Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor Sermon Podcast
Hope Series (#3) : A Present, Empowering Future Hope
Hope Series (#3) : A Present, Empowering Future Hope by Senior Pastor, Ken Wilson
We've been cruising through some series, I think we did a six part series on healing. We're completing a three part series on Easter Hope, and the next two weeks we'll be talking about loss. We want to finish up our series though on hope. Easter offers us a present empowering future hope. We human beings are unique in our ability to anticipate the future. So we plan for the future, we imagine the future, we even work to shape our future. Hope is a conviction about a future worth embracing. So our vision of the future, our hope has a profound effect on our life in the present. Rising from the dead, Jesus enters and models our future for us, our fantastic future. And joined to him, death is not the end of the line, nor is life after death in heaven our ultimate destiny, but Jesus will complete what he began on Easter Sunday by reuniting heaven and earth in a renewed and transformed creation that's the story. Now to make sense of the future, we have to locate it within the story that it culminates. The biblical story, which is a love story between God and humanity, is a drama in essentially four acts. We are currently in act three of the four part drama, and we're awaiting act four, and I want to tell the three acts in about 15 minutes. Act one, prehistory, the epic saga of the Garden of Eden, starring Lord Yahweh, the creator, and his creatures Lord Adam and Lady Eve. Like all good beginnings, this one anticipates, prefigures the end, and all the major themes of the story are found in this first one. In the garden heaven, which is understood as the realm where God dwells, and earth understood as the realm where we dwell, are one, they're united. The dwelling of God, heaven, is with us. Paradise means a walled garden of earthly delights, and that's what happens when God is dwelling with us. This memory of Eden is stamped in every human psyche, West Side Story gives voice to it. There's a place for us. That's what the garden is all about. There is a place for us. Children are constantly creating special places like that. They're taking the dining room chairs and putting them in the living room, and putting a blanket over them to go underneath, and they're taking a refrigerator box from the new Newell family appliance, and they're writing their name on it, and they're putting their sleeping bag in it, and they're bringing in their flashlights and saying, "Do not enter. This is my special place. That's what the garden is all about." A river runs through that garden, which is the source of all life, and we're meant to live by the streams of that river. But before the first day is done, tragedy strikes in Act 1. There's a breach of trust in the garden, which is built on trust, which is the guardian of love. Humans do something that we've been doing ever since. They take the one thing, the one thing that was not given to them. Everything else in the garden was there freely to take and use, but the one thing that was God's alone, the knowledge of good and evil, they decide to take it against His wishes. This is a breach of trust. This is an act of injustice, and it ruins relationships, the currency of paradise. Our relationship with self is marked now by shame, with others is marked by chronic blame, and with God our relationship is marked with guilt and fear. The final theme in Act 1, the mysterious death of the innocent to cover human shame. Lord Yahweh provides an animal pelt to cover the nakedness of the man and the woman, infer the loss of an innocent life. Act 1 ends with the humans in exile from the garden, heaven and earth are no longer united, but they seem to be functioning now as separate realms. Injustice runs riot, and God begins the long process of repair and redemption. Act 2, ancient history. It offers another place like the garden, only this time it's a temple. There are many versions of the temple, the tabernacle and the wilderness, Solomon's temple. It seems to be a temporary fix because these temples keep getting destroyed. On the eve of one such destruction, Ezekiel, the prophet in the northern land of Israel, has a vision of a new temple. It's got huge gates suggesting there's a way back into this place. There's the death of the innocent on the altar of sacrifice, and then there's the river running through it. Evoking Eden once again, that river that gets deeper and deeper in Ezekiel's vision that comes forth from the altar of sacrifice, gets deeper and deeper and it's filled with life. It's another version of the garden. There is a place for us where heaven and earth can meet. Act 3, the beginning of the end of history. Herod's temple, the second temple. Jesus teaching in the temple courts like he did so often. John, chapter 7, it's the Feast of Tabernacles, also known as the Feast of Booths because the pilgrims would come from all over the Holy Land into Jerusalem carrying booths with them, remembering the time in the wilderness where God provided protection, provided a place for them in their wilderness wanderings. On the last great day of the feast, there's a priestly procession from the temple precincts out to the pool of Siloam, outside the temple, and they take their silver pictures and they fill them with water from the pool in infestal procession. They come back to the altar. The Levites are playing their drums and blowing their trumpets and singing their songs. The priests are coming with their robes and they're pouring that water out on the corner of the temple's base. They're trying to evoke the garden of Eden one more time. The river would be running once again through this sacred place. And at that dramatic moment in John, chapter 7, Jesus stands up and he cries out, it says, "And a loud voice, if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink, and out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. There's a place for us where heaven and earth meet, and Jesus is that place come to me." He says, "And I'll plant the garden in your hearts. And there will be a river running through the garden of your heart." Shortly thereafter, Jesus takes on the death of the innocent to cover our shame for good at long last. He didn't overcome evil the old fashioned way with violence and force, but like a Judo master. He absorbed the full weight of the aggression of violence. He took it into himself. He let the powers of injustice hang themselves with their own weight. And once that deed was done, he was dead and buried. The Easter tomb gave up its dead and he entered a new and transformed bodily existence called resurrection, a sign in history of coming attractions, the future breaking in to the present. And this is the era we live in now. His invitation remains open to all. As we respond, the spirit of the risen Jesus is poured into our hearts. The garden is planted there, and there's a river running through it. But what's the final act of the drama? What comes next? I don't mean what happens after we die, that's a side issue, that's an interim state. The Bible doesn't say much about that, some, just enough. But how does the whole thing culminate? What does the resurrection of Jesus from the dead foretell? Act chapter four, act four. The end of the end of history and the beginning of what's next, it's in the last book of the Bible, surprise, called the revelation, the appearing of Jesus Christ, Revelations chapter 21. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea, sea being a sign of evil in the Bible. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Now the dwelling of God is with men, and He will live with them." He said to me, "It is done, I'm the elf in the Omega, the beginning and the end to him, who is thirsty, I will give to drink without cause from the spring of the water of life." I did not see a temple in the city, it goes on a little later, because the Lord got almighty and the lamb are its temple. The city doesn't need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light and the lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut, for there will be no night there. The angels showed me the river of the water of life as clear as crystal flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb down the middle of the great street of the city on each side of the rivers to the tree of life. During twelve crops of fruit yielding its fruit every month and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. This is vivid, dramatic apocalyptic imagery of where it's all headed. It's all headed toward the reuniting of God's realm heaven in our realm the earth, the reintegration of heaven and earth. Now we know for centuries we've had an anemic understanding of the realm called heaven and its relationship to earth. But think of the heavenly realm as a parallel dimension beyond space-time but close. The dimension Jesus entered when he ascended before their very eyes surrounded by a cloud. He slipped in to another dimension and then all the more since then there's been intersections between the heavenly dimension and our dimensions of space-time and dreams and invisions and and foretaste interventions and experiences. A time is coming when these now parallel, sometimes intersecting dimensions will be fully integrated and our experience of space-time will be radically altered. The resurrection of Jesus is the foretaste but this is the full banquet spread. It's what the story always promised, a time when the glory of the Lord would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. We're not just dating God anymore, we're not just checking each other out, he's moving in, it's cohabitation baby, the marriage of the lamb and his bride. All the injustices will be made right because we will be made right and the earth itself, the physical universe will be completely renewed and reunited with the realm of God. We will walk the shores of a transformed world with a transformed Lord, in transformed our bodies like his that are fit for the new creation. The greatest objection to this vision is very simple. It just sounds too wonderfully fantastic to be true doesn't it? I mean it just sounds too wonderfully fantastic to be true. We get so used to life it becomes so ordinary in our experience and this, this just sounds too wonderfully fantastic to be true. How ignorant of us, how ignorant of us to ever think that anything having to do with this universe wouldn't be anything but fantastic. Prove the beginnings and the unfolding of the physical universe, if nothing else through the narrow lens of science and you see through that lens a universe that by all rights seems too wonderfully fantastic to be true except we wake up in it every morning. It has a beginning in the Big Bang, completely unpredicted one moment, all space time compressed into an infinitely small point, a potentiality called the singularity. The next moment, a burst of energy, the Big Bang, the effects of which can be measured can be measured and felt today 15 billion years later. In the early microseconds a soup of subatomic particles, the quark soup is called the simplest atoms form out of that soup, hydrogen, maybe a little helium, clouds of these very simple atoms gather and the unfolding universe they form stars. They implode upon themselves as gravity does its work generating enormous heat, nuclear fusion ensues, other elements are born out of those simple ones, the stuff of our earth, calcium in our bones, each of these transitions. Utterly fantastic, we haven't even talked about biological life on earth. And here we are with this fantastic capacity to figure this out, to grasp hold of it, to develop reason and mathematics and all of it and have a sense even of the whole of the universe as puny as we are. And more than that, we have this capacity to reach out, we have these longings for something beyond the universe, we even begin to respond to God who is not an object in the universe, he's involved in the universe yet he's absolutely not an object in the universe being absolutely beyond it. Of course it is possible logically I grant the possibility that when it comes to us, this fantastic universe is just a cruel joke. We get our 15 minutes of fame and then oblivion. It could be I grant the logical possibility it could be our instinct to hope is the gacha that makes all of us suckers to this cruel joke. But if there is something rather than nothing in our future, it will be in the order of the fantastic of that we can be sure. The resurrection of Jesus is a sign in history of fantastic coming attractions. He will bring it about the work he began in act three in the resurrection, he will complete in act four and this hope makes all the difference in the world today. See, we cannot live, we cannot get through a day without having something to look forward to. So we constantly look forward, we look forward to the next meal, we look forward to our warm bed, you may be looking forward to the end of this sermon, we look forward to the weekend. And these little looking forwards help us get through the day but we also face some pretty hard realities beyond the anchoring power of the next meal or warm bed or the weekend or the end of the sermon and even longer time frames are needed. Like once we're done with school, things will be better once I get a better job, once my teenage offspring get adolescents out of their system, once we finally get universal health care, once our troops are home from Iraq, once Islamic fundamentalism is spent its fundamentalistic impulse, once Walmart takes better care of its employees, once the economy in Southeast Michigan finally perks up once the cures for cancer come whatever. Think of your family in this life, in this order of things will all the injustices and failed relationships and misunderstandings and gross evils be reversed, completely reversed, maybe, maybe not. I think of my father only child of an unrecovering alcoholic endured the violence and trauma of being in the infantry in World War II, recurring bouts of mental illness throughout his life and midlife comes to saving faith in Jesus, the risen Lord. His marriage on the verge of collapsing preserved improved dramatically, relationships with his children preserved improved dramatically. His capacity for happiness preserved improved dramatically but I know when he died he was still suffering residual damage from life in this unjust world. Heaven as good as it is, as good as it must be for him, it's just not enough to experience the fullness of humanity, the joy of life with his wife and his children, the capacity to absorb the full wonder of the human existence, heaven is not enough for that Glenn S. Wilson, Glenn S. Wilson needs something else, something more, they need a new creation not just begun and fits and starts but running full-tailed. See we are invited by the resurrection to set our sights on something beyond this present order to anchor our hope. Not so we can abandon ship here, not so we can treat the earth like renters, not so we can squeeze all the juice out of the orange and throw it away because it's just a centigrating pulp now but so we can live in light of what's coming and lend a hand to the work of renewal and make the world a better place today because it's becoming a better place tomorrow. You know Moses, I'm back in the Old Testament now, Moses who led the people of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt, they were in the wilderness wanderings for 40 years, Moses at the end of that time was taken up on a mountain to look across the way to the promised land, a land he hadn't yet entered and God said to his servant Moses, you'll die before crossing over but Moses didn't despair because he was on the mountain top of hope where he caught a glimpse on the promised land. It's April, Martin Luther King I believe was assassinated in April 1968, Martin Luther King had a similar experience in April, his last speech, he voiced that premonition. The words go like this, I left Atlanta this morning and as we got started on the plane there were six of us, the pilots said over the PA system we're sorry for the delay but we have Dr. Martin Luther King on the plane and to be sure that all of the bags were checked and to be sure that nothing would be wrong with the plane we had to check out everything carefully and we've had the plane protected and guarded all night, terrorism in the United States is not new, September 11th 2001, there's been a lot of terrorism in this country for a long, long time. He goes on and then I got to Memphis and some began to say the threats or talk about the threats that were out, what would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers? Well, I don't know what will happen now, we've got some difficult days ahead but it doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountain top and I don't mind like anybody I would like to live a long, life longevity has its place but I'm not concerned about that now, I just want to do God's well and he's allowed me to go up to the mountain and I've looked over and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land and I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man, my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. This mountain top vision gave him power to live his remaining days with courage, conviction and confidence and he left the world a better place. He participated in the future, in the work of renewing the earth, in our own struggles with presently intractable problems, problems that just don't yield yet to the solutions we've been given. In our own battle with the demons of despair that would speak seductive words to just give up, we need courage, conviction, confidence so we can keep at the renewal task and leave the world a better place. This only comes, this only comes from the mountain top of hope and our vision of the promised land, the Omega Point, a risen Lord, Lord of a new creation already initiated but to be completed with a fully united, reunited, heaven and earth with every city, a garden city whose gates are always open with the river running through it for the healing of the nations. So what then, so what, we need to make room for this hope on our radar screen. See if we've got just an intermediate hope, we don't get the power of the Omega Point. The power of the Omega Point just helps every other interim point of hope along the alphabet. We need to make room for this hope on our radar screen. So go ahead. Let your mind wander beyond the confines of the present order of things. Resurrection is inviting us to lift our hope higher beyond what I can see and scientists describe and prognosticators predict the first generation of the Jesus movements. Didn't have this weak vision that we've been feeding off of for the last hundred years that it's all about the death of Jesus, the forgiveness of sin so we can go to heaven when we die. I mean that's just part of the story. The first generation of the Jesus movement had a vivid sense of the nearness of act 4. He's always hiding from me, he's hiding right behind James, but I find him out when I find James. Oh, right behind James, you can find Peter. The end of all things is near, therefore be clear-minded and self-controlled so that you can pray. What would you want to pray except to be able to connect with what it is that God is doing in the heavenly realm? So be sober not so that you can be dull and be one of those praying church people, but so that you can access the really fantastic realities. The end of all things is near, therefore be clear-minded and self-controlled so that you can pray above all, love each other deeply, begin living the future life now because it's coming, because love covers over a multitude of sins, offer hospitality to one another without grumbling, the gates of that city will be open. So start now by offering hospitality. Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks he should do it as one speaking the very words of God. If anyone serves he should do it with a strength God provides so that in all things, God may be praised through Jesus Christ, to him be glory in the power forever and ever, amen. He says amen. It's not even the end of the letter because he knows he's talking about the end of all things. Of course we read something like this from Peter and we think, oh, Peter, it wasn't that close. Come on, it's 2006, poor dude, I mean, poor guy. We know so much better than Peter, you know Peter understood this too in his second letter. He said, you know, there's some of you guys thinking why the delay, but listen, time is a slippery thing. Time is a grease peg, it's hard to get hold of and understand what we're dealing with when we're dealing with time. With the Lord, one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day, I mean, let's be humble when we're around this concept called time. When we say as James did, you know, tomorrow and the next day I'm going to do this and do that, but we don't know because this whole time thing is hard to get a hold of so stay instead if the Lord wills tomorrow I will do this and do that because time is not really in our hands. I mean, time is a squirrely thing. Think about it. I mean, it's a squirrely thing. Often we get used to some kind of long timeframes and we think, oh well, our son has five billion years of fuel left before it collapses and goes haywire as a safe heater for our planet. The end doesn't seem very near when you think like that. But our life is a different time frame doing a quick, I'd say in 50 years, most of us in this room will be dead, most of us in 50 years. Now you young ones, you think 50 years, I've lived 54 or 54 years. And I want to tell you just how squirrely time is in my own life. I mean, I've had so many long days in my life and yet altogether time is short. How did that work out? Time is a grease peg. You try to grab it and you think you've got it, you touch it and it squirms out of your hand. Once we physically exit this space timeframe, when we die, who is to know how we will experience time with the next breath we breathe in after breathing our last? It might be like falling asleep and we wake at the great awakening of the new creation. We might fall asleep in this earth and tunnel through some wormhole and land there on our feet at the bottom of the slide in the New Jerusalem. We just don't know time is a squirrely thing. And so it's a little foolish to dismiss this idea of the nearness of the end based on the idea that we think we understand time. See the resurrection of Jesus just to close is a turning point decision on the part of the author of this great epic drama that we're all in. You know that authors are not always sure how a story will end once they start writing it. Some of the best stories unfold like that. They don't really know how it's going to end once they started. But each word, each sentence, each paragraph, each chapter involves choices the author makes. And those choices cumulatively they add up and each choice narrows the outcome options. Enough choices have now been made by the author of life that the ending more or less is decided. The nature of the ending is decided. As this plot thickens it gathers momentum toward the ending. God will say the day and all will say my glorious of him. Remember story is God's chosen means to reveal himself. That's why the Bible, this story is telling us of him that all you ever do God, all you ever do it seems is change the old for new. The evidence just keeps adding up that that's what God does. He exchanges the old for the new. And there are so many lives that bear witness to that reality that God takes what's old and decaying and he exchanges it for what's new and renewing. All God ever does it seems is exchange the old for the new. That's what the story is telling us. And now we have some decisions to make. Well we insist on writing our own dull stories with our own tragic endings. Well we insist. No, I'm going to be the one that writes my story and I'll write it alone without help. Thank you. You are given that awful freedom and you know that stories have a way of turning on us. You know you might think you've got a great storyline planned and oh I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that and then after college I'm going to get into this career and I'm going to meet this kind of a partner and we're going to have two of these kinds of kids and we're going to live in this kind of a neighborhood and these are the cars in my garage and all of it unfolds just like you're writing it. It all unfolds just like you're writing except there's one thing that you intended that you put in the story but it's just not there. You're not happy. There's no satisfaction in what you've gained. There's nothing worse than a dream, a tame that doesn't deliver all. Stories are funny things. So will we insist on writing our own stories with our own tragic endings or will we allow God onto our title page as a co-author of our story? See it's all about proprietary rights. It's all about intellectual property. It's all about control of the copyright. Do we write our stories ourselves or do we need a co-author to write them with us? Wherever you are today in your story it's not too late to sign a contract with God as your co-author and if you're smart you'll make him the primary author and you're just a little co-author. It's not too late no matter how lousy your story is turning out today, April, whatever, 2000, whatever, 6, yes. It's not too late to sign a new contract with God as your co-author. You bring God in as your co-author, amazing what he can do with your story, you say oh God. It's just a pile of crap. The manuscript so far it's just not turning out the way I intended could you just hear. Would you just rework it and he takes it and he reads it over and he understands it and he thinks about it and he says come here let's work on it together now and you know what with a little twist here and a little twist there he takes things in your story that are just so awful and amazingly with a few plot twists. He's able to turn the whole thing around and you're like wow, the best stories are like that aren't they? I mean the best stories are not, he was born half Olivia ever after, he lived happily ever after, he died happily ever after and he lived after death happily ever after. That's a boring story. The best stories are oh we had all the good intentions it started out great but ten man things and oh oh oh gosh there's no way this story could ever turn out incomes the co-writer looks over the manuscripts oh I've seen this before oh a twist here, a twist here the great artist the great writer involved with our stories and all of a sudden he takes something that's awful and he turns it into something beautiful beauty for ashes oh my goodness. Wherever you are in your story today it's not too late to sign a new contract with God as your co-author that's what it means to be a student of Jesus. So let us if the band could return. I just want to invite you today those of you who have not yet done that you've not, you've really been the master of your own soul and captain of your own destiny and you're ready to just exchange that ownership for God's ownership in your life. Just want to invite you to take a step today to invite God in as your co-author and just a moment I'm going to ask you to stand up and then once you're standing up that's a way of signaling that yes this is something meaningful this is something you're willing to make a public act for you're willing to press through maybe the embarrassment of standing up in front of a group I assure you that it will treat you very tenderly most people won't even notice you but then I'm just going to offer a prayer and together with me you can pray that prayer and solidarity with the rest of us to turn over rights of your story to God as your co-author. So those of you who wish to take this step today would you just stand right where you are in your place I'd like to see that you're there before we do this there and others is a moment now you can take to do this so it just begins with the admission oh God I admit that depends been in my hand only and I thought that I could write the best story for my life and I'm just willing to admit that I'm wrong in that assessment and so I give over the manuscript of my life to you now all the twists and the turns of the plot I don't know where it should go from here and so I give it over to you I surrender my life story as it is God author of life I invite you into the story of my life I ask you to start giving directions and leadership and telling me what the next steps are I surrender to your will I surrender to this awesome story that you've written already that you're inviting me into Lord I give up my own vision of the future and I embrace your vision of my future with your beloved son and I welcome his presence now they offer you myself such as I am the good the bad and the beautiful I offer to you in his precious name man that's all stand like to invite if you to forward today if you'd like prayer that especially like to offer prayer for anyone who's facing an issue in your life where you're just hopeless about moving forward nothing you've tried has helped to improve the situation you're facing and you don't have any hope at all I'd like to invite you if you're in that state concerning a particular issue in your life today if you'd like to to just migrate forward as we close with some worship and to receive some prayer from someone on the prayer ministry team just for the insertion of hope into your heart for that area you don't even need to mention what it is but just that you need hope the first thing we all need to move forward before any solutions is hope and so I want to pray for hope for anyone who's facing one of those issues today I think especially I just had in my heart today those facing compulsive disorders of various kinds or control disorders of various kinds eating kinds of disorders those kinds of things that we may be facing it's very common to feel very hopeless about those things so I just want to a special note for for those who might be struggling with that today also sense that there were some people here that what's standing in your way is sadness and grief and if that's where you're stuck I think the Lord is here today for you for a blessing of hope for the future so be happy to pray with you for that there's a young man here who I just think on the outside everything is going fantastic your friends and those who know you at least at some distance envy you they think man I just love to I'd exchange my life for his life in a heartbeat and you just know that if you could exchange your life for something else you'd do it in a heartbeat I just think the the God knows you and you're his son and if you come to him he'll just help you find your way in this world so if that applies to you I encourage you especially to come up today so back to you Dr. Brooks and lovely Brad. I'm going to start a pic. I came back. [BLANK_AUDIO]