All Things New

Transcript

If you guys know, even for those guys, I'm not exaggerating I saw a kid this last semester. He had his AirPods in, he had his phone in his hand, he had his Panda Express in his other hand, one of the many nutritious options available at Grand Canyon University. He's walking along and he walked right into a light pole on campus. Orange chicken and chow mein confetti everywhere around his life. These guys are everywhere, and while that's certainly true when it comes to our technology, these guys are everywhere.

And while that's certainly true when it comes to our technology, I actually think a similar dynamic can sometimes exist in our spiritual lives. In fact, in certain recent streams of American Christianity, there's been a story that has been taught and caught about specific foundations of the Christian faith, and that story says that things like resurrection or eternal life or heaven are about escaping from this world, getting out of this world. The idea in the story is that at the end, if you believe the right things or act the right way, god will come and scoop your soul up and take you to some ethereal heaven where you'll float on clouds and play harps and maybe sing songs or something. That's the picture that we've been handed, and many Americans think that that's what Christians believe.

In fact, there's been a whole book and film series designed to promote that story. Many of the Evangelifish kids in the room know what I'm talking about. You guys remember Left Behind those of you that were raised in the church, the Left Behind series. The latest movie, by the way, in 2014,. Starred Nicolas Cage. The latest movie, by the way, in 2014,. Starred Nicolas Cage. That might be new information to you.

The great Nicolas Cage, stooped to the left behind, leveled, actually, this movie when it was released. I haven't seen it, but it has. It's the only movie I've ever seen that has a zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Literally there are no critics who say this is worth seeing. And these movies, as much as they can kind of be cheesy and hokey, they're actually based on real books that were released a couple decades ago. Here's what the covers of the books look like, and so you can tell they're just a good time, right? You just crack one of these babies open and you are just in for a blast here. And these stories these were New York Times bestsellers. 65 million copies of these books sold around the world.

And this story that it tells is that, and that many Christians have bought in our culture, is that God is going to destroy this world, get rid of this world and whisk our souls away to some pie-in-the-sky Neverland. That's the story that has been caught and taught, and when we buy into that story, it usually results in a lack of responsibility for this world. After all, god's going to throw it all out anyways, right? God's going to let it burn anyway. So let's just keep doing our religious activities and wait around for the evacuation plan. It turns us into those guys Escapist people are just focusing on some future fantasy world and avoiding real involvement with the here and now. In that picture it's one reason why, alongside many other people, karl Marx called Christianity an opium of the people. It's like a drug and it's either given by those in power to keep those who are oppressed docile, or it's a drug that we take to just kind of ignore all of the bad stuff in the world and just wait until we float away someday. And there's just one pesky thing that gets in the way of this version of the Christian stuff in the world and just wait until we float away someday. And there's just one pesky thing that gets in the way of this version of the Christian story the Bible. The Bible gets in the way of this Christian story. See, the Bible has never been about some distant, disembodied heaven that God is gonna whisk us away to. The story of the Bible has always been, from beginning to end, about the unity of heaven and earth coming together, not the destruction of earth and taking us somewhere else.

The opening pages of the Bible. It starts with a creation where heaven and earth are unified, where people and God and creation all work together harmoniously, heaven and earth unified. And then something happens, a fall happens and humans decide to prioritize their will at the expense of creation and God and the rest of the people, and so that heaven and their will at the expense of creation and God and the rest of the people, and so that heaven and earth unity, that flourishing that we were made for, gets fractured in some way and suddenly brokenness and division and injustice radiate through the world. That world that was designed for abundance and flourishing becomes a world of zero-sum games. So if I win, you have to lose, and if you win, I have to lose, and if I have, then you can't have, and if you have, then I can't have. That's the way that our world functions. I don't think we need to go through all of the examples. Our workplaces, our schools, they look like that kind of world.

But then, immediately after that fall, god sets in motion a plan to redeem and reunify heaven and earth. And the rest of the scriptures are telling that story about how God is at work to bring heaven and earth back together. And Jesus is the culmination of that story. He is the ultimate embodiment of heaven and earth coming back together. He is literally God from heaven. Come to earth to reunify heaven and earth. That's what Jesus said his mission was, and everything he spoke, everything he did, his death and resurrection were all about that work. That's why he constantly talked about heaven breaking into the here and now, not whisking us away somewhere else One of the thesis statements of his ministry.

We see it in Mark, chapter 1, he says this repent, come back to God, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. That is, it is here, it is near, it is arriving now. It's not up there with harps and clouds and naked babies flying around with heart-shaped arrows. That's not what heaven looks like. The prayer he taught us to pray, that Gael just led us in your kingdom, come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, it's not your kingdom. Come your will be done. So get us the heck out of here.

And that's why, throughout history, the more deeply Christians have believed in these core tenets of the faith things like resurrection and heaven and eternal life the more deeply they believed in those things, the more involved they've been in the world, not less involved. The earliest Christians are an example of this, the witnesses to the resurrection, the people who proclaimed it, who wrote these texts down, who staked their lives to these claims. They were never escapists. They were never conspiracy theory theologians sitting on their hands and watching Nick Cage movies. Their belief in resurrection and heaven and eternal life was the fuel that shot them back into the world as transformed people who transformed the places in which they lived. And that's because they believed that Jesus, in Jesus, the unity of heaven and earth had begun, that heaven was breaking in now, that it was breaking into their lives, it was breaking into the world and they were partners in bringing it, and that shocked the world around them. No one else in the world believed that this could be possible. Everyone else in the world was believing in a zero-sum game that I have and you don't have, that I win and you lose, and so when they saw Christians doing this, they're like this breaks all of our categories. This doesn't make any sense.

You can actually read some of the earliest critics of Christianity. They're shocked by this. There's a guy named Lucian of Samosata who wrote about it. He said their founder, jesus, taught them that they should be like brothers to one another, brothers and sisters, and therefore they despise their own privacy and view their possessions as common property, radical, generous living, not sitting on their hands and waiting around. There's another emperor of Rome, julian of Rome, who described Christians this way. He said the impious Galileans, that is, the Christians support not only their poor, but our poor as well, the poor and their enemies, the poor and the people who oppress them.

Cs Lewis, I think, captured it beautifully in Mere Christianity, he said if you read history, you will find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were just those who thought most of the coming one. The apostles themselves who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English evangelicals who abolished the slave trade, all left their mark on earth precisely because their minds were occupied in heaven. Heaven, far from the Christian story turning us into those guys obsessed with escape, what we find is that the Christian story of resurrection and heaven and eternal life is the thing that gets us back into the world, that gives us the sustaining power to enter a brutalizing and hard world and become vehicles of love and joy and peace, precisely there. And that should make all of us wonder how, because we live in the same sort of brutalizing world. All of us have entered this room with the weight of the world just crushing us, the weight of the things around us, the weight of our inner lives. We know that things aren't the way they ought to be. So how do we show up in a world like that? Where do we get power to sustain ourselves in a world like that? That's what these central tenets of Christianity are about. How does this story transform us in the world?

We're wrapping up a series this week. We've called Brand New the Resurrection for All of Life. The idea behind the series, since Easter, is we've been exploring different New Testament passages that talk about the resurrection of Jesus and what that means for us, how it actually transforms every nook and cranny of our lives and world. And today we wrap up the story well, I think fittingly on the last page of our Bibles, because on that page we see the description of a remarkable truth that Jesus and the early apostles all proclaimed. See, they all believed that what happened on Easter the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave that that was not just about individual humans, that that was about an entirely new universe, that that was about a new creation that sprung forth from the tomb alongside Jesus, and every part of our world now is being transformed. It's not just about me, it's about the whole of creation, and when we understand that, we become people guided by that story, we find a transforming power to sustain us in a broken and brutalizing world. So, friends, if you have a Bible, open it with me to your last page of your Bibles.

Revelation 21 is where we're gonna be reading. We'll read verses one through six here. If you don't have a Bible, by the way, that's okay. The words are gonna be behind me on the screen so you can follow along there.

Revelation 21, starting in verse one. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying see, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them, they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more. Mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away, and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. And the one who was seated on the throne said see, I am making all things new. Also, he said write this, for these words are trustworthy and true. And then he said to me it is done. I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Friends, would you pray with me, father, as we glimpse this amazing image on the final page of our Bibles? Would you, by your spirit, transform us? Would you let this image sink into the deepest parts of who we are? Would you let it speak to all of the parts of our lives and world that we know need to be transformed, that we know need to be made new? Would you open our minds and our hearts to receive this, as we need to today? In Jesus' name, amen. The book of Revelation is like pineapple on pizza it divides a room in half. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Kevin wasn't expecting. If I can get Kevin, catch Kevin off guard. I'm doing something good.

This is a text in our modern Western world that I've noticed tends to split people into two camps. So on one side you've got folks who are obsessed with Revelation, the left-behind sort of folks we talked about earlier. They tend to read Revelation like they're a national treasure. You've got to find a code or a cipher, you've got to find this magical thing that tells you exactly how it's going to go. At the end You're going to know the map. It's like just put some lemon juice on your Bible, like the back of the Declaration of Independence, and you'll find the map right. I've actually been around dinner tables I'm not exaggerating been around dinner tables with people who spent hours trying to decipher whether Barack Obama was the Antichrist or not. So those are some people.

Some people find Revelation endlessly fascinating for that reason, and those sort of people are exactly what makes the other half of people totally weirded out and sometimes even repulsed by Revelation. I have some friends who follow Jesus and they're really wary of opening this book because they know how it's been used, how it's been read, and they know it's loaded with all sorts of weird images and metaphors and pictures. They don't know what to do with them. And I actually get that response because the whole book of Revelation is image-driven. It was written by an early follower of Jesus named John who had these remarkable and fantastic visions that seem really weird to us as modern readers. But we have to remember when we open up this text we are reading someone else's mail from 2,000 years ago, which means it's going to take a lot of work for us to understand what they were talking about and how they were talking about it. And in fact the people who this was written to found the images much less bizarre than we do See his audience.

They were first century Jewish believers in Jesus and the book of Revelation is actually a perfect example of a common literary genre at that time called Jewish apocalyptic literature. We actually have other examples of this sort of literature in the ancient world and this sort of literature always had unique features. Just like any of our literary genres have unique features, right, jewish apocalyptic literature usually involved a prophet or a visionary who is saturated in the Old Testament, saturated in the Jewish poetry and scriptures and metaphors, and that prophet or visionary they recount dreams or visions, that sort of zoom out and take this 30,000 foot view over history and talk about God's perspective on it and where it's all headed. And the primary way that this type of literature communicates is through heavy and intense imagery that represents, oftentimes through metaphor, the truth of who God is and what God is doing and what God is going to do. That's what this genre looked like, so we should expect some images that won't make sense to us.

There's a New Testament scholar named Tim Mackey who I think gives a helpful analogy to this in our own culture, a sort of comparison that can help us better understand. So I want to go through this. It's not a perfect comparison, but I think it's helpful. He talks about how Revelation in some ways is sort of like how we treat political cartoons today. So I pulled one up. We're going to walk through an example. I picked a political cartoon that critiques both of our major sides, because we have to play fair. So here's the meme.

This is a movie poster, right, a horror movie poster for the election that's upcoming in November. Right, the two main parties fighting against each other. I don't know if you can see at the bottom, but the rating is R, for really Is this what we're doing again? You've got the lights around, right, you could expect seeing something like this outside of your local movie theater. Now, just looking at this, as people who live in 2024, we don't need much explanation on what this is saying. Right, we get it. The upcoming election feels like a horror movie that no one's really hyped about.

But imagine if someone from Jesus's day time traveled to this room and saw this image. Would it make sense to them? Not a chance, right? They would not understand any of this. They'd have a lot of questions about this, like what is a movie and what are those mysterious floating lights around this image of two shadowy human faces? And who are the shadowy faces and who's the one with the funky looking hair? And what are those strange symbols in the bottom corners of this image? In other words, this image of the election horror sequel is not self-explanatory, though we often think it is in our culture.

To understand this, you have to have a relatively advanced knowledge of recent American history, an understanding of our two major political parties and how they jockey for power, an awareness of what movies are and aren't and how they're advertised and rated, an awareness of both of these men and so forth. It's telling and showing this story about real people. But the story is layered with images and symbols that are communicating a unique truth about those real events and real people. And the point of the cartoon is not for us to walk away and say, ooh, when's that movie come out. It's not about the movie. It's about something beyond the image itself. It's communicating a truth that this is not going to be a fun time in the next few months for most Americans you with me. That same sort of dynamic is at work when we read Revelation, but in reverse. So we are the time travelers.

We are going back to John's culture and reading his prayerfully meditated over text, his carefully organized text that's using images and symbols that are bizarre to us but are often pulling from images that his audience would be really familiar with. In fact, basically the whole book is just riffing off of the Old Testament. There's numerous scholars who talk about. In basically every verse and nearly every word of Revelation there is some reference back to Old Testament images. Eugene Peterson talks about this in his book on Revelation. He says the Revelation has 404 verses and in those 404 verses there are 518 references to earlier scripture. If we are not familiar with the preceding writings, quite obviously we're not going to be familiar with Revelation. John has his favorite books Ezekiel, daniel, zephaniah, zechariah, isaiah, exodus but there's probably not a single canonical Old Testament book to which he doesn't make at least some allusion.

That's where those images are coming from.

The reason it sounds strange is because none of us have memorized our Old Testaments. So Revelation it's an imaginative work of literature meant to be explored and entered into. It's not a code to be cracked. It's a rich and layered depiction of the truth of God, who God is to us, what God is doing in the world and what God is going to do. And when we read Revelation 21, the passage we just read together, that way we find a power of the resurrected heaven and earth that transforms the way we show up. Now we see the power when we can understand some of these images that John is using. We see it in three main ways, I think, in Revelation 21. Here we see first what the resurrected heaven and earth is and isn't. The resurrected heaven and earth is earthy, not ethereal. John is getting this vision at the end of history right. The culmination of all things is what Revelation 21 is about. And what does he see? The holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. The image is not individual souls rising up and escaping the earth and going to some ethereal, disembodied heaven. It's heaven coming down and transforming the earth. This is earthy spirituality. Friends, God didn't just create spirits. God created bodies, God created our world, which means when he comes to redeem and restore all things, he's going to redeem and restore all things spirits and bodies, heaven and earth. The future of God is an embodied future. Friends, in the resurrection kingdom of heaven coming to earth, our feet will touch the grass, our legs will dance and run and never grow weary. Our voices will sing and celebrate, our hands will embrace in love. And Jesus, by the way, showed this in his resurrected body in some details we often overlook from the resurrection narratives in the Gospels Little details.

After Jesus rises from the grave, he shows up to the disciples and immediately his first question is guys, do you have any food? I'm hungry. It's been a long road trip to hell and back. I'm hungry. And then he eats a fish in front of them. Why would he do that? And then, later on in John, he's waiting on the shore for the disciples who are out fishing. He calls them in and as they go in they realize he's doing something. What's he doing? Making breakfast. He's like come and eat with me, you guys. Why? Why is the Bible so bent on telling us that Jesus is eating food after the resurrection? Because it wants us to know that resurrection is earthy, it is physical, it is a transformation of these bodies. It's not a destruction of the earth and a whisking away to pie-in-the-sky Neverland. It's a feast on earth, which means every time you experience deep, abundant goodness in this earthly existence, you've gotten a small taste of what the new heavens and new earth are going to look like.

Every time you've been caught up in the joy of laughing or dancing with abandon.

Every time your heart has been struck by the beauty and wonder of a good song, a good piece of art, every time you've tasted some delicious delicacy, you've gotten a little sample of what's coming of the new heavens and the new earth. Ocho Cafe is just a taste of heaven. Amen, yeah, yeah, yeah. The background knows. And that truth, friends. It has real implications beyond just looking forward to good food. See the heavens coming to earth to renew it. It's the ultimate declaration that God cares deeply for this world, that God deeply loves this world, that he's not trying to get rid of it, he's not going to throw it all out because it's good. In verse 5, we see this echoed. It says I am making all things new. Notice God doesn't say I am making all new things. Catch the difference I am making all things new. It's not about God coming and doing away with everything and making everything anew. All things new. It's not about God coming and doing away with everything and making everything anew. It's about God renewing this earthy good creation to its true, eternally glorious nature and purpose. God doesn't throw it all away. God reshapes it, god renews it. And that always has started and ended with Jesus.

Jesus' primary message was that God's rule and reign, god's kingdom, has arrived in him to make all things new us and all of creation. And he boiled down very clearly what that renewal would look like. It would mean a return to love Love of God and love of others. It looks like living as God's image bearers in the world, committing ourselves to the creator, not the created. And then it would mean, from that orientation, extending that love to our neighbor. Those things are intimately connected. How you love God is intimately connected to how you love your neighbor, seeking the well-being of all others around us, even when it costs us. And Jesus didn't just teach that, he lived it, he died it, he resurrected it. His death and resurrection sparked the making of all things new, so that in him we are being made new and we are participating in the renewal of all things. We are our same selves, made new, people who last forever, people who are going to live forever, which means every part of our lives and world now is shot through with the energy of eternity.

Friends, you've never met an ordinary person in your life. It's never happened. You've only ever interacted with image of God bearers that are going to live forever. You've only ever interacted with image of God bearers that are going to live forever. You've only ever interacted with eternal beings. The resurrection picture of heaven doesn't lead us to care less about the physical world or to escape it. It leads us to participate in it now, because we know this is all part of the renewal plan.

So, moms in the room, you're never just changing a diaper or making the 2,431st PB&J. You are loving and shaping an eternal being designed to live in the love of God and love of others. I can hardly think of a more important job than that. Desk job. Workers, you're never just reviewing spreadsheets or sending emails or balancing budgets. You are participating with Christ in bringing flourishing to an unbalanced world. So balance away Teachers and nurses. You are never just putting together lesson plans or caring for patients. You are proclaiming the good news that their hearts and minds and bodies matter to God and you are inviting them to know God through what you do.

This revelation story, it's anything but ethereal, friends. It is earthy, but it doesn't stop there. We also see that it's holistic, not just individual. See, so often the story we are told about Christianity is a very me-centric one. Jesus died and rose again for me, and that's definitely true. That's part of the story. Jesus did rise again for you, die and rise again for you. But if we just stop at the me-centric salvation story, we miss the bigger, broader, wider picture of what God is doing.

And John captures this through a specific image he uses in verse one. He says then I saw a new heaven and new earth, for the first heaven and first earth had passed away and the sea was no more. Did you catch that? The sea was no more. Christian surfers in the room just lament, right Like what there's going to be no sea. Before we jump to conclusions on what this means, remember what we're reading. We're reading an image-heavy, metaphor-driven text. Does John really mean that 70% of this good creation is just going to evaporate instantaneously? That's likely not what he's getting at. There's something else going on here.

See, the sea in the mind of ancient Hebrew culture was a symbolic representation of all the chaos and instability and evil of our current creation. And if you read through the Hebrew scriptures and just keep an eye out for that word the sea you will constantly see it described as a threat to human flourishing and life. It is the embodiment of the disorder of death and threat to human life and existence. Nt Wright captures this well in his commentary on Revelation. He says throughout this book, as in much of the Bible, the sea is the dark force of chaos which threatens God's plans and God's people. It is the element from which the first monster emerged. It is contained in Genesis by God. Contained, that is, both in the sense that it is there as part of the furniture and in the sense that its boundary is strictly limited. Evil is only allowed to do enough to overreach itself and bring about its own downfall. But in the new creation there will be no more sea, that is, no more chaos, no place from which monsters might again emerge, no place from which monsters might again emerge.

So for God to do away with the sea here isn't for God to do away with H2O molecules. It's to do away with anything, all things that hinder or threaten or impede upon human flourishing and the flourishing of our world, to do away with oppression, to do away with poverty, to do away with poverty, to do away with ecological harm and injustice, all things that cause tears, that cause death, that cause mourning or crying or pain. Those things will be wiped away and all that will be left is a radiant, life-giving presence of God that dwells among us, that surrounds us and pervades us, that brings joy and peace and life to all things. That's what's coming Holistic, flourishing, not just individual. And once we catch a glimpse of this, friends, once we see that this is earthy and not ethereal, that's holistic and not individual, we begin to see how it transforms us now, particularly in how we show up in the brokenness of our world.

See, it's important when we read this text to remember who John was writing to. He mentions it in chapters two and three of the book. He's writing to people who were enduring terrible things in the first century. We're talking about people who went through things that, thankfully, none of us likely will have to go through in our lives, because at the end of the first century the Roman emperor Domitian was about to begin widespread, large-scale persecution of Christians, and many of the people John was writing to in this text in the next few years were going to be sent into arenas to be torn apart by lions in front of thousands of people. They were about to be impaled on stakes and covered with pitch and lit on fire. They were about to be crucified, sometimes by the hundreds along the highways entering Rome. That's what these people were facing, and what did John give them? The new heavens and the new earth. This picture, this glimpse, this was the news that enabled them to endure their suffering.

This frame of seeing reality and from history we know it worked for those people. We have records of Christians who took their suffering with incredible poise and peace. They sang hymns from prison cells, they forgave their persecutors and they grieved with a transcendent hope. So much so that the more people killed them, the more Christians grew, the more they died, the more people saw how they died and said I need something like what they have. That's why one of the early church fathers, tertullian, said the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church. That the suffering of Christians and the way they navigated suffering was precisely the thing that compelled everyone else in, because they saw that they had something to deal with. The pain and the loss that transcended every other framework. It gave them a strength, an inner hope, an inner life. It transformed them.

You guys, we as humans are hope-based creatures. The way you live now is completely controlled by what you believe about your future, and your ability to navigate the pain and the suffering of this world is determined by what you believe about your future, and your ability to navigate the pain and the suffering of this world is determined by what you believe is coming. A quick example of this. Imagine that you've got two men who are tasked with working a really tedious job folding up cardboard boxes for 12 hours a day, no breaks, and they're told you do this for a year and then you'll get a salary at the end of that year. And the first man is given a salary of $15,000. He said at the end of the year you'll get $15,000 for this tedious work. The second man is told hey, at the end of this year you'll get a salary of $15 million for doing this work. What's going to happen after a couple weeks, or maybe even a couple hours? That first dude is going to be like not a chance, just not worth it. Right, because what I know is coming is not making any of this worth it.

But the man who's promised 15 million dollars, he's folding boxes and singing, he's whistling Taylor Swift, he's loving life because he knows what's coming. He knows and the way he lives now is shaped by that knowledge. If we believe that at the end we all die and rot, or at the end we all just go to sleep, or at the end all of human civilization will be done away with and nothing we did or do now matters if that's what we really believe, then our lives will be completely untransformed and we will have no power to navigate the pain of right now. But if we believe in the new heavens and new earth, if we believe that no oppressor or evildoer gets away with it and we believe that in Christ we will experience the wiping of every tear, the renewal of our bodies in a renewed world and the pervading love of God holding us for eternity, then our lives will be transformed. The way we navigate suffering will be transformed, the way we work and parent and neighbor will be transformed.

Back in 1947, there was a scholar named Howard Thurman. He presented a paper at Harvard on the music genre of spirituals. Spirituals were a genre of communal songs sung by African Americans who were enslaved throughout American history, and Thurman observed that these songs were always saturated with the hope of the new heavens and the new earth, and they had radical images like thrones and crowns and robes.

And what Thurman found is that, rather than making those men and women into passive escapists, rather than making them docile, it actually gave them real energy and hope and endurance that never would have come otherwise. The thing that gave them the power to hope and endure their suffering was precisely the future that they knew God was bringing. That's what enabled them to navigate suffering. Here's how Thurman put it. He said this sung faith served to deepen the capacity of the slaves for endurance and their ability to absorb their suffering, and it taught a people how to ride high in life, how to look squarely in the face of those facts that argue most dramatically against all hope, and to use those facts as raw material out of which they fashioned a hope that their environment, out of which they fashioned a hope that their environment, with all its cruelty, could not crush. This enabled them to reject annihilation and affirm a terrible right to live.

Friends, when we let the vision of the new heavens and new earth grab hold of us, when we let it sink into our souls, it will transform the ways we show up in the broken world. It will transform the ways that we navigate in the broken world. It will transform the ways that we navigate our suffering, and it will give us a strength and a power and endurance that nothing can take away. We become people who can live in this in-between world, in a world not yet new but being made so, because we know the worst thing is never the last thing. The last thing is only ever the best thing. One of my favorite expressions of this comes from the last book in the Lord of the Rings series. Yes, I'm a nerd, but nerds out there, I see you.

I see you, there's a point at the end of the third book where Sam one of the main characters has lost pretty much all hope.

It seems that darkness has finally prevailed and won, but then he sees something on the distant horizon that changes him, and I love how Tolkien writes it. Listen to these words, friends. There, peeping among the cloud rack above a dark tor, high up in the mountains, sam saw a white star twinkle for a while, and the beauty of it smote his heart. As he looked up out of the forsaken land and hope returned to him. For, like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the shadow was only a small and passing thing. It was light and high beauty, forever beyond its reach. Light and high beauty, new heavens and new earth, friends.

It transforms the way we show up in the darkness of our world, and so the last thing we need to explore from this passage is how we get it. How do we receive that hope? How do we bring that hope into our lives in a real way? As it turns out, that's both the simplest and maybe the most difficult part of it all, because we have to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus. We have to believe that this has actually happened, that this is how God has worked. John hints at this in verse 6. He says it is done. I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Now, if we know John's other writings, in his gospel in particular, that image of water free, lasting, eternal water should make us think of a couple other stories he told.

In John, chapter 4, jesus meets a woman at a well and she's had a mess of a life. She's been feverishly looking for life, for true, lasting peace and joy, and she hasn't found it. And so she shows up to this well needing water, and Jesus says I've got some water that you can drink. It means you'll never be thirsty again. But that deep longing in your heart, the longing for love, the longing for peace, the longing for identity, the longing to last, all those cravings that have sent you all over the world looking for satisfaction, I have the water for you, living water that is a foretaste of an ultimate glory to come. And it is free. All you need to do is receive it in me. And that conversation with that woman looks forward to another story that John tells Jesus on the cross In John 19,. Jesus on the cross says I thirst, I thirst.

In that moment on the cross, jesus experiences what that woman at the well and what all of us, in our own ways, have experienced the cosmic thirst for life, thirst for connection to the source of love, thirst for peace and flourishing and healing, thirst for the life we know we're made for and we know we don't yet have. And on the cross. Jesus takes that parched condition into himself, takes all of our thirst into himself and he leaves it in the grave so that we might be quenched one day. He absorbs the pain and hopelessness of our longing lives there and then afterwards he says it is finished. John says here it is done, a new beginning has come.

Death has swallowed up the thirst, the longing of our hearts and of our world has been put to death and all that's left is resurrection. All that's left is the open grave. All that's left is the new heavens and new earth breaking into our lives today. And all that's left is for us to believe. That's true, and that's what Christ has done, to entrust our thirst and our lives to him. He will give us a new power, a new hope that shoots us back into the world. There's a story that a pastor named Donald Barnhouse tells that, I think, beautifully illustrates this. It's about his own reckoning with suffering and death. He and his wife, ruth, got married back in 1922. And they had four kids.

But then, only a few years later, ruth, his wife, died of cancer and it jarred their whole family, forced them to reckon with pain and suffering and loss, and one day he was walking with his youngest daughter, dorothy, on the sidewalk down Fifth Avenue in New York and a giant truck came within a couple feet of hitting Dorothy and it scared her, and so she jumped to Donald who held her close as they kept walking. And Donald at that point realized this is an opportunity for me to help both my daughter and myself navigate this pain and suffering and loss and death that we've experienced. And this is how his conversation went with Dorothy. He said, my love, did that truck hit you? She said no, through her tears, that's right, but the shadow of the truck hit you, which was quite scary. She nodded her head in agreement.

And then Donald said Dorothy, death didn't hit your mother, only the shadow of death hit her. Death hit Jesus. And because death hit Jesus, no matter what hits us, it is only ever a shadow and that shadow is only ever an entrance to life. Friends, let the new heavens and new earth grab a hold of your heart today. Let Christ's word transform you today. Let the resurrection resurrect you today, let's pray.