we cling to, Christians. And when we cling to that hope, we don't have to make sense out of everything. When we cling to that hope, we don't have to understand how it's fair that John was so good and we lost him early. When we cling to that hope, I don't have to understand how my college roommate passed away at the age of 30 and left behind small children. I don't have to understand that because there's coming a day when it's going to all make sense. And so our job is to cling to it with patience. That's what Paul says, that if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. So we look to our Jesus. We desire him more. Come, Lord Jesus, today. And while we wait, we are patient, and we cling to the one thing that isn't vapor. And what we find there in the presence of Christ is true joy. In fact, true joy can only exist in the presence of Jesus. True joy can only exist in the presence of Jesus. Joy that is not fleeting. Joy that is immutable. Joy that doesn't go away. Joy that's not impacted by circumstances. True joy can only exist in the presence of Jesus. So that is where we go. We go there now while we can, and we wait on an eternity while we are there all the time. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your son. Thank you that he covers over our worst days. That he covers over the worst in us. Jesus, thank you for coming and for dying. We know that when the time came, you didn't want to. But you did anyways because you love us. God, I can't imagine what it was to watch your son do that. But you led him for us. And we are grateful. I pray that we would, all of us, lean more into him. If there's someone here today who doesn't know you or watching or listening who doesn't know you, I pray that they would believe in that justification, that they would want it for themselves, that they would know you today. God, thank you for the message of Ecclesiastes. Thank you that it points us to the rest of the work that you did. God, give us the patience and the perseverance and the hope to continue to cling to your promises. It's in your son's name we all pray. Amen.