Revelation 4

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 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 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 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 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 Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that. If you're catching up later in the week, we appreciate you following along. This is our third part in our series going through the book of Revelation. There's a lot of questions there, a lot of curiosity, a lot of mystery. And so I want to do the best that I can as we move through the series to help make Revelation more approachable and understandable for all of us, whether that means pulling back from the details and the weeds so that we can actually see the forest and get the point of this amazing book, or whether it means making it approachable so that we can actually understand what's happening throughout the book. Last week, my dad carried the weight for us. He did a phenomenal job. Many of you have said kind things to me about him, and I appreciate that. I was as surprised as the rest of us that he did such a good job. I was watching from the cabin that I was at going, huh, look at this. The dude's good at it. So that was really, really cool and a neat moment for us. So I appreciate you guys indulging that. And he did a good job talking about Revelation 4 and 5. And the point that he made was that God in chapter 4 is seated on the throne and that Jesus, the Lamb of God, is the one worthy to open the seals. That's what happens in 4 and 5. But there's a question that leads into the rest of the book of why is Jesus, as the Lamb of God, stepping forward to open a seal? What's the deal there? What's going on? And it's actually an important part in the narrative of Revelation, what's happening in 4 and 5. And basically, what's happening in 4 and 5 is that Jesus is stepping up to begin the tribulation period. This is when the tribulation begins. It's the official start of it. Now, some of you know that word tribulation. Others of you may not. Maybe we can define it. Maybe we kind of have a loose knowledge of what it is. But what Jesus is doing in Revelation 4 and 5 is he is beginning the tribulation period. And in Revelation chapters 6 through 17 describes this tribulation period. So the way that we're going to approach it as a church is for the next three weeks, we're going to talk about this together. This morning, we're going to define the tribulation. Next week, we're going to look at the events of the tribulation. And then the week after that, we're going to look at the signs in the tribulation. Because this is where it gets sticky. This is the tough part. Revelation 1 through 5, that's easy. We just did that. The last two sermons, Jesus comes back. Hooray. God establishes new heaven and new earth. Those are easy. These middle three, boy, they're tricky. They are tricky. This is where if you have questions, what does this mean? What happens? In what order? I'm genuinely interested in them. So this week or next week, as you're reading through Revelation, hopefully you're following along in the reading plan, or maybe there's been something rattling around for a long time. If there's something that you in particular want me to address and say, hey, this is how we understand this event, then let me know, email me. And I will absolutely, if I can't address it in the sermon, I'll figure out how to answer you personally. But I would love your questions because the thing is, if you're asking it, so are five other people, at least. So ask away and we'll kind of cobble this thing together over the next three weeks as we focus on this tribulation period. So this morning, I want to define the tribulation and what it is, and then ask, why is it necessary? So that's the first thing to think about. What is the tribulation and why is it necessary? Why does it have to happen? And the tribulation is quite simply, the most abrupt way to put it is, the tribulation is the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath and reclaiming what is rightfully his. The tribulation process is a seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. I will be up front with you and tell you, this sermon this week is the least excited to preach a sermon I have been in my life. Okay. I did not wake up going, yes, wrath of God. This is super fun in 2021. I'm actually getting on a plane this afternoon to go to Atlanta and just be around the stadium during the game in case they win tonight. And it is really hard for me to not focus on how excited I am for that and appropriately address the wrath of God in the service this morning. As we began the series, I knew that this was coming. And to me, it's the hardest part of Revelation. Not interpreting what's going to happen and trying to figure everything out, but for a 21st century audience, to actually, for us to wrap our head around the fact that our God is a wrathful God, that he is a just God. And so this morning, as I was preparing this week, I realized we can't really go on and discuss the events of the tribulation until we adequately understand the wrath of God that's seen in the tribulation. So when we ask, why is the tribulation necessary? Why is it necessary for God to pour out his wrath on his creation at the end of time? Well, the first answer that I would offer you is that God's wrath is necessary because his justice requires it. God's wrath is necessary because his justice requires it. My dad did a great job last week of defining holiness in a way that I had never thought of before when he was talking about the angels around the throne and they're singing to God. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And what does that word holy mean? Well, he defined it as being the intersection of God's love and God's justice. That they are perfectly balanced in God. And we love God's love. We love God's love. But we don't talk a lot about God's justice. And the reality is that his person, his very essence, requires a balance of love and justice. And the further reality is we don't want a God creator sovereign over all of the universe who isn't just, who isn't capable of wrath. Our own sensibilities insist that our God would be just. Here's what I mean. The Braves are playing the Astros in the World Series. The whole country is a Braves fan right now because everybody hates the Astros, right? They are the patriots of baseball. Everyone hates them. Now, here's why everyone hates the Astros. For those of you who don't know baseball and may not be informed about this, back in 2017, the Astros had a great season and a great team, and they won the World Series. And they kind of came out of nowhere when they did it, and I think they may have won the next year or the year previous, I'm not sure, but two years around 2017, they won the World Series. And it was kind of fun, because they were kind of a cool team, and they were kind of fun to cheer for. But then it came out that they were cheating. Like, not cheating a little bit. They were cheating a lot of it. And that's how they won those two World Series. And then what happened was, what did baseball do? What did the commissioner do? Did the commissioner bring wrath and justice upon the Astros? No, he'd like find the owner and I think the coach got in trouble. But none of the players who actually cheated got punished. And so everyone hates the Astros because it wasn't fair. It's not right. They cheated, they got caught, and nothing happened to them. And our senses of justice cry out and say, that's not fair. To the extent that, and I was so proud of my hometown, when their best player came up to bat in game three of the World Series, first time he had to play in Atlanta, the whole stadium broke out with chants of cheater, cheater, cheater. I'm like, yes, this is great. Our sense of justice is offended when things are not fairly litigated. To think about it in a more applicable personal way. Parents, if somebody did something to genuinely harm your child in a way that requires you to be in court and to prosecute them. And they are absolutely guilty. How offended would you be if the judge did not display justice and said, you know what? That wasn't you. You didn't mean it. You're off the hook. No, we want a just judge in the same way we want a just God. His nature requires it. And our senses of fairness and justice demand it. The uncomfortable side of that justice is his wrath. And make no mistake, when you read the middle sections of the book of Revelation, it reads very much like the Old Testament prophets. Two times in the book of Revelation, the phrase, the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God is used. In Revelation 19, when Jesus comes back, it says that he is going to tread the press of the fury of the wrath of God, which tells us that God's wrath does not only exist, but it is furious. We are told at a different point that God will send an angel with a sickle to take a third of humanity like grapes and put them in a wine press and press them with his fury and his wrath. The wrath of God in Revelation is unavoidable. And to pretend like it's not there is dishonest and unfair. So we have to come to grips with this existence and learn how to accept that this is a part of the God that we worship. To do that, I think that we can listen to the voices of the martyrs in Revelation chapter 6 to begin not only to understand that God's justice requires wrath and that we want a just God, but also to begin to understand the source of this wrath. It's helpful to listen to the voice of the martyrs in Revelation 6. This to me is one of the more poignant moments in all of scripture, and I'll tell you why in a second. Revelation chapter 6 verses 9 through 11. So there's this poignant scene in heaven. As Jesus begins to open the seals, and if you don't understand what the seals are, that's all right. We're going to talk about those next week. The rest of Revelation is scheduled out through seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. And we're going to talk about that progression next week. But for this one, as this seal was opened, then there's martyrs under the throne at the altar of God. And these martyrs are men and women who have died for their faith. They were killed because they professed a faith in God. And they cry out, how much longer are you going to wait before you avenge us, God? We were killed for you. You saw the people from heaven. You know who murdered us. When are you going to punish the people who are harming your children? And this voice, the voice of the martyrs, echoes. And it echoes particularly with the original audience. Because I told you in week one that the people who received this letter endured great persecution. The generations of the church that immediately followed this time around 90, 95 AD endured tremendous persecution. To be a Christian, to proclaim and claim the gospel of faith in Jesus was to put your life at risk, was to put your family at risk. So the people reading this letter and receiving it, they cried out with the martyrs too. Yeah, God, win. How much longer? And here's how much longer before you avenge. You saw them take our dad. You saw them kill our mom. You saw them take my wife. When are you going to make that okay? And if we pay attention, what we see is that we cry out with the martyrs as well. We also cry out with the martyrs. Paul talks about this in Romans when he says in Romans chapter 8 that all of creation groans for the return of our king. When we have that sense that this isn't right, most of you know that part of mine and Jen's story is that at the end of last year, her dad lost a two-year battle to pancreatic cancer. Her dad was the best man I ever knew. And I will always be sad that Lily doesn't get to experience the glow of his love in her life. I will always be sad that his grandson will only get to meet him in eternity. And so we cry out, God, he loved you. He served you. He loves his grandkids. He cried when we told him that we were pregnant because he knew we wouldn't meet that one. How is this okay with you? And that's just ours. You guys have it too. Where you cry out with the martyrs. God, you could have done something and you didn't. When are you going to fix it? When are you going to make this okay? How are you going to make this right? And it's not an insistent thing. It's not a precocious thing. We don't walk into the throne room of God and demand. We sit at the altar and we humbly wonder and plea like, God, how much longer are you going to watch this? And we need to realize that that voice has been echoing throughout the centuries, not just for the things that we endure that seem unfair or seem like God could have prevented it and he didn't, but for all the things going on over the course of history. God sat in heaven and he watched the Holocaust. And the voice of the martyr says, God, how much longer? He sat in heaven and he watches the slave trade. That still exists. And we think, how much longer, God? He's seen the atrocities of people claiming his name in the Crusades. Evil meted out over an entire continent, falsely claiming him. How much longer, God? So at the beginning, when I define the tribulation as God pouring out his earned wrath, that's what I mean. He's been waiting. He is angered by the evil things that happen. He is angered and hurt by school shootings. He is angered that our sin has broken down the world in such a way that we lose people too early from disease. He's angered by that. He's hurt by that, that Satan has been loosed into his perfect creation and the people who listen to his voice, including us, have perverted it and made it something that it is not. He's angered by that. He's angered by us when we trample on his gospel and we presume upon his grace and we act like our actions have no consequences because we're so used to hearing about the love of God that we forget about the wrath of God. And it angers him. God says that vengeance is his, and he will take it. He's simply waiting. And when the martyrs ask him, how much longer are you going to wait to do, as I always say, to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue? When will that happen, God? His response is, rest a little while longer because there's still more to be added to your numbers. It's not time yet, but it's coming. And so we see in listening to the voice of the martyrs and in seeing the response of God that part of the necessity of God's wrath and his tribulation is that God's wrath is actually working to draw people to him. His wrath is working to wake people up and to draw them into his eternity. If there are still martyrs who have yet to be added to the number in Revelation chapter six, then what it means is there are people in the tribulation period actively sharing their faith so that more people might know Jesus, so that more people might spend eternity in heaven. If you flip the page to the next chapter, what you see is a mass of humanity being ushered into heaven. And John leans over to the angel next to him and he goes, who are they? And he says, those are all the people who have accepted Christ who are coming out of the tribulation. God is using his wrath as a tool to wake people up and draw them near to him. And if that sounds like a contradiction, then let's think of it this way. In our house, we try to be calm. I try, best I can, not to raise my voice. Except at Jen. Boy, howdy. I really get after Jen. I'm just messing around. I try not to raise my voice. Now, sometimes, Lily, she's five. She's very much like me. And so, I can't help it. But most of the time, I'm pretty calm with her. And the reason I try not to raise my voice is, first of all, I want to set that model for her. But second, I want it to matter when I do. We raise our voice all the time. Eventually, I mean, you can see these kids. They're in the store. Their mom's yelling at them. They couldn't care less. Because mom yells at them all the time. So I want it to matter when I raise my voice. Because when I raise my voice to Lily, sometimes I do it because it's the only thing left that's going to get her attention. Right, parents? I tell her to stop. Don't do that. Put that down. We're not going to talk about that. I try to be as calm as I can. But sometimes I have to get stern with her. And when I get stern with her, I'm doing it to get her attention. Because what I'm saying matters. The same is true of God. Sometimes God has to get stern with his children because he's been trying to get our attention in other ways and we're not listening. So sometimes God gets forceful with us because you parents know if you pick your moments there, you can really get your kids' attention simply by being more stern with them. So God also knows, and we see it in the Old Testament, that sometimes to get the attention of His people, He raises His voice. He does not do it to intimidate or scare us, although that should be our reaction. He does it to draw us near to him, to get our attention. He does it because his biggest priority in all of creation is that you and I would spend eternity with him. That's why Paul writes that even though we endure pain for a little while, he considers it nothing compared to the glory that he's going to experience in eternity. It's nothing. It doesn't matter. So is God, and Jesus tells us, listen, if your eye's causing you to sin, gouge it out. It's better to enter into heaven with one eye than it is to have both eyes and not be in eternity with God. So sometimes God uses his wrath and his stern voice to get our attention because his priority is that we would spend eternity with him. This may be why Solomon writes in Proverbs chapter 9 that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Many of you have probably heard this verse before. And when I was growing up and we would come across this verse, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we were kind of told that fear there is an awe, it's a respect. It's not being afraid of our Heavenly Father because our Heavenly Father is good. It's being in awe of Him, and that's the beginning of wisdom. No, no, no. It's being fall on your face, terrified of the Father. It's actual fear. On the holiday that we celebrate fear, this is actual fear. Being fearful of our almighty God creator in heaven. Being scared of what he can do to us if he were to so choose. Being actually fearful of him. Reading through the wrath of God that will be poured out on creation and going, that sounds terrible. And God goes, yeah, because here's the thing. As we go through Revelation and we see God's wrath meted out on creation, please understand, the only people who experience God's wrath are the ones who don't believe in it. The only people who experience the wrath of God are the ones who have said, please God, or the ones who have not said, please God, spare me. At any point, if we look to God and we say, God, you're God and I'm not, and I trust you, please spare me your wrath. He does. The only ones left to experience the wrath at the end of the tribulation, I am convinced, are those who have chosen obstinately to refuse to submit to God in faith. And so he pours out his wrath. And he pours out his wrath because God in his goodness sent his son to rescue us up to heaven to spend eternity with him. And we obstinately, some of us choose to not believe in the son that he sent. Instead, we spit on it. Instead, we don't believe it. Instead, we pass it off like a fairy tale. And one day, every knee will bow before our God in heaven. And the only ones who will experience God's wrath are the ones that have to be forced to bow. And it is not, to me, until we understand that, that we can begin to appreciate God's love for us. This is why wisdom begins in, oh no, God created the universe and I'm terrified of him. And God says, good, but guess what? I created it so that you could spend eternity with me and I love you. And all you have to do to be spared from that wrath is ask me. As I sank into this topic for this week, I began to reflect on the wrath of God. It actually occurred to me, something that I've long understood, but something that fits very well into this sermon and this idea right now, which is it is impossible to adequately appreciate God's love without being in awe of his wrath. It is impossible to adequately appreciate God's love without being in awe of his wrath. And I think it's actually good for us to take a Sunday and confront the fact that our God is just and his justice necessitates wrath. And for us to exist and tremble and for us to hear it said, yeah, we want to be as nice as possible to everyone, but one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. And you do not want to be made to bow against your will. We submit to God now and we spend eternity with him later. And I think it's good for us to sink into that reality because we talk a lot about the love of God and we should. We talk about our good, good father and we should and we talk about his grace and we talk about his forgiveness and we talk about his mercy and we should. Those things are good and trust me, I like preaching about those things way more. But I think that sometimes we talk so much about God's love for us that we forget he has every right to smite us. All the times that we've trampled on the gospel. All the times that I've presumed upon God's grace, knowing he would forgive me. All the times I've cheapened the blood of Christ on the cross with my action and my attitude and my obstinance. We were in here on Tuesday morning for Bible study and I was sitting right here and over there was a roach. And I noticed it and Shane noticed it, but it was a roach. And we're like, whatever, I didn't care. It was like 620. Live it up, roach. But when Britt Vinson, who was dressed up like a cowboy that day, noticed it. You like that, Kyle? Okay. All right, pal. There you go. I love Kyle. When Britt Vinson in his cowboy boots saw the roach, he got up. That was the end of that roach. We live our lives as if God can't do that to us. We live our lives as if that's not a daily reality. And we live our lives as if it would somehow be unfair if he did. When it's not. The most fair and just thing for him to do is to take us. Is to die for our sin. That is the most just thing. But because his incredible love balances his incredible justice, he sent his son so he doesn't have to smite us, and we walk around acting like that's not a reality when it is. And so it's good for a Sunday for us to sink into the wrath of God and to appreciate it. Because I wonder about me and maybe about you if we feel stagnant in our walk with the Lord. If we heard Steve talk about being on fire for Jesus and it's been a while since we have experienced that. If we give mental assent to the fact that God loves us, but we are not warmed by it daily and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the grace of his love for us, maybe it's in part because we haven't sat and thought for a minute in a long time about the wrath that his love is balancing out. About what he's sparing us from. About what it means for him to have every right to claim us and choose in his goodness not to. So my hope and my prayer this week has been that by focusing on God's wrath, it would actually inexplicably draw us closer to him and help us more deeply appreciate the love that he lavishes upon us and the things that John writes, like from his fullness he has bestowed upon us grace upon grace. I hope we can appreciate those sentiments a little more deeply today and feel God's love a little more closely today by reflecting on his tremendous wrath as well. Let's pray. God, thank you for your justice. Thank you for your terrible and furious wrath. We know that we would not want a God that was not capable of those things, whose character didn't require them. Father, I pray that if anyone can hear my voice, whether it's today or in the future, who doesn't know you, who has not bowed their knee, I pray that they would cry out to you today. That they would claim Jesus as their Savior and you as their Father. That they would simply ask to be spared of your wrath, which you are so anxious to do. God, would we be brought more close to you? And God, would we walk more fearfully of you? To give us a greater depth of appreciation of your love for us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

The Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that. If you're catching up later in the week, we appreciate you following along. This is our third part in our series going through the book of Revelation. There's a lot of questions there, a lot of curiosity, a lot of mystery. And so I want to do the best that I can as we move through the series to help make Revelation more approachable and understandable for all of us, whether that means pulling back from the details and the weeds so that we can actually see the forest and get the point of this amazing book, or whether it means making it approachable so that we can actually understand what's happening throughout the book. Last week, my dad carried the weight for us. He did a phenomenal job. Many of you have said kind things to me about him, and I appreciate that. I was as surprised as the rest of us that he did such a good job. I was watching from the cabin that I was at going, huh, look at this. The dude's good at it. So that was really, really cool and a neat moment for us. So I appreciate you guys indulging that. And he did a good job talking about Revelation 4 and 5. And the point that he made was that God in chapter 4 is seated on the throne and that Jesus, the Lamb of God, is the one worthy to open the seals. That's what happens in 4 and 5. But there's a question that leads into the rest of the book of why is Jesus, as the Lamb of God, stepping forward to open a seal? What's the deal there? What's going on? And it's actually an important part in the narrative of Revelation, what's happening in 4 and 5. And basically, what's happening in 4 and 5 is that Jesus is stepping up to begin the tribulation period. This is when the tribulation begins. It's the official start of it. Now, some of you know that word tribulation. Others of you may not. Maybe we can define it. Maybe we kind of have a loose knowledge of what it is. But what Jesus is doing in Revelation 4 and 5 is he is beginning the tribulation period. And in Revelation chapters 6 through 17 describes this tribulation period. So the way that we're going to approach it as a church is for the next three weeks, we're going to talk about this together. This morning, we're going to define the tribulation. Next week, we're going to look at the events of the tribulation. And then the week after that, we're going to look at the signs in the tribulation. Because this is where it gets sticky. This is the tough part. Revelation 1 through 5, that's easy. We just did that. The last two sermons, Jesus comes back. Hooray. God establishes new heaven and new earth. Those are easy. These middle three, boy, they're tricky. They are tricky. This is where if you have questions, what does this mean? What happens? In what order? I'm genuinely interested in them. So this week or next week, as you're reading through Revelation, hopefully you're following along in the reading plan, or maybe there's been something rattling around for a long time. If there's something that you in particular want me to address and say, hey, this is how we understand this event, then let me know, email me. And I will absolutely, if I can't address it in the sermon, I'll figure out how to answer you personally. But I would love your questions because the thing is, if you're asking it, so are five other people, at least. So ask away and we'll kind of cobble this thing together over the next three weeks as we focus on this tribulation period. So this morning, I want to define the tribulation and what it is, and then ask, why is it necessary? So that's the first thing to think about. What is the tribulation and why is it necessary? Why does it have to happen? And the tribulation is quite simply, the most abrupt way to put it is, the tribulation is the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath and reclaiming what is rightfully his. The tribulation process is a seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. I will be up front with you and tell you, this sermon this week is the least excited to preach a sermon I have been in my life. Okay. I did not wake up going, yes, wrath of God. This is super fun in 2021. I'm actually getting on a plane this afternoon to go to Atlanta and just be around the stadium during the game in case they win tonight. And it is really hard for me to not focus on how excited I am for that and appropriately address the wrath of God in the service this morning. As we began the series, I knew that this was coming. And to me, it's the hardest part of Revelation. Not interpreting what's going to happen and trying to figure everything out, but for a 21st century audience, to actually, for us to wrap our head around the fact that our God is a wrathful God, that he is a just God. And so this morning, as I was preparing this week, I realized we can't really go on and discuss the events of the tribulation until we adequately understand the wrath of God that's seen in the tribulation. So when we ask, why is the tribulation necessary? Why is it necessary for God to pour out his wrath on his creation at the end of time? Well, the first answer that I would offer you is that God's wrath is necessary because his justice requires it. God's wrath is necessary because his justice requires it. My dad did a great job last week of defining holiness in a way that I had never thought of before when he was talking about the angels around the throne and they're singing to God. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And what does that word holy mean? Well, he defined it as being the intersection of God's love and God's justice. That they are perfectly balanced in God. And we love God's love. We love God's love. But we don't talk a lot about God's justice. And the reality is that his person, his very essence, requires a balance of love and justice. And the further reality is we don't want a God creator sovereign over all of the universe who isn't just, who isn't capable of wrath. Our own sensibilities insist that our God would be just. Here's what I mean. The Braves are playing the Astros in the World Series. The whole country is a Braves fan right now because everybody hates the Astros, right? They are the patriots of baseball. Everyone hates them. Now, here's why everyone hates the Astros. For those of you who don't know baseball and may not be informed about this, back in 2017, the Astros had a great season and a great team, and they won the World Series. And they kind of came out of nowhere when they did it, and I think they may have won the next year or the year previous, I'm not sure, but two years around 2017, they won the World Series. And it was kind of fun, because they were kind of a cool team, and they were kind of fun to cheer for. But then it came out that they were cheating. Like, not cheating a little bit. They were cheating a lot of it. And that's how they won those two World Series. And then what happened was, what did baseball do? What did the commissioner do? Did the commissioner bring wrath and justice upon the Astros? No, he'd like find the owner and I think the coach got in trouble. But none of the players who actually cheated got punished. And so everyone hates the Astros because it wasn't fair. It's not right. They cheated, they got caught, and nothing happened to them. And our senses of justice cry out and say, that's not fair. To the extent that, and I was so proud of my hometown, when their best player came up to bat in game three of the World Series, first time he had to play in Atlanta, the whole stadium broke out with chants of cheater, cheater, cheater. I'm like, yes, this is great. Our sense of justice is offended when things are not fairly litigated. To think about it in a more applicable personal way. Parents, if somebody did something to genuinely harm your child in a way that requires you to be in court and to prosecute them. And they are absolutely guilty. How offended would you be if the judge did not display justice and said, you know what? That wasn't you. You didn't mean it. You're off the hook. No, we want a just judge in the same way we want a just God. His nature requires it. And our senses of fairness and justice demand it. The uncomfortable side of that justice is his wrath. And make no mistake, when you read the middle sections of the book of Revelation, it reads very much like the Old Testament prophets. Two times in the book of Revelation, the phrase, the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God is used. In Revelation 19, when Jesus comes back, it says that he is going to tread the press of the fury of the wrath of God, which tells us that God's wrath does not only exist, but it is furious. We are told at a different point that God will send an angel with a sickle to take a third of humanity like grapes and put them in a wine press and press them with his fury and his wrath. The wrath of God in Revelation is unavoidable. And to pretend like it's not there is dishonest and unfair. So we have to come to grips with this existence and learn how to accept that this is a part of the God that we worship. To do that, I think that we can listen to the voices of the martyrs in Revelation chapter 6 to begin not only to understand that God's justice requires wrath and that we want a just God, but also to begin to understand the source of this wrath. It's helpful to listen to the voice of the martyrs in Revelation 6. This to me is one of the more poignant moments in all of scripture, and I'll tell you why in a second. Revelation chapter 6 verses 9 through 11. So there's this poignant scene in heaven. As Jesus begins to open the seals, and if you don't understand what the seals are, that's all right. We're going to talk about those next week. The rest of Revelation is scheduled out through seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. And we're going to talk about that progression next week. But for this one, as this seal was opened, then there's martyrs under the throne at the altar of God. And these martyrs are men and women who have died for their faith. They were killed because they professed a faith in God. And they cry out, how much longer are you going to wait before you avenge us, God? We were killed for you. You saw the people from heaven. You know who murdered us. When are you going to punish the people who are harming your children? And this voice, the voice of the martyrs, echoes. And it echoes particularly with the original audience. Because I told you in week one that the people who received this letter endured great persecution. The generations of the church that immediately followed this time around 90, 95 AD endured tremendous persecution. To be a Christian, to proclaim and claim the gospel of faith in Jesus was to put your life at risk, was to put your family at risk. So the people reading this letter and receiving it, they cried out with the martyrs too. Yeah, God, win. How much longer? And here's how much longer before you avenge. You saw them take our dad. You saw them kill our mom. You saw them take my wife. When are you going to make that okay? And if we pay attention, what we see is that we cry out with the martyrs as well. We also cry out with the martyrs. Paul talks about this in Romans when he says in Romans chapter 8 that all of creation groans for the return of our king. When we have that sense that this isn't right, most of you know that part of mine and Jen's story is that at the end of last year, her dad lost a two-year battle to pancreatic cancer. Her dad was the best man I ever knew. And I will always be sad that Lily doesn't get to experience the glow of his love in her life. I will always be sad that his grandson will only get to meet him in eternity. And so we cry out, God, he loved you. He served you. He loves his grandkids. He cried when we told him that we were pregnant because he knew we wouldn't meet that one. How is this okay with you? And that's just ours. You guys have it too. Where you cry out with the martyrs. God, you could have done something and you didn't. When are you going to fix it? When are you going to make this okay? How are you going to make this right? And it's not an insistent thing. It's not a precocious thing. We don't walk into the throne room of God and demand. We sit at the altar and we humbly wonder and plea like, God, how much longer are you going to watch this? And we need to realize that that voice has been echoing throughout the centuries, not just for the things that we endure that seem unfair or seem like God could have prevented it and he didn't, but for all the things going on over the course of history. God sat in heaven and he watched the Holocaust. And the voice of the martyr says, God, how much longer? He sat in heaven and he watches the slave trade. That still exists. And we think, how much longer, God? He's seen the atrocities of people claiming his name in the Crusades. Evil meted out over an entire continent, falsely claiming him. How much longer, God? So at the beginning, when I define the tribulation as God pouring out his earned wrath, that's what I mean. He's been waiting. He is angered by the evil things that happen. He is angered and hurt by school shootings. He is angered that our sin has broken down the world in such a way that we lose people too early from disease. He's angered by that. He's hurt by that, that Satan has been loosed into his perfect creation and the people who listen to his voice, including us, have perverted it and made it something that it is not. He's angered by that. He's angered by us when we trample on his gospel and we presume upon his grace and we act like our actions have no consequences because we're so used to hearing about the love of God that we forget about the wrath of God. And it angers him. God says that vengeance is his, and he will take it. He's simply waiting. And when the martyrs ask him, how much longer are you going to wait to do, as I always say, to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue? When will that happen, God? His response is, rest a little while longer because there's still more to be added to your numbers. It's not time yet, but it's coming. And so we see in listening to the voice of the martyrs and in seeing the response of God that part of the necessity of God's wrath and his tribulation is that God's wrath is actually working to draw people to him. His wrath is working to wake people up and to draw them into his eternity. If there are still martyrs who have yet to be added to the number in Revelation chapter six, then what it means is there are people in the tribulation period actively sharing their faith so that more people might know Jesus, so that more people might spend eternity in heaven. If you flip the page to the next chapter, what you see is a mass of humanity being ushered into heaven. And John leans over to the angel next to him and he goes, who are they? And he says, those are all the people who have accepted Christ who are coming out of the tribulation. God is using his wrath as a tool to wake people up and draw them near to him. And if that sounds like a contradiction, then let's think of it this way. In our house, we try to be calm. I try, best I can, not to raise my voice. Except at Jen. Boy, howdy. I really get after Jen. I'm just messing around. I try not to raise my voice. Now, sometimes, Lily, she's five. She's very much like me. And so, I can't help it. But most of the time, I'm pretty calm with her. And the reason I try not to raise my voice is, first of all, I want to set that model for her. But second, I want it to matter when I do. We raise our voice all the time. Eventually, I mean, you can see these kids. They're in the store. Their mom's yelling at them. They couldn't care less. Because mom yells at them all the time. So I want it to matter when I raise my voice. Because when I raise my voice to Lily, sometimes I do it because it's the only thing left that's going to get her attention. Right, parents? I tell her to stop. Don't do that. Put that down. We're not going to talk about that. I try to be as calm as I can. But sometimes I have to get stern with her. And when I get stern with her, I'm doing it to get her attention. Because what I'm saying matters. The same is true of God. Sometimes God has to get stern with his children because he's been trying to get our attention in other ways and we're not listening. So sometimes God gets forceful with us because you parents know if you pick your moments there, you can really get your kids' attention simply by being more stern with them. So God also knows, and we see it in the Old Testament, that sometimes to get the attention of His people, He raises His voice. He does not do it to intimidate or scare us, although that should be our reaction. He does it to draw us near to him, to get our attention. He does it because his biggest priority in all of creation is that you and I would spend eternity with him. That's why Paul writes that even though we endure pain for a little while, he considers it nothing compared to the glory that he's going to experience in eternity. It's nothing. It doesn't matter. So is God, and Jesus tells us, listen, if your eye's causing you to sin, gouge it out. It's better to enter into heaven with one eye than it is to have both eyes and not be in eternity with God. So sometimes God uses his wrath and his stern voice to get our attention because his priority is that we would spend eternity with him. This may be why Solomon writes in Proverbs chapter 9 that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Many of you have probably heard this verse before. And when I was growing up and we would come across this verse, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we were kind of told that fear there is an awe, it's a respect. It's not being afraid of our Heavenly Father because our Heavenly Father is good. It's being in awe of Him, and that's the beginning of wisdom. No, no, no. It's being fall on your face, terrified of the Father. It's actual fear. On the holiday that we celebrate fear, this is actual fear. Being fearful of our almighty God creator in heaven. Being scared of what he can do to us if he were to so choose. Being actually fearful of him. Reading through the wrath of God that will be poured out on creation and going, that sounds terrible. And God goes, yeah, because here's the thing. As we go through Revelation and we see God's wrath meted out on creation, please understand, the only people who experience God's wrath are the ones who don't believe in it. The only people who experience the wrath of God are the ones who have said, please God, or the ones who have not said, please God, spare me. At any point, if we look to God and we say, God, you're God and I'm not, and I trust you, please spare me your wrath. He does. The only ones left to experience the wrath at the end of the tribulation, I am convinced, are those who have chosen obstinately to refuse to submit to God in faith. And so he pours out his wrath. And he pours out his wrath because God in his goodness sent his son to rescue us up to heaven to spend eternity with him. And we obstinately, some of us choose to not believe in the son that he sent. Instead, we spit on it. Instead, we don't believe it. Instead, we pass it off like a fairy tale. And one day, every knee will bow before our God in heaven. And the only ones who will experience God's wrath are the ones that have to be forced to bow. And it is not, to me, until we understand that, that we can begin to appreciate God's love for us. This is why wisdom begins in, oh no, God created the universe and I'm terrified of him. And God says, good, but guess what? I created it so that you could spend eternity with me and I love you. And all you have to do to be spared from that wrath is ask me. As I sank into this topic for this week, I began to reflect on the wrath of God. It actually occurred to me, something that I've long understood, but something that fits very well into this sermon and this idea right now, which is it is impossible to adequately appreciate God's love without being in awe of his wrath. It is impossible to adequately appreciate God's love without being in awe of his wrath. And I think it's actually good for us to take a Sunday and confront the fact that our God is just and his justice necessitates wrath. And for us to exist and tremble and for us to hear it said, yeah, we want to be as nice as possible to everyone, but one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. And you do not want to be made to bow against your will. We submit to God now and we spend eternity with him later. And I think it's good for us to sink into that reality because we talk a lot about the love of God and we should. We talk about our good, good father and we should and we talk about his grace and we talk about his forgiveness and we talk about his mercy and we should. Those things are good and trust me, I like preaching about those things way more. But I think that sometimes we talk so much about God's love for us that we forget he has every right to smite us. All the times that we've trampled on the gospel. All the times that I've presumed upon God's grace, knowing he would forgive me. All the times I've cheapened the blood of Christ on the cross with my action and my attitude and my obstinance. We were in here on Tuesday morning for Bible study and I was sitting right here and over there was a roach. And I noticed it and Shane noticed it, but it was a roach. And we're like, whatever, I didn't care. It was like 620. Live it up, roach. But when Britt Vinson, who was dressed up like a cowboy that day, noticed it. You like that, Kyle? Okay. All right, pal. There you go. I love Kyle. When Britt Vinson in his cowboy boots saw the roach, he got up. That was the end of that roach. We live our lives as if God can't do that to us. We live our lives as if that's not a daily reality. And we live our lives as if it would somehow be unfair if he did. When it's not. The most fair and just thing for him to do is to take us. Is to die for our sin. That is the most just thing. But because his incredible love balances his incredible justice, he sent his son so he doesn't have to smite us, and we walk around acting like that's not a reality when it is. And so it's good for a Sunday for us to sink into the wrath of God and to appreciate it. Because I wonder about me and maybe about you if we feel stagnant in our walk with the Lord. If we heard Steve talk about being on fire for Jesus and it's been a while since we have experienced that. If we give mental assent to the fact that God loves us, but we are not warmed by it daily and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the grace of his love for us, maybe it's in part because we haven't sat and thought for a minute in a long time about the wrath that his love is balancing out. About what he's sparing us from. About what it means for him to have every right to claim us and choose in his goodness not to. So my hope and my prayer this week has been that by focusing on God's wrath, it would actually inexplicably draw us closer to him and help us more deeply appreciate the love that he lavishes upon us and the things that John writes, like from his fullness he has bestowed upon us grace upon grace. I hope we can appreciate those sentiments a little more deeply today and feel God's love a little more closely today by reflecting on his tremendous wrath as well. Let's pray. God, thank you for your justice. Thank you for your terrible and furious wrath. We know that we would not want a God that was not capable of those things, whose character didn't require them. Father, I pray that if anyone can hear my voice, whether it's today or in the future, who doesn't know you, who has not bowed their knee, I pray that they would cry out to you today. That they would claim Jesus as their Savior and you as their Father. That they would simply ask to be spared of your wrath, which you are so anxious to do. God, would we be brought more close to you? And God, would we walk more fearfully of you? To give us a greater depth of appreciation of your love for us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.

The Well, good morning. It's good to see everybody. My name is Nate. I get to be the pastor here. If you're joining us online, thank you for doing that. If you're catching up later in the week, we appreciate you following along. This is our third part in our series going through the book of Revelation. There's a lot of questions there, a lot of curiosity, a lot of mystery. And so I want to do the best that I can as we move through the series to help make Revelation more approachable and understandable for all of us, whether that means pulling back from the details and the weeds so that we can actually see the forest and get the point of this amazing book, or whether it means making it approachable so that we can actually understand what's happening throughout the book. Last week, my dad carried the weight for us. He did a phenomenal job. Many of you have said kind things to me about him, and I appreciate that. I was as surprised as the rest of us that he did such a good job. I was watching from the cabin that I was at going, huh, look at this. The dude's good at it. So that was really, really cool and a neat moment for us. So I appreciate you guys indulging that. And he did a good job talking about Revelation 4 and 5. And the point that he made was that God in chapter 4 is seated on the throne and that Jesus, the Lamb of God, is the one worthy to open the seals. That's what happens in 4 and 5. But there's a question that leads into the rest of the book of why is Jesus, as the Lamb of God, stepping forward to open a seal? What's the deal there? What's going on? And it's actually an important part in the narrative of Revelation, what's happening in 4 and 5. And basically, what's happening in 4 and 5 is that Jesus is stepping up to begin the tribulation period. This is when the tribulation begins. It's the official start of it. Now, some of you know that word tribulation. Others of you may not. Maybe we can define it. Maybe we kind of have a loose knowledge of what it is. But what Jesus is doing in Revelation 4 and 5 is he is beginning the tribulation period. And in Revelation chapters 6 through 17 describes this tribulation period. So the way that we're going to approach it as a church is for the next three weeks, we're going to talk about this together. This morning, we're going to define the tribulation. Next week, we're going to look at the events of the tribulation. And then the week after that, we're going to look at the signs in the tribulation. Because this is where it gets sticky. This is the tough part. Revelation 1 through 5, that's easy. We just did that. The last two sermons, Jesus comes back. Hooray. God establishes new heaven and new earth. Those are easy. These middle three, boy, they're tricky. They are tricky. This is where if you have questions, what does this mean? What happens? In what order? I'm genuinely interested in them. So this week or next week, as you're reading through Revelation, hopefully you're following along in the reading plan, or maybe there's been something rattling around for a long time. If there's something that you in particular want me to address and say, hey, this is how we understand this event, then let me know, email me. And I will absolutely, if I can't address it in the sermon, I'll figure out how to answer you personally. But I would love your questions because the thing is, if you're asking it, so are five other people, at least. So ask away and we'll kind of cobble this thing together over the next three weeks as we focus on this tribulation period. So this morning, I want to define the tribulation and what it is, and then ask, why is it necessary? So that's the first thing to think about. What is the tribulation and why is it necessary? Why does it have to happen? And the tribulation is quite simply, the most abrupt way to put it is, the tribulation is the seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath and reclaiming what is rightfully his. The tribulation process is a seven-year process of God pouring out his earned wrath on creation and reclaiming what is rightfully his. I will be up front with you and tell you, this sermon this week is the least excited to preach a sermon I have been in my life. Okay. I did not wake up going, yes, wrath of God. This is super fun in 2021. I'm actually getting on a plane this afternoon to go to Atlanta and just be around the stadium during the game in case they win tonight. And it is really hard for me to not focus on how excited I am for that and appropriately address the wrath of God in the service this morning. As we began the series, I knew that this was coming. And to me, it's the hardest part of Revelation. Not interpreting what's going to happen and trying to figure everything out, but for a 21st century audience, to actually, for us to wrap our head around the fact that our God is a wrathful God, that he is a just God. And so this morning, as I was preparing this week, I realized we can't really go on and discuss the events of the tribulation until we adequately understand the wrath of God that's seen in the tribulation. So when we ask, why is the tribulation necessary? Why is it necessary for God to pour out his wrath on his creation at the end of time? Well, the first answer that I would offer you is that God's wrath is necessary because his justice requires it. God's wrath is necessary because his justice requires it. My dad did a great job last week of defining holiness in a way that I had never thought of before when he was talking about the angels around the throne and they're singing to God. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty. And what does that word holy mean? Well, he defined it as being the intersection of God's love and God's justice. That they are perfectly balanced in God. And we love God's love. We love God's love. But we don't talk a lot about God's justice. And the reality is that his person, his very essence, requires a balance of love and justice. And the further reality is we don't want a God creator sovereign over all of the universe who isn't just, who isn't capable of wrath. Our own sensibilities insist that our God would be just. Here's what I mean. The Braves are playing the Astros in the World Series. The whole country is a Braves fan right now because everybody hates the Astros, right? They are the patriots of baseball. Everyone hates them. Now, here's why everyone hates the Astros. For those of you who don't know baseball and may not be informed about this, back in 2017, the Astros had a great season and a great team, and they won the World Series. And they kind of came out of nowhere when they did it, and I think they may have won the next year or the year previous, I'm not sure, but two years around 2017, they won the World Series. And it was kind of fun, because they were kind of a cool team, and they were kind of fun to cheer for. But then it came out that they were cheating. Like, not cheating a little bit. They were cheating a lot of it. And that's how they won those two World Series. And then what happened was, what did baseball do? What did the commissioner do? Did the commissioner bring wrath and justice upon the Astros? No, he'd like find the owner and I think the coach got in trouble. But none of the players who actually cheated got punished. And so everyone hates the Astros because it wasn't fair. It's not right. They cheated, they got caught, and nothing happened to them. And our senses of justice cry out and say, that's not fair. To the extent that, and I was so proud of my hometown, when their best player came up to bat in game three of the World Series, first time he had to play in Atlanta, the whole stadium broke out with chants of cheater, cheater, cheater. I'm like, yes, this is great. Our sense of justice is offended when things are not fairly litigated. To think about it in a more applicable personal way. Parents, if somebody did something to genuinely harm your child in a way that requires you to be in court and to prosecute them. And they are absolutely guilty. How offended would you be if the judge did not display justice and said, you know what? That wasn't you. You didn't mean it. You're off the hook. No, we want a just judge in the same way we want a just God. His nature requires it. And our senses of fairness and justice demand it. The uncomfortable side of that justice is his wrath. And make no mistake, when you read the middle sections of the book of Revelation, it reads very much like the Old Testament prophets. Two times in the book of Revelation, the phrase, the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God is used. In Revelation 19, when Jesus comes back, it says that he is going to tread the press of the fury of the wrath of God, which tells us that God's wrath does not only exist, but it is furious. We are told at a different point that God will send an angel with a sickle to take a third of humanity like grapes and put them in a wine press and press them with his fury and his wrath. The wrath of God in Revelation is unavoidable. And to pretend like it's not there is dishonest and unfair. So we have to come to grips with this existence and learn how to accept that this is a part of the God that we worship. To do that, I think that we can listen to the voices of the martyrs in Revelation chapter 6 to begin not only to understand that God's justice requires wrath and that we want a just God, but also to begin to understand the source of this wrath. It's helpful to listen to the voice of the martyrs in Revelation 6. This to me is one of the more poignant moments in all of scripture, and I'll tell you why in a second. Revelation chapter 6 verses 9 through 11. So there's this poignant scene in heaven. As Jesus begins to open the seals, and if you don't understand what the seals are, that's all right. We're going to talk about those next week. The rest of Revelation is scheduled out through seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls. And we're going to talk about that progression next week. But for this one, as this seal was opened, then there's martyrs under the throne at the altar of God. And these martyrs are men and women who have died for their faith. They were killed because they professed a faith in God. And they cry out, how much longer are you going to wait before you avenge us, God? We were killed for you. You saw the people from heaven. You know who murdered us. When are you going to punish the people who are harming your children? And this voice, the voice of the martyrs, echoes. And it echoes particularly with the original audience. Because I told you in week one that the people who received this letter endured great persecution. The generations of the church that immediately followed this time around 90, 95 AD endured tremendous persecution. To be a Christian, to proclaim and claim the gospel of faith in Jesus was to put your life at risk, was to put your family at risk. So the people reading this letter and receiving it, they cried out with the martyrs too. Yeah, God, win. How much longer? And here's how much longer before you avenge. You saw them take our dad. You saw them kill our mom. You saw them take my wife. When are you going to make that okay? And if we pay attention, what we see is that we cry out with the martyrs as well. We also cry out with the martyrs. Paul talks about this in Romans when he says in Romans chapter 8 that all of creation groans for the return of our king. When we have that sense that this isn't right, most of you know that part of mine and Jen's story is that at the end of last year, her dad lost a two-year battle to pancreatic cancer. Her dad was the best man I ever knew. And I will always be sad that Lily doesn't get to experience the glow of his love in her life. I will always be sad that his grandson will only get to meet him in eternity. And so we cry out, God, he loved you. He served you. He loves his grandkids. He cried when we told him that we were pregnant because he knew we wouldn't meet that one. How is this okay with you? And that's just ours. You guys have it too. Where you cry out with the martyrs. God, you could have done something and you didn't. When are you going to fix it? When are you going to make this okay? How are you going to make this right? And it's not an insistent thing. It's not a precocious thing. We don't walk into the throne room of God and demand. We sit at the altar and we humbly wonder and plea like, God, how much longer are you going to watch this? And we need to realize that that voice has been echoing throughout the centuries, not just for the things that we endure that seem unfair or seem like God could have prevented it and he didn't, but for all the things going on over the course of history. God sat in heaven and he watched the Holocaust. And the voice of the martyr says, God, how much longer? He sat in heaven and he watches the slave trade. That still exists. And we think, how much longer, God? He's seen the atrocities of people claiming his name in the Crusades. Evil meted out over an entire continent, falsely claiming him. How much longer, God? So at the beginning, when I define the tribulation as God pouring out his earned wrath, that's what I mean. He's been waiting. He is angered by the evil things that happen. He is angered and hurt by school shootings. He is angered that our sin has broken down the world in such a way that we lose people too early from disease. He's angered by that. He's hurt by that, that Satan has been loosed into his perfect creation and the people who listen to his voice, including us, have perverted it and made it something that it is not. He's angered by that. He's angered by us when we trample on his gospel and we presume upon his grace and we act like our actions have no consequences because we're so used to hearing about the love of God that we forget about the wrath of God. And it angers him. God says that vengeance is his, and he will take it. He's simply waiting. And when the martyrs ask him, how much longer are you going to wait to do, as I always say, to make the wrong things right and the sad things untrue? When will that happen, God? His response is, rest a little while longer because there's still more to be added to your numbers. It's not time yet, but it's coming. And so we see in listening to the voice of the martyrs and in seeing the response of God that part of the necessity of God's wrath and his tribulation is that God's wrath is actually working to draw people to him. His wrath is working to wake people up and to draw them into his eternity. If there are still martyrs who have yet to be added to the number in Revelation chapter six, then what it means is there are people in the tribulation period actively sharing their faith so that more people might know Jesus, so that more people might spend eternity in heaven. If you flip the page to the next chapter, what you see is a mass of humanity being ushered into heaven. And John leans over to the angel next to him and he goes, who are they? And he says, those are all the people who have accepted Christ who are coming out of the tribulation. God is using his wrath as a tool to wake people up and draw them near to him. And if that sounds like a contradiction, then let's think of it this way. In our house, we try to be calm. I try, best I can, not to raise my voice. Except at Jen. Boy, howdy. I really get after Jen. I'm just messing around. I try not to raise my voice. Now, sometimes, Lily, she's five. She's very much like me. And so, I can't help it. But most of the time, I'm pretty calm with her. And the reason I try not to raise my voice is, first of all, I want to set that model for her. But second, I want it to matter when I do. We raise our voice all the time. Eventually, I mean, you can see these kids. They're in the store. Their mom's yelling at them. They couldn't care less. Because mom yells at them all the time. So I want it to matter when I raise my voice. Because when I raise my voice to Lily, sometimes I do it because it's the only thing left that's going to get her attention. Right, parents? I tell her to stop. Don't do that. Put that down. We're not going to talk about that. I try to be as calm as I can. But sometimes I have to get stern with her. And when I get stern with her, I'm doing it to get her attention. Because what I'm saying matters. The same is true of God. Sometimes God has to get stern with his children because he's been trying to get our attention in other ways and we're not listening. So sometimes God gets forceful with us because you parents know if you pick your moments there, you can really get your kids' attention simply by being more stern with them. So God also knows, and we see it in the Old Testament, that sometimes to get the attention of His people, He raises His voice. He does not do it to intimidate or scare us, although that should be our reaction. He does it to draw us near to him, to get our attention. He does it because his biggest priority in all of creation is that you and I would spend eternity with him. That's why Paul writes that even though we endure pain for a little while, he considers it nothing compared to the glory that he's going to experience in eternity. It's nothing. It doesn't matter. So is God, and Jesus tells us, listen, if your eye's causing you to sin, gouge it out. It's better to enter into heaven with one eye than it is to have both eyes and not be in eternity with God. So sometimes God uses his wrath and his stern voice to get our attention because his priority is that we would spend eternity with him. This may be why Solomon writes in Proverbs chapter 9 that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Many of you have probably heard this verse before. And when I was growing up and we would come across this verse, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we were kind of told that fear there is an awe, it's a respect. It's not being afraid of our Heavenly Father because our Heavenly Father is good. It's being in awe of Him, and that's the beginning of wisdom. No, no, no. It's being fall on your face, terrified of the Father. It's actual fear. On the holiday that we celebrate fear, this is actual fear. Being fearful of our almighty God creator in heaven. Being scared of what he can do to us if he were to so choose. Being actually fearful of him. Reading through the wrath of God that will be poured out on creation and going, that sounds terrible. And God goes, yeah, because here's the thing. As we go through Revelation and we see God's wrath meted out on creation, please understand, the only people who experience God's wrath are the ones who don't believe in it. The only people who experience the wrath of God are the ones who have said, please God, or the ones who have not said, please God, spare me. At any point, if we look to God and we say, God, you're God and I'm not, and I trust you, please spare me your wrath. He does. The only ones left to experience the wrath at the end of the tribulation, I am convinced, are those who have chosen obstinately to refuse to submit to God in faith. And so he pours out his wrath. And he pours out his wrath because God in his goodness sent his son to rescue us up to heaven to spend eternity with him. And we obstinately, some of us choose to not believe in the son that he sent. Instead, we spit on it. Instead, we don't believe it. Instead, we pass it off like a fairy tale. And one day, every knee will bow before our God in heaven. And the only ones who will experience God's wrath are the ones that have to be forced to bow. And it is not, to me, until we understand that, that we can begin to appreciate God's love for us. This is why wisdom begins in, oh no, God created the universe and I'm terrified of him. And God says, good, but guess what? I created it so that you could spend eternity with me and I love you. And all you have to do to be spared from that wrath is ask me. As I sank into this topic for this week, I began to reflect on the wrath of God. It actually occurred to me, something that I've long understood, but something that fits very well into this sermon and this idea right now, which is it is impossible to adequately appreciate God's love without being in awe of his wrath. It is impossible to adequately appreciate God's love without being in awe of his wrath. And I think it's actually good for us to take a Sunday and confront the fact that our God is just and his justice necessitates wrath. And for us to exist and tremble and for us to hear it said, yeah, we want to be as nice as possible to everyone, but one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. And you do not want to be made to bow against your will. We submit to God now and we spend eternity with him later. And I think it's good for us to sink into that reality because we talk a lot about the love of God and we should. We talk about our good, good father and we should and we talk about his grace and we talk about his forgiveness and we talk about his mercy and we should. Those things are good and trust me, I like preaching about those things way more. But I think that sometimes we talk so much about God's love for us that we forget he has every right to smite us. All the times that we've trampled on the gospel. All the times that I've presumed upon God's grace, knowing he would forgive me. All the times I've cheapened the blood of Christ on the cross with my action and my attitude and my obstinance. We were in here on Tuesday morning for Bible study and I was sitting right here and over there was a roach. And I noticed it and Shane noticed it, but it was a roach. And we're like, whatever, I didn't care. It was like 620. Live it up, roach. But when Britt Vinson, who was dressed up like a cowboy that day, noticed it. You like that, Kyle? Okay. All right, pal. There you go. I love Kyle. When Britt Vinson in his cowboy boots saw the roach, he got up. That was the end of that roach. We live our lives as if God can't do that to us. We live our lives as if that's not a daily reality. And we live our lives as if it would somehow be unfair if he did. When it's not. The most fair and just thing for him to do is to take us. Is to die for our sin. That is the most just thing. But because his incredible love balances his incredible justice, he sent his son so he doesn't have to smite us, and we walk around acting like that's not a reality when it is. And so it's good for a Sunday for us to sink into the wrath of God and to appreciate it. Because I wonder about me and maybe about you if we feel stagnant in our walk with the Lord. If we heard Steve talk about being on fire for Jesus and it's been a while since we have experienced that. If we give mental assent to the fact that God loves us, but we are not warmed by it daily and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the grace of his love for us, maybe it's in part because we haven't sat and thought for a minute in a long time about the wrath that his love is balancing out. About what he's sparing us from. About what it means for him to have every right to claim us and choose in his goodness not to. So my hope and my prayer this week has been that by focusing on God's wrath, it would actually inexplicably draw us closer to him and help us more deeply appreciate the love that he lavishes upon us and the things that John writes, like from his fullness he has bestowed upon us grace upon grace. I hope we can appreciate those sentiments a little more deeply today and feel God's love a little more closely today by reflecting on his tremendous wrath as well. Let's pray. God, thank you for your justice. Thank you for your terrible and furious wrath. We know that we would not want a God that was not capable of those things, whose character didn't require them. Father, I pray that if anyone can hear my voice, whether it's today or in the future, who doesn't know you, who has not bowed their knee, I pray that they would cry out to you today. That they would claim Jesus as their Savior and you as their Father. That they would simply ask to be spared of your wrath, which you are so anxious to do. God, would we be brought more close to you? And God, would we walk more fearfully of you? To give us a greater depth of appreciation of your love for us. It's in your son's name we pray. Amen.