Emmanuel Baptist Church of Nipawin Sermons

Last week we began a four-month series in which we’ll work through about 20 or so of the Psalms, and we discussed how even though the Psalms were Israel’s hymnbook and are filled with some of the most incredible statements of praise and worship in the Bible, at least one-third of the Psalms are Psalms of lament: songs and prayers which express sorrow or grief or disappointment.

And we talked about how necessary it is for us at our moment in history to recapture this idea of lament. The Western world today is filled with hurting and struggling people who very often don’t know what to do with their sorrow. We don’t know how to be sad. And this problem permeates the church, where we not only don’t know how to be sad, we often feel like we’re not allowed to be sad.

And so one of the important gifts the Psalms give us is the language of lament. They give us a voice in our sorrow and show us how to relate to God in the full range of life experiences, including when things are hard.

We’re going to continue to explore these themes as we consider Psalm 10 this morning. This Psalm begins, similarly to Psalm 3, with honest prayer. The Psalmist is calling out to God in the middle of his struggle and in the middle of his questions. He’s telling God what he sees and how things seem.

Did you know what the word is for this kind of honest prayer that we see here in Psalm 10? Complaint. That’s what he’s doing. He’s complaining to God about what he’s seeing.

Complaint is the exact word that David used for this kind of prayer in Psalm 55:17: “Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he hears my voice.” Psalm 142 speaks of this same experience: “With my voice I cry out to the Lord; with my voice I plead for mercy to the Lord. I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my trouble before him” (Psalm 142:1–2). 

And complaint is what we encounter in Psalm 10. It begins in verse 1: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” And from verse 2 down to verse 11 the Psalmist systematically lists out the complaints that he is bringing to God about the things he is seeing.

Two Red Flags

Now, right away, I’m sure that many of you in this room have at least a couple of red flags that have gone up in your mind what I’ve just said.

The first red flag is: I thought we’re not supposed to complain! I thought complaining is sinful! So how is that ok?

The second red flag is this: this is God we’re talking about! God, the holy, sovereign, powerful creator. I thought we’re supposed to submit to His will and bow ourselves before Him. Doesn’t Romans 9:20 say “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’” And now you’re telling us that not only is complaining ok, but we can do it to Him? How is this even possible?

If you had those two red flags in your thinking, that’s good. I hope you’re not thinking, “Yes! I get to complain!” We should have those red flags questions about this idea of complaint. And we’re going to answer those questions together as we explore Psalm 10 together.

Are We Allowed to Complain?

So first, let’s consider this basic idea of complaint in and of itself. I hope you know that, in general, complaining is not something we’re supposed to do. Right about now I hear George Sholter’s voice in my head, when you’d ask him how he was doing. And he’d say, “Can’t complain, shouldn’t complain, nobody wants to hear me complain.”

And he was right, if by “complain” we mean grumbling, or whining, or arguing. Those things are often what we mean when we say “complain,” and they are always sin.

But the word “complain” can also just mean telling someone when something is wrong. And that’s what’s happening in Psalm 10. The Psalmist is not sinfully grumbling or whining—he’s going right to God and telling Him what appears to be wrong. That’s biblical complaint. And we’re going to come back to this idea of attitude in a little bit.

Complaining is also wrong if the thing we’re complaining about is not a legitimate complaint. If it’s not something we should be complaining about in the first place.

Every winter here in Saskatchewan people complain about how cold it is. And my response is, “you know what province you live in, right? And you chose to live here, right?” It gets cold here, and nobody ever promised us it was going to be any different. And I wrote this point in my notes before I looked at the weather forecast for this weekend!

Another kind of complaining I’ve noticed is parents about their children. You know, the eye-rolling “you’ll never believe what my kid did today.” Or the snarky social media posts whining about how hard it is to raise children.

And again, I want to ask those people: “You chose to have kids, right? You know that that they don’t enter this world as fully-formed adults, right? That thing you’re complaining about is exactly what you signed up for. That’s what being a parent is all about.”

These are two examples of illegitimate complaining. Complaining about things we shouldn’t complain about.

But what about the things that you should complain about?

If you just bought a new car, and one week later the engine blows up, you’re going to call up the dealership and tell them what happened and ask them to fix it. You’re not just going to let that slide, because that kind of thing shouldn’t happen. That’s not what you signed up for. That’s not what you were promised. In that kind of a situation, it is right for you to politely and respectfully complain.

And that’s the kind of situation in Psalm 10. The psalmist is complaining to God about a set of circumstances that should not be. Listen to the kinds of things he complains about:

“In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor” (verse 2).

“…the wicked boasts of the desires of his soul, and the one greedy for gain curses and renounces the Lord” (verse 3).

“He sits in ambush in the villages; in hiding places he murders the innocent. His eyes stealthily watch for the helpless” (verse 8).

“He says in his heart, ‘God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it’” (verse 11). 

The psalmist is upset about a wicked person, or a wicked group of people, who are cursing God, oppressing the poor, and getting away with it. And not just getting away with it, but succeeding! Verse 5: “His ways prosper at all times; your judgments are on high, out of his sight; as for all his foes, he puffs at them” (Psalm 10:5). 

And this causes the Psalmist to complain to God that it looks like he’s standing far away, hiding himself while this goes on. He’s just letting these people get away with it.

Now remember when this Psalm was written and who it was written by. This Psalm would have been penned by an Israelite living under the Mosaic covenant. And in that covenant, God commanded His people repeatedly not to oppress the poor. And He promised to curse and not bless those who ignored Him and broke His law.

And the writer of Psalm 10 looks around him at fellow Israelites who are trampling on the poor and vulnerable. And He knows that according to what God has said, God should be standing up and punishing these wicked people.

But instead, they are prospering. They are doing well. They are totally getting away with it, and are saying that “God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it” (Psalm 10:11).

And so this is where the Psalmists’ complaint comes from. It looks like God is not keeping His promises. It really looks like He is standing far away and hiding Himself. He doesn’t seem to be doing what He said He would do. 

So the Psalmist’s complaints are legitimate, biblical complaints. This is not whining about personal discomfort. These are honest questions about a set of circumstances that appear to be totally out of sync with God’s character and God’s promises.

So Psalm 10 does not give you and I a big blank check to complain to God about anything and everything.

When we feel prompted to complain, we need to stop and check ourselves. What are we complaining about, and why? Are we complaining about things that are really just normal and expected, things we really have no right to complain about, like a cold January in Saskatchewan?

Or are we complaining because our circumstances seem seriously out of step with the character of God? Are we complaining because it really seems like God is not doing something that He should be doing?

I’m reading a very excellent book right now called “Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy,” and it’s going to go in the church library as soon as I’m done with it. It’s a book about lament, and how lament is a gift of grace from God to us. And there’s a whole chapter in there on complaint. And the author mentions that at times when his heart has been burdened with complaints, he’s sat down and written out a list of his complaints—very similar to what Psalm 10 does. 

And he said that sometimes he’d find himself laughing at how silly some of his complaints were, but even just writing out what they were was helpful. And then, once he had done this filtering work, he could offer the real, legitimate, biblical complaints to God in honest prayer.

Hurting for the Truly Vulnerable

Now before we move on, I do want us to notice the specific content that the Psalmist is complaining about here. He is really bothered to see wicked men oppressing the vulnerable and getting away with it.

Are we bothered when we see the same thing? I hope you know that God’s concern for the truly vulnerable and His commitment to uphold justice are not confined to the Mosaic covenant. He punished Sodom and Gomorrah long before Moses, and Romans 1:18 tells us that now in the era of the New Covenant, “…the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). 

And so we should take note of how Psalm 10 expresses concern for God’s reputation when the truly vulnerable are oppressed by the wicked and nothing seems to happen.

It might be easy to think that the kind of thing that Psalm 10 describes—wicked men hiding in ambush to murder the poor—maybe happened back then, but not any more. We don’t have this kind of thing in our world anymore. I beg to differ. 

Psalm 10 came alive to me several years ago when I was driving home and turned on CBC and listened to an interview with someone from an organization called “Women on Waves.” This organization travels around the world by boat to perform abortions in countries where it’s illegal. They will drop anchor in international waters and go into these villages and lure these women back to their floating platforms of death where the innocent are killed. These women are literally missionaries of murder. And here they were, being interviewed on the CBC as if nothing was wrong.

That night, I felt a rage and a sorrow which I needed a voice for, and I found it in Psalm 10. I read verse 8 and how it literally describes what these women were doing—sitting in ambush in the villages, murdering the innocent in hiding places. And Psalm 10 gave me voice to cry out to God and ask him how long he would let people get away with that. How long until Christ returns and brings justice with him?

In recent months my soul has been churned again as I’ve been encountering more disturbing facts of this atrocity known as abortion. Did you know that here in Canada, abortion is the leading cause of death? 100,000 Canadian babies a year are murdered inside their own mother’s wombs. That’s over 11 abortions every hour, adding up to 30% of all Canadian deaths each year, 20,000 more than those who die of cancer.

I recently had a conversation with a medical student who had to witness an actual abortion taking place and described to me what she witnessed. It was one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever heard, and I can assure you that those doctors and nurses in those rooms know full well that it’s a real baby they’ve just killed. They see the little arms, the little feet.

And I hope, when you hear about that, it chews you up. But what do we do when we remember that there is this silent holocaust is going on all around us? Where do we start? We start by doing what Psalm 10 does: we lament and we bring our complaints to God. We cry out to Him to bring this injustice to an end. “How long, O Lord?”

Now there is perhaps not where we end. I’ve recently become convicted about some ways that I can contribute to the fight against abortion, not at a political level but at a very personal level. I’d love to talk with you about some of that if you’re curious. But for the sake of Psalm 10 this morning, I just want to ask us: do we feel what the author of this Psalm feels? Do we cry out to God for justice when we see the truly vulnerable being oppressed by the wicked who seem to just get away with it? Do we long for the return of Christ, which will be the day when true justice prevails forever? I hope so.

Are We Allowed to Complain to God?

So that’s the first red flag down. Complaint is OK when we are complaining about legitimate things which should not be.

Next I want to move on to the second red flag we saw this morning. Is complaining to God even ok? Doesn’t this sound disrespectful to God? Aren’t we supped to trust in His sovereignty?

Those are excellent questions. And they remind us that we need to be careful when discussing these things. The Psalms don’t give us a blank check to talk to God however we’d like. The Psalms never encourage us to be angry with God.

But they do encourage us to be respectfully honest as we bring our legitimate complaints to Him. So how do we do that without going too far?

Psalm 10 gives us the answer as it shows us how to complain with humility and how to complain with hope.

Humility is seen in the way that the Psalmist asks questions of God instead of making accusations.

Notice that verse 1 doesn’t say, “O Lord, you are standing far away and you shouldn’t be. You are hiding yourself in times of trouble and you have no good reason for doing so.” Instead, he asks God questions. He’s being honest in his questions, telling God the way that things seem, but there is humility in the fact that they are questions. Maybe there’s an answer here. Maybe there’s something he’s missing that God knows. 

When we bring our complaints to God we must come with the humility that recognizes our perspective is limited. There is so much we don’t know and so much we don’t see. 

Isn’t that one of the big points of the book of Job? When Job suffered, he had no idea what was going on in heaven. He had no idea about Satan’s involvement in his struggle. And God never told him. When God did speak to Job, all He really did was remind Job about how much he didn’t know.

So when we complain, we don’t march in with angry accusations. We humbly come with honest questions.

And second, Psalm 10, along with the rest of the Psalms, teach us to complain with hope. This Psalm begins with questions, and lists its complaints, and verse 12 asks God to arise and lift His hand and not forget the afflicted.

But then verse 14 bursts in with a shot of raw hope: “But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands; to you the helpless commits himself; you have been the helper of the fatherless.” And then again in verses 16-18: “The Lord is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land. O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.”

This is the truth. It feels like God is hiding himself, and even though the Psalmist says so, he actually does know better. He knows that God does see.  He knows that God is taking note of what the wicked are doing so that he can deal with them. He knows that God is the helper to the fatherless. God is the king forever and ever who has sent the wicked nations out of his land and so can deal with the wicked among His own people. God does hear the desire of the afflicted. He will strengthen their heart. He is listening to them to do justice for them. And there will come a day when wicked men will strike terror no more.

So this is one of the secrets of biblical complaint: we don’t stay stuck in it. Complaint is not as place we camp out permanently. It’s a necessary first step on the path to truth-filled hope.

I mentioned that book “Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.” In the chapter on Psalm 10 he describes sitting in the car with his wife after another devastating visit to the doctor where they heard heartbreaking news they were not expecting to hear. And his wife prayed out loud and said: “God, I know you’re not mean, but it feels like you are today.” (p. 41).

That is an example of biblical complaint. She was honestly telling him how things seemed but at the same time was acknowledging her limited perspective and expressing her confidence that God was not cruel, despite how things felt at the moment.

Perhaps, though, the greatest example of true, biblical complaint from the mouth of Jesus while He hung on the cross. “And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:33–34). 

Do you know what Jesus was doing there? He was quoting a Psalm of lament. He was quoting Psalm 22, written by David, which opens with these words. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:1–2). 

When David penned these words, he was describing how it felt, how things seemed to him in his situation. It seemed like he had been abandoned and forsaken by a God who was not listening to his prayers, and so he poured out his complaint to the Lord. And as Psalm 22 goes on, David expresses more and more confidence that God does in fact hear him and is going to save him, despite all appearances.

But when Jesus uttered these words, he wasn’t only speaking of how things seemed. He was expressing what was really happening. Because on the cross, Jesus truly did experience abandonment and exile. He did experience God’s curse and God’s wrath. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us…” (Galatians 3:13). “Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief” (Isaiah 53:10a). 

And He did it for us. That’s what our sins deserved, but He took it instead of us.

And so the incredible truth of the gospel brings such clarity to our own suffering and lament and complaint. There will be times when God seems far off, when it feels like we’ve been forsaken, when it feels like we are under the curse of God. But we can know that because those things really did happen to Jesus, they are not and will never happen to us, despite all appearances.

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38–39). 

That is what Jesus died to purchase for us. The confidence of the inseparable love of God for us.

And so it’s fitting now that we would turn now to the table before us where we remember the death of our Saviour and proclaim the hope of His return. This is the hope that we need in our complaint and our lament. That no matter how dark things feel, we have a Saviour who walked out of His grave and who will split the skies some day soon and wipe every tear from our eyes.

So we can tell God how it feels. Be honest with Him about how things seem. Bring our humble complaint to Him. But this table reminds us that we know how it all ends.

Last week we began a four-month series in which we’ll work through about 20 or so of the Psalms, and we discussed how even though the Psalms were Israel’s hymnbook and are filled with some of the most incredible statements of praise and worship in the Bible, at least one-third of the Psalms are Psalms of lament: songs and prayers which express sorrow or grief or disappointment.

And we talked about how necessary it is for us at our moment in history to recapture this idea of lament. The Western world today is filled with hurting and struggling people who very often don’t know what to do with their sorrow. We don’t know how to be sad. And this problem permeates the church, where we not only don’t know how to be sad, we often feel like we’re not allowed to be sad.

And so one of the important gifts the Psalms give us is the language of lament. They give us a voice in our sorrow and show us how to relate to God in the full range of life experiences, including when things are hard.

We’re going to continue to explore these themes as we consider Psalm 10 this morning. This Psalm begins, similarly to Psalm 3, with honest prayer. The Psalmist is calling out to God in the middle of his struggle and in the middle of his questions. He’s telling God what he sees and how things seem.

Did you know what the word is for this kind of honest prayer that we see here in Psalm 10? Complaint. That’s what he’s doing. He’s complaining to God about what he’s seeing.

Complaint is the exact word that David used for this kind of prayer in Psalm 55:17: “Evening and morning and at noon I utter my complaint and moan, and he hears my voice.” Psalm 142 speaks of this same experience: “With my voice I cry out to the LORD; with my voice I plead for mercy to the LORD. I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my trouble before him” (Psalm 142:1–2). 

And complaint is what we encounter in Psalm 10. It begins in verse 1: “Why, O LORD, do you stand far away? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” And from verse 2 down to verse 11 the Psalmist systematically lists out the complaints that he is bringing to God about the things he is seeing.

Two Red Flags

Now, right away, I’m sure that many of you in this room have at least a couple of red flags that have gone up in your mind what I’ve just said.

The first red flag is: I thought we’re not supposed to complain! I thought complaining is sinful! So how is that ok?

The second red flag is this: this is God we’re talking about! God, the holy, sovereign, powerful creator. I thought we’re supposed to submit to His will and bow ourselves before Him. Doesn’t Romans 9:20 say “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’” And now you’re telling us that not only is complaining ok, but we can do it to Him? How is this even possible?

If you had those two red flags in your thinking, that’s good. I hope you’re not thinking, “Yes! I get to complain!” We should have those red flags questions about this idea of complaint. And we’re going to answer those questions together as we explore Psalm 10 together.

Are We Allowed to Complain?

So first, let’s consider this basic idea of complaint in and of itself. I hope you know that, in general, complaining is not something we’re supposed to do. Right about now I hear George Sholter’s voice in my head, when you’d ask him how he was doing. And he’d say, “Can’t complain, shouldn’t complain, nobody wants to hear me complain.”

And he was right, if by “complain” we mean grumbling, or whining, or arguing. Those things are often what we mean when we say “complain,” and they are always sin.

But the word “complain” can also just mean telling someone when something is wrong. And that’s what’s happening in Psalm 10. The Psalmist is not sinfully grumbling or whining—he’s going right to God and telling Him what appears to be wrong. That’s biblical complaint. And we’re going to come back to this idea of attitude in a little bit.

Complaining is also wrong if the thing we’re complaining about is not a legitimate complaint. If it’s not something we should be complaining about in the first place.

Every winter here in Saskatchewan people complain about how cold it is. And my response is, “you know what province you live in, right? And you chose to live here, right?” It gets cold here, and nobody ever promised us it was going to be any different. And I wrote this point in my notes before I looked at the weather forecast for this weekend!

Another kind of complaining I’ve noticed is parents about their children. You know, the eye-rolling “you’ll never believe what my kid did today.” Or the snarky social media posts whining about how hard it is to raise children.

And again, I want to ask those people: “You chose to have kids, right? You know that that they don’t enter this world as fully-formed adults, right? That thing you’re complaining about is exactly what you signed up for. That’s what being a parent is all about.”

These are two examples of illegitimate complaining. Complaining about things we shouldn’t complain about.

But what about the things that you should complain about?

If you just bought a new car, and one week later the engine blows up, you’re going to call up the dealership and tell them what happened and ask them to fix it. You’re not just going to let that slide, because that kind of thing shouldn’t happen. That’s not what you signed up for. That’s not what you were promised. In that kind of a situation, it is right for you to politely and respectfully complain.

And that’s the kind of situation in Psalm 10. The psalmist is complaining to God about a set of circumstances that should not be. Listen to the kinds of things he complains about:

“In arrogance the wicked hotly pursue the poor” (verse 2).

“…the wicked boasts of the desires of his soul, and the one greedy for gain curses and renounces the LORD” (verse 3).

“He sits in ambush in the villages; in hiding places he murders the innocent. His eyes stealthily watch for the helpless” (verse 8).

“He says in his heart, ‘God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it’” (verse 11). 

The psalmist is upset about a wicked person, or a wicked group of people, who are cursing God, oppressing the poor, and getting away with it. And not just getting away with it, but succeeding! Verse 5: “His ways prosper at all times; your judgments are on high, out of his sight; as for all his foes, he puffs at them” (Psalm 10:5). 

And this causes the Psalmist to complain to God that it looks like he’s standing far away, hiding himself while this goes on. He’s just letting these people get away with it.

Now remember when this Psalm was written and who it was written by. This Psalm would have been penned by an Israelite living under the Mosaic covenant. And in that covenant, God commanded His people repeatedly not to oppress the poor. And He promised to curse and not bless those who ignored Him and broke His law.

And the writer of Psalm 10 looks around him at fellow Israelites who are trampling on the poor and vulnerable. And He knows that according to what God has said, God should be standing up and punishing these wicked people.

But instead, they are prospering. They are doing well. They are totally getting away with it, and are saying that “God has forgotten, he has hidden his face, he will never see it” (Psalm 10:11).

And so this is where the Psalmists’ complaint comes from. It looks like God is not keeping His promises. It really looks like He is standing far away and hiding Himself. He doesn’t seem to be doing what He said He would do. 

So the Psalmist’s complaints are legitimate, biblical complaints. This is not whining about personal discomfort. These are honest questions about a set of circumstances that appear to be totally out of sync with God’s character and God’s promises.

So Psalm 10 does not give you and I a big blank check to complain to God about anything and everything.

When we feel prompted to complain, we need to stop and check ourselves. What are we complaining about, and why? Are we complaining about things that are really just normal and expected, things we really have no right to complain about, like a cold January in Saskatchewan?

Or are we complaining because our circumstances seem seriously out of step with the character of God? Are we complaining because it really seems like God is not doing something that He should be doing?

I’m reading a very excellent book right now called “Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy,” and it’s going to go in the church library as soon as I’m done with it. It’s a book about lament, and how lament is a gift of grace from God to us. And there’s a whole chapter in there on complaint. And the author mentions that at times when his heart has been burdened with complaints, he’s sat down and written out a list of his complaints—very similar to what Psalm 10 does. 

And he said that sometimes he’d find himself laughing at how silly some of his complaints were, but even just writing out what they were was helpful. And then, once he had done this filtering work, he could offer the real, legitimate, biblical complaints to God in honest prayer.

Hurting for the Truly Vulnerable

Now before we move on, I do want us to notice the specific content that the Psalmist is complaining about here. He is really bothered to see wicked men oppressing the vulnerable and getting away with it.

Are we bothered when we see the same thing? I hope you know that God’s concern for the truly vulnerable and His commitment to uphold justice are not confined to the Mosaic covenant. He punished Sodom and Gomorrah long before Moses, and Romans 1:18 tells us that now in the era of the New Covenant, “…the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth” (Romans 1:18). 

And so we should take note of how Psalm 10 expresses concern for God’s reputation when the truly vulnerable are oppressed by the wicked and nothing seems to happen.

It might be easy to think that the kind of thing that Psalm 10 describes—wicked men hiding in ambush to murder the poor—maybe happened back then, but not any more. We don’t have this kind of thing in our world anymore. I beg to differ. 

Psalm 10 came alive to me several years ago when I was driving home and turned on CBC and listened to an interview with someone from an organization called “Women on Waves.” This organization travels around the world by boat to perform abortions in countries where it’s illegal. They will drop anchor in international waters and go into these villages and lure these women back to their floating platforms of death where the innocent are killed. These women are literally missionaries of murder. And here they were, being interviewed on the CBC as if nothing was wrong.

That night, I felt a rage and a sorrow which I needed a voice for, and I found it in Psalm 10. I read verse 8 and how it literally describes what these women were doing—sitting in ambush in the villages, murdering the innocent in hiding places. And Psalm 10 gave me voice to cry out to God and ask him how long he would let people get away with that. How long until Christ returns and brings justice with him?

In recent months my soul has been churned again as I’ve been encountering more disturbing facts of this atrocity known as abortion. Did you know that here in Canada, abortion is the leading cause of death? 100,000 Canadian babies a year are murdered inside their own mother’s wombs. That’s over 11 abortions every hour, adding up to 30% of all Canadian deaths each year, 20,000 more than those who die of cancer.

I recently had a conversation with a medical student who had to witness an actual abortion taking place and described to me what she witnessed. It was one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever heard, and I can assure you that those doctors and nurses in those rooms know full well that it’s a real baby they’ve just killed. They see the little arms, the little feet.

And I hope, when you hear about that, it chews you up. But what do we do when we remember that there is this silent holocaust is going on all around us? Where do we start? We start by doing what Psalm 10 does: we lament and we bring our complaints to God. We cry out to Him to bring this injustice to an end. “How long, O Lord?”

Now there is perhaps not where we end. I’ve recently become convicted about some ways that I can contribute to the fight against abortion, not at a political level but at a very personal level. I’d love to talk with you about some of that if you’re curious. But for the sake of Psalm 10 this morning, I just want to ask us: do we feel what the author of this Psalm feels? Do we cry out to God for justice when we see the truly vulnerable being oppressed by the wicked who seem to just get away with it? Do we long for the return of Christ, which will be the day when true justice prevails forever? I hope so.

Are We Allowed to Complain to God?

So that’s the first red flag down. Complaint is OK when we are complaining about legitimate things which should not be.

Next I want to move on to the second red flag we saw this morning. Is complaining to God even ok? Doesn’t this sound disrespectful to God? Aren’t we supped to trust in His sovereignty?

Those are excellent questions. And they remind us that we need to be careful when discussing these things. The Psalms don’t give us a blank check to talk to God however we’d like. The Psalms never encourage us to be angry with God.

But they do encourage us to be respectfully honest as we bring our legitimate complaints to Him. So how do we do that without going too far?

Psalm 10 gives us the answer as it shows us how to complain with humility and how to complain with hope.

Humility is seen in the way that the Psalmist asks questions of God instead of making accusations.

Notice that verse 1 doesn’t say, “O Lord, you are standing far away and you shouldn’t be. You are hiding yourself in times of trouble and you have no good reason for doing so.” Instead, he asks God questions. He’s being honest in his questions, telling God the way that things seem, but there is humility in the fact that they are questions. Maybe there’s an answer here. Maybe there’s something he’s missing that God knows. 

When we bring our complaints to God we must come with the humility that recognizes our perspective is limited. There is so much we don’t know and so much we don’t see. 

Isn’t that one of the big points of the book of Job? When Job suffered, he had no idea what was going on in heaven. He had no idea about Satan’s involvement in his struggle. And God never told him. When God did speak to Job, all He really did was remind Job about how much he didn’t know.

So when we complain, we don’t march in with angry accusations. We humbly come with honest questions.

And second, Psalm 10, along with the rest of the Psalms, teach us to complain with hope. This Psalm begins with questions, and lists its complaints, and verse 12 asks God to arise and lift His hand and not forget the afflicted.

But then verse 14 bursts in with a shot of raw hope: “But you do see, for you note mischief and vexation, that you may take it into your hands; to you the helpless commits himself; you have been the helper of the fatherless.” And then again in verses 16-18: “The LORD is king forever and ever; the nations perish from his land. O LORD, you hear the desire of the afflicted; you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more.”

This is the truth. It feels like God is hiding himself, and even though the Psalmist says so, he actually does know better. He knows that God does see.  He knows that God is taking note of what the wicked are doing so that he can deal with them. He knows that God is the helper to the fatherless. God is the king forever and ever who has sent the wicked nations out of his land and so can deal with the wicked among His own people. God does hear the desire of the afflicted. He will strengthen their heart. He is listening to them to do justice for them. And there will come a day when wicked men will strike terror no more.

So this is one of the secrets of biblical complaint: we don’t stay stuck in it. Complaint is not as place we camp out permanently. It’s a necessary first step on the path to truth-filled hope.

I mentioned that book “Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy.” In the chapter on Psalm 10 he describes sitting in the car with his wife after another devastating visit to the doctor where they heard heartbreaking news they were not expecting to hear. And his wife prayed out loud and said: “God, I know you’re not mean, but it feels like you are today.” (p. 41).

That is an example of biblical complaint. She was honestly telling him how things seemed but at the same time was acknowledging her limited perspective and expressing her confidence that God was not cruel, despite how things felt at the moment.

Perhaps, though, the greatest example of true, biblical complaint from the mouth of Jesus while He hung on the cross. “And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Mark 15:33–34). 

Do you know what Jesus was doing there? He was quoting a Psalm of lament. He was quoting Psalm 22, written by David, which opens with these words. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:1–2). 

When David penned these words, he was describing how it felt, how things seemed to him in his situation. It seemed like he had been abandoned and forsaken by a God who was not listening to his prayers, and so he poured out his complaint to the Lord. And as Psalm 22 goes on, David expresses more and more confidence that God does in fact hear him and is going to save him, despite all appearances.

But when Jesus uttered these words, he wasn’t only speaking of how things seemed. He was expressing what was really happening. Because on the cross, Jesus truly did experience abandonment and exile. He did experience God’s curse and God’s wrath. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us…” (Galatians 3:13). “Yet it was the will of the LORD to crush him; he has put him to grief” (Isaiah 53:10a). 

And He did it for us. That’s what our sins deserved, but He took it instead of us.

And so the incredible truth of the gospel brings such clarity to our own suffering and lament and complaint. There will be times when God seems far off, when it feels like we’ve been forsaken, when it feels like we are under the curse of God. But we can know that because those things really did happen to Jesus, they are not and will never happen to us, despite all appearances.

“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38–39). 

That is what Jesus died to purchase for us. The confidence of the inseparable love of God for us.

And so it’s fitting now that we would turn now to the table before us where we remember the death of our Saviour and proclaim the hope of His return. This is the hope that we need in our complaint and our lament. That no matter how dark things feel, we have a Saviour who walked out of His grave and who will split the skies some day soon and wipe every tear from our eyes.

So we can tell God how it feels. Be honest with Him about how things seem. Bring our humble complaint to Him. But this table reminds us that we know how it all ends.

Today we begin a new series in the book of Psalms which will take us through the spring and summer. 

I have loved the Psalms for years, and hope to preach through each one of them one day. That’s not going to happen this year: there’s 150 Psalms and we’re only going to cover 20 or so of them this spring and summer. So this is likely not the last time we’ll visit the Psalms together as a church.

For the past several months I’ve been drawn to the Psalms as I’ve thought about what I’ll preach on next. And I want to share with you some of those reasons why the board and I have decided that this is where we’ll be going next.

Applying the Series

First, the Psalms are a wonderful place for us to apply many of the things we learned in the “You Are Here” series. I’ve mentioned more than once that one of the goals in that series was to help us learn how to appropriately read and apply the Old Testament. And the Psalms are great place to do to do that.

The book of Psalms was Israel’s hymnbook. These were the songs that God’s people sang for centuries. And so the Psalms are rich in the theology of the Mosaic covenant.

The Psalms are also bursting with the truth of God’s covenant with David. If you’ve read any of the Psalms before, you’ve probably noticed David is all over the place. About half of the Psalms are attributed to David himself, and when we step back and look the book of Psalms as a whole, we see that one of the purposes of the Psalms was to orient the hope of God’s people on the promise of the coming son of David.

So the Psalms are easy to misinterpret and take out of context if we don’t appreciate the big story of the Bible and how the covenants fit together. But now that we’ve covered that ground, we’re in a good spot to dig into the Psalms and apply these Old Testament Scriptures to our lives as New Covenant believers.

Learning to Pray 

Second, I’m drawn to the Psalms because they are prayers. The Psalms can be described as a collection of prayers. And I don’t know about you, but I want to keep learning how to pray better. When I preached on prayer a few weeks ago it felt like I just scratched the surface in terms of appreciating everything the Bible tells us about prayer. And so I’m looking forward to the Psalms guiding us deeper into an appreciation of what prayer is and how to pray.

A Personal View

Third, the Psalms are very personal. You could even say they are intimate. So many of the Psalms are written in the first person and they take us close to the action, showing us how the human heart interacts with God and His truth in the real world. And I think it will be good for us, after several months of a lot of big picture ideas, to zoom in and spend some time in a part of Scripture which takes these big ideas and applies them to our hearts in the personal way that it does. 

When Sorrows Like Sea Billows Roll

Fourth, and this is building off of the idea of the Psalms being personal, the Psalms are intensely realistic. When we think about the Psalms, we might be tempted to think that the Psalms are all about praise and worship and joy and celebration.

Many of the Psalms are. And throughout the book, worship always has the final answer. But it might surprise you to know that, depending on how you count it, at least a third of the 150 Psalms are classified as Psalms of lament. These Psalms deal with themes of pain and suffering and struggle and sadness, and they show us what it looks like to express sorrow or grief to God.

And I think that this language of lament is something we need to rediscover. Because life is hard. Life is painful. Life gives us reasons to lament. And if we don’t know how to vocalize those experiences, if we don’t know how to express our sorrow to God, or worse, if we think that being a Christian requires that we feel happy all the time, then what happens to us when we’re not?

What can happen is that your faith in God and your real life end up being separated off from each other. Being a Christian slowly becomes a performance, something you do, something you put on, instead of who you are. And eventually, keeping up that performance might become impossibly hard.

But it shouldn’t be this way. One third of Israel’s hymnbook tells us that life is difficult, and this is normal. One third of Israel’s hymnbook shows us how to lament, how to communicate and walk with God in the middle of our grief and sadness and suffering.

And for this reason, the Psalms have a lot to offer to us today in our particular moment in history. You maybe have’t noticed, but our Western culture is going through a bit of a crisis right now. People in our country, both in and outside of the church, are struggling with sadness and depression at unprecedented rates. Recent data tells us that Canadians are the third greatest users of antidepressants in the world.

I read an article this week in which Dr. Joel Paris, one of Canada’s top psychiatrists, commented on this trend, and he stated that many Canadians taking antidepressants are not, in fact, clinically depressed. What they are is sad. They are experiencing sadness or grief. And the problem is that we don’t know how to be sad anymore. We expect to feel happy all the time, and when we feel sad the only thing we know how to do is ask our doctors to make it better.

Dr. Paris did stress that clinical depression is a real thing and he believes that anti-depressants are necessary in cases of “severe, debilitating and life-threatening depression.” But he and other top psychiatrists believe that clinical depression is being seriously over-diagnosed these days, and what’s to blame is the “trend in Western societies to expect the right to happiness.”

So I was thinking about all this from the perspective of the Psalms. I believe that mental illness is a real thing—that there are times when our brains are simply not working the way they are supposed to, and they take everything else down with them. And I believe that the Psalms can help people walk through the pain of mental illness, as they show us how to relate to God in the middle of our suffering.

And on the other hand, the Psalms also help us for those times when what we are struggling with is sadness, or grief, or spiritual despair. The Psalms might be one of the only places in our world today where we can learn how to properly process those experiences. How to understand them. And most of all, how to walk with God in the middle of them.

One third of the Psalms are there to pop the bubble that says we should expect to feel happy all of the time. And one third of the Psalms are there to give us a voice in our sadness and in our suffering.

The Psalms have such potential to orient us towards a realistic Christian life, shaping our expectations and reactions and helping us learn how to fight for hope and joy in the middle of our difficulty.

Now there’s a lot more I want to say about these matters, and I’m hoping they’ll get a chance to come out in this series, either here in the pulpit or on the blog. But hopefully this sneak peak shows you some of the reasons why I am drawn to the Psalms. The Psalms have been such a help to me throughout the years and it’s a joy to lead us into these next four months where we’ll get to explore some of them together.

Psalm 3

So today we begin with Psalm 3, which we’ve read together already. You will notice that this Psalm has a title: “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.” These titles are a part of the original Scripture text, and give us the background to the Psalm’s composition. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the whole story of David and Absalom, you can read about it in 2 Samuel 14-19. This event happened later on in David’s life. After all his years of being chased around by Saul. After conquering Jerusalem and being established there. After God’s covenant with him in 2 Samuel 7, where God promised to give David rest from all his enemies.

And after all of this, an enemy arises from within David’s own house. His son, Absalom stole the hearts of the people through a long and deliberate process, so much so that one of David’s closest advisors gave his loyalty to Absalom. And now Absalom has launched a military coup and plans to kill David and take the throne for himself.

This was betrayal of the highest order. And it wasn’t just treason against David. It was treason against God. See, David was the Lord’s anointed. God had chosen him and promised to establish him and give him rest from all his enemies (2 Samuel 7:11). This is a truth that was just celebrated in Psalm 2. Listen to these words from Psalm 2:1-6:

“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed [that’s referring to David], saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.’ He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, ‘As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill’” (Psalm 2:1–6). 

That’s the vision of the Davidic kingship that opens the Psalms. God laughing at puny humans who would try to unseat His chosen king and His royal Son whom He had established in Jerusalem.

Bur right after Psalm 2 is Psalm 3: “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.”

What is going on? The Lord’s anointed king, on the run from one of his own sons, with his own nation turned against him? How is this happening?

Well, that is exactly what David must have been asking. What’s going on here? How can this be possible? This must have felt like David’s worst nightmare coming true.

So how does David respond to his worst nightmare? What does David say to God in the middle of this impossibly terrible situation? That’s what we’re about to find out as we dig into this Psalm together. 

Telling God What He Sees

The first thing we see in verses 1 & 2 is that David simply tells God what is going on. “O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of my soul, ‘There is no salvation for him in God’” (Psalm 3:1–2).

David just tells God what he sees. This is a theme we’re going to see come up multiple times in the Psalms: the idea of complaining to God. Telling God what’s going on.

And as David does this, what he’s also doing is facing the facts. He’s not trying to put a bright face on it. “Oh, it’s ok, things aren’t all that bad.” Yes, they are all that bad, and David isn’t afraid to say so. His foes are many and they are saying horrible things about him, and in his honest prayer, David faces these facts head on.

Choosing to Trust

But David faced all of the facts. David knew that there were more facts in play than simply what he could see with his eyes. And so in verse 3, he reminds himself of the greatest and most important fact of all: God. “But you, O Lord, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head” (Psalm 3:3).

Now just stop and take this in for a moment. Thank about what David is saying here about God. And think about how he knows this. Does he know these things about God just by looking around him? Are his circumstances telling him that God is his shield and glory and the lifter of his head? 

At that point in the story, absolutely not. All of his circumstances were pointing in the opposite direction. Everything looked like David was defenceless and ashamed.

But David chooses to remember who God is. He chooses to remember that God had given him specific promises to make him a great name and deliver him from his enemies (2 Samuel 7:9, 11). He chooses to remember the truth of Psalm 2. And he’s choosing to remind himself of these promises and even praise God for them right in the middle of his nightmare. 

So David probably felt defenceless, but he chose to remember and worship God for being His true shield. By all appearances, David running away from his own son looked shameful, but David chose to remember and worship God for being his glory and the one who would remove this shame and lift up His head.

Sustaining Grace

He chose to remember that God lives and that God had not changed and would not turn back on His promises. And so he keeps praying. And as he prays, he experiences God’s grace, as verse 4 tells us, “I cried aloud to the Lord, and he answered me from his holy hill.”

There’s some question as to exactly what is going on here when David speaks about God answering him. Did God literally speak to David, giving an verbal answer through a prophetic revelation? That’s possible. It’s also very possible that what David is expressing here is absolute confidence that the living God will answer Him. And it’s such a complete confidence that he can speak about it in the past-tense. “God answered me. He’s not ignoring me.”

But in the context of the Psalm, it appears that the answer God gave David was the experience of peace that we see in verses 5 & 6: “I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.”

This is just astounding. I don’t know about you, but when I’m in a tough spot, when my worst nightmares are unfolding around me, one of the hardest things in the world to do is sleep.

But David—away from Jerusalem, no walls between him and his enemies—is able to lie down and sleep. His enemies are still arrayed against him but he’s not afraid of them. 

And the secret to this experience is there at the end of verse 5—“For the Lord sustained me.” God has not yet taken away David’s difficult circumstances. His enemies are still there. But in the middle of his difficult circumstances, God is sustaining David. Helping him. Supporting him. Giving him peace and taking away his fear and enabling him to rest.

Isn’t this the experience of Psalm 23:4? “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4). God does not promise to deliver us from the valley of the shadow of death, but He does promise to be with us in that valley. And that’s what David is experiencing here in Psalm 3. God’s sustaining grace in his suffering.

A Final Prayer

And yet, David knows that it’s not over. His fear is gone, but the enemies aren’t, and they do need to be dealt with. And so in verse 7, David prays again. “Arise, O Lord! Save me, O my God!” (Psalm 3:7a). David is asking God to deal with his enemies and to save him from them.

Now you’ll remember that God had promised David in the Davidic covenant to do this very thing: to deliver him from his enemies. And so David is doing here what we learned about biblical prayer a few weeks ago: he’s asking God to do what God has promised to do. That’s what he’s pointing to in the last half of verse 7: “For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked.” (Psalm 3:7b). 

“This is what You do; this is what You’ve promised to do. So come to it now for me. Do what You’ve promised.”

As the Psalm draws to a close, he makes one more statement of confidence at the beginning of verse 8. “Salvation belongs to the Lord.” David’s salvation does not depend on David and it certainly does not depend on his enemies. David’s salvation belongs to the Lord. And if God wants to save David, He’ll do it, regardless of how many thousands of enemies surround him.

And then the Psalm ends with one more prayer: “Your blessing be on your people” (Psalm 3:8b). Wow. David could be asking God to curse His people for their rebellion against him. But instead he asks God to bring this rebellion to an end and to bring the people back under David’s rule so they can experience God’s blessing again.  And when we read the story in 2 Samuel we see that this did, in fact, happen.

Conclusion

And with that, Psalm 3 is done. And what a journey it is. From the cries of “O Lord, how many are my foes!” to the confidence of “Salvation belongs to the Lord.” 

What can you and I learn from this Psalm? A lot, actually. More than we’ll have time to consider this morning. But what we are going to do this morning is focus on David’s example, and see how we can learn from his example when we find ourselves in our own impossibly difficult circumstances.

Whatever those circumstances are, whatever our worst nightmare is, when it’s exploding all around us, what should we do?

Tell God

David shows us that we should begin with honest prayer. Just start talking to God about what’s going on around you, and what’s going on in your heart. Tell Him.

I’ve talked with people in the middle of difficult circumstances and they’re kind of freaking out and I’ll ask them, “have you talked to God about this?” And it’s surprising how often the answer is “no.” And I wonder if the problem is that we feel like we need to get ourselves together, get a handle on things, before we can talk to God in prayer.

But that’s the wrong way to think about it. The way we get a handle on things, the way we get ourselves together, is by talking to God about it. He’s big enough for us! He’s big enough for our emotions and our struggles. We can start talking to Him right in the middle of our pain. And just doing that will begin to orient our souls in the right direction and begin to push us towards faith and confidence.

Remember What’s True

The second thing we should learn from David is how he reminded himself of what was true and what was real.

Don’t we so often read into his circumstances and listen to our own feelings? When things look bleak, we give in to the bleakness. When things feel hopeless, we listen to our feelings and give up hope. When we feel abandoned by God, we assume that we must be abandoned by God.

But David shows us the better way. He chooses to remember that what he sees with his eyes and feels in his heart are not the final measure of truth in the universe. He chooses to remember that God is alive, and he chooses to remember who God has promised to be for Him. 

So if you’re in an impossible situation right now, what are the messages you’re hearing? Who have you been listening to? What have you been telling yourself?

And have you stopped to ask yourself, “Who is God, and who has God promised to be for me in this?” Have you opened up the Bible to a place like Romans 8, and reminded yourself of all that God has promised to be for you?

I had a friend a couple of years ago who was seriously depressed. And to this day they don’t know what combination of physical or emotional or spiritual causes were behind their depression. But they do know that one of the most helpful ways they fought back at their depression was by meditating on the attributes of God.

As they were falling asleep at night—one of the hardest times of the day—they would pick a word and go through each letter and think of an attribute of God that began with that letter. And over the days and weeks this had a massive effect on them.

That’s what David is doing here. “God is my shield. God is my glory. God is the lifter of my head.” He’s speaking the truth about God and worshipping Him for it. And this will have a powerful effect on us when we do the same.

Sleeping on the Battlefield

Third, let’s follow David’s example of resting in God's sustaining grace while we pray and ask for His final salvation.

So often, when things are hard, we want God to fix them now. But when we read 2 Samuel 14-19, we see that David’s situation didn’t get fixed right away. It took a while. But David was able to experience God’s peace in the middle of the storm.

And so that is so very often our story, isn’t it? We walk with God and experience His grace in the suffering. In the trial. In the fire. Remembering His promises and asking Him to fulfill them as we patiently trust Him here and now, today.

And as we do that, we remember the ultimate way that this Psalm will be fulfilled in our life. Jesus, the greater Son of David, who Himself was so often beset by enemies, will return in triumph. All of His enemies will be placed under His feet. And like Hebrews 9:28 tells us, when He appears this second time, He will “save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28).

Our salvation is coming, and that salvation gives us hope today. And this isn’t just pie-in-the-sky stuff. We’re about to sing a song written by a man after he lost his four daughters to a shipwreck. That was his worst nightmare exploding all around him. And yet listen to the words of this song. Listen to the promises that helped this man say, in the middle of his heartbreak, “It is well with my soul.” It’s the death and the return of Jesus Christ. It’s the final salvation we’ve been promised. It’s all that God has been for us and all that God will be for us, forever.

I don’t know what all you’re going through today, but I know that it can be well with your soul in the middle of your pain. So let’s ask God for the faith to believe this and to experience His sustaining grace today.

Today we begin a new series in the book of Psalms which will take us through the spring and summer. 

I have loved the Psalms for years, and hope to preach through each one of them one day. That’s not going to happen this year: there’s 150 Psalms and we’re only going to cover 20 or so of them this spring and summer. So this is likely not the last time we’ll visit the Psalms together as a church.

For the past several months I’ve been drawn to the Psalms as I’ve thought about what I’ll preach on next. And I want to share with you some of those reasons why the board and I have decided that this is where we’ll be going next.

Applying the Series

First, the Psalms are a wonderful place for us to apply many of the things we learned in the “You Are Here” series. I’ve mentioned more than once that one of the goals in that series was to help us learn how to appropriately read and apply the Old Testament. And the Psalms are great place to do to do that.

The book of Psalms was Israel’s hymnbook. These were the songs that God’s people sang for centuries. And so the Psalms are rich in the theology of the Mosaic covenant.

The Psalms are also bursting with the truth of God’s covenant with David. If you’ve read any of the Psalms before, you’ve probably noticed David is all over the place. About half of the Psalms are attributed to David himself, and when we step back and look the book of Psalms as a whole, we see that one of the purposes of the Psalms was to orient the hope of God’s people on the promise of the coming son of David.

So the Psalms are easy to misinterpret and take out of context if we don’t appreciate the big story of the Bible and how the covenants fit together. But now that we’ve covered that ground, we’re in a good spot to dig into the Psalms and apply these Old Testament Scriptures to our lives as New Covenant believers.

Learning to Pray 

Second, I’m drawn to the Psalms because they are prayers. The Psalms can be described as a collection of prayers. And I don’t know about you, but I want to keep learning how to pray better. When I preached on prayer a few weeks ago it felt like I just scratched the surface in terms of appreciating everything the Bible tells us about prayer. And so I’m looking forward to the Psalms guiding us deeper into an appreciation of what prayer is and how to pray.

A Personal View

Third, the Psalms are very personal. You could even say they are intimate. So many of the Psalms are written in the first person and they take us close to the action, showing us how the human heart interacts with God and His truth in the real world. And I think it will be good for us, after several months of a lot of big picture ideas, to zoom in and spend some time in a part of Scripture which takes these big ideas and applies them to our hearts in the personal way that it does. 

When Sorrows Like Sea Billows Roll

Fourth, and this is building off of the idea of the Psalms being personal, the Psalms are intensely realistic. When we think about the Psalms, we might be tempted to think that the Psalms are all about praise and worship and joy and celebration.

Many of the Psalms are. And throughout the book, worship always has the final answer. But it might surprise you to know that, depending on how you count it, at least a third of the 150 Psalms are classified as Psalms of lament. These Psalms deal with themes of pain and suffering and struggle and sadness, and they show us what it looks like to express sorrow or grief to God.

And I think that this language of lament is something we need to rediscover. Because life is hard. Life is painful. Life gives us reasons to lament. And if we don’t know how to vocalize those experiences, if we don’t know how to express our sorrow to God, or worse, if we think that being a Christian requires that we feel happy all the time, then what happens to us when we’re not?

What can happen is that your faith in God and your real life end up being separated off from each other. Being a Christian slowly becomes a performance, something you do, something you put on, instead of who you are. And eventually, keeping up that performance might become impossibly hard.

But it shouldn’t be this way. One third of Israel’s hymnbook tells us that life is difficult, and this is normal. One third of Israel’s hymnbook shows us how to lament, how to communicate and walk with God in the middle of our grief and sadness and suffering.

And for this reason, the Psalms have a lot to offer to us today in our particular moment in history. You maybe have’t noticed, but our Western culture is going through a bit of a crisis right now. People in our country, both in and outside of the church, are struggling with sadness and depression at unprecedented rates. Recent data tells us that Canadians are the third greatest users of antidepressants in the world.

I read an article this week in which Dr. Joel Paris, one of Canada’s top psychiatrists, commented on this trend, and he stated that many Canadians taking antidepressants are not, in fact, clinically depressed. What they are is sad. They are experiencing sadness or grief. And the problem is that we don’t know how to be sad anymore. We expect to feel happy all the time, and when we feel sad the only thing we know how to do is ask our doctors to make it better.

Dr. Paris did stress that clinical depression is a real thing and he believes that anti-depressants are necessary in cases of “severe, debilitating and life-threatening depression.” But he and other top psychiatrists believe that clinical depression is being seriously over-diagnosed these days, and what’s to blame is the “trend in Western societies to expect the right to happiness.”

So I was thinking about all this from the perspective of the Psalms. I believe that mental illness is a real thing—that there are times when our brains are simply not working the way they are supposed to, and they take everything else down with them. And I believe that the Psalms can help people walk through the pain of mental illness, as they show us how to relate to God in the middle of our suffering.

And on the other hand, the Psalms also help us for those times when what we are struggling with is sadness, or grief, or spiritual despair. The Psalms might be one of the only places in our world today where we can learn how to properly process those experiences. How to understand them. And most of all, how to walk with God in the middle of them.

One third of the Psalms are there to pop the bubble that says we should expect to feel happy all of the time. And one third of the Psalms are there to give us a voice in our sadness and in our suffering.

The Psalms have such potential to orient us towards a realistic Christian life, shaping our expectations and reactions and helping us learn how to fight for hope and joy in the middle of our difficulty.

Now there’s a lot more I want to say about these matters, and I’m hoping they’ll get a chance to come out in this series, either here in the pulpit or on the blog. But hopefully this sneak peak shows you some of the reasons why I am drawn to the Psalms. The Psalms have been such a help to me throughout the years and it’s a joy to lead us into these next four months where we’ll get to explore some of them together.

Psalm 3

So today we begin with Psalm 3, which we’ve read together already. You will notice that this Psalm has a title: “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.” These titles are a part of the original Scripture text, and give us the background to the Psalm’s composition. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the whole story of David and Absalom, you can read about it in 2 Samuel 14-19. This event happened later on in David’s life. After all his years of being chased around by Saul. After conquering Jerusalem and being established there. After God’s covenant with him in 2 Samuel 7, where God promised to give David rest from all his enemies.

And after all of this, an enemy arises from within David’s own house. His son, Absalom stole the hearts of the people through a long and deliberate process, so much so that one of David’s closest advisors gave his loyalty to Absalom. And now Absalom has launched a military coup and plans to kill David and take the throne for himself.

This was betrayal of the highest order. And it wasn’t just treason against David. It was treason against God. See, David was the Lord’s anointed. God had chosen him and promised to establish him and give him rest from all his enemies (2 Samuel 7:11). This is a truth that was just celebrated in Psalm 2. Listen to these words from Psalm 2:1-6:

“Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed [that’s referring to David], saying, ‘Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.’ He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision. Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, ‘As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill’” (Psalm 2:1–6). 

That’s the vision of the Davidic kingship that opens the Psalms. God laughing at puny humans who would try to unseat His chosen king and His royal Son whom He had established in Jerusalem.

Bur right after Psalm 2 is Psalm 3: “A Psalm of David, when he fled from Absalom his son.”

What is going on? The Lord’s anointed king, on the run from one of his own sons, with his own nation turned against him? How is this happening?

Well, that is exactly what David must have been asking. What’s going on here? How can this be possible? This must have felt like David’s worst nightmare coming true.

So how does David respond to his worst nightmare? What does David say to God in the middle of this impossibly terrible situation? That’s what we’re about to find out as we dig into this Psalm together. 

Telling God What He Sees

The first thing we see in verses 1 & 2 is that David simply tells God what is going on. “O LORD, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me; many are saying of my soul, ‘There is no salvation for him in God’” (Psalm 3:1–2).

David just tells God what he sees. This is a theme we’re going to see come up multiple times in the Psalms: the idea of complaining to God. Telling God what’s going on.

And as David does this, what he’s also doing is facing the facts. He’s not trying to put a bright face on it. “Oh, it’s ok, things aren’t all that bad.” Yes, they are all that bad, and David isn’t afraid to say so. His foes are many and they are saying horrible things about him, and in his honest prayer, David faces these facts head on.

Choosing to Trust

But David faced all of the facts. David knew that there were more facts in play than simply what he could see with his eyes. And so in verse 3, he reminds himself of the greatest and most important fact of all: God. “But you, O LORD, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head” (Psalm 3:3).

Now just stop and take this in for a moment. Thank about what David is saying here about God. And think about how he knows this. Does he know these things about God just by looking around him? Are his circumstances telling him that God is his shield and glory and the lifter of his head? 

At that point in the story, absolutely not. All of his circumstances were pointing in the opposite direction. Everything looked like David was defenceless and ashamed.

But David chooses to remember who God is. He chooses to remember that God had given him specific promises to make him a great name and deliver him from his enemies (2 Samuel 7:9, 11). He chooses to remember the truth of Psalm 2. And he’s choosing to remind himself of these promises and even praise God for them right in the middle of his nightmare. 

So David probably felt defenceless, but he chose to remember and worship God for being His true shield. By all appearances, David running away from his own son looked shameful, but David chose to remember and worship God for being his glory and the one who would remove this shame and lift up His head.

Sustaining Grace

He chose to remember that God lives and that God had not changed and would not turn back on His promises. And so he keeps praying. And as he prays, he experiences God’s grace, as verse 4 tells us, “I cried aloud to the LORD, and he answered me from his holy hill.”

There’s some question as to exactly what is going on here when David speaks about God answering him. Did God literally speak to David, giving an verbal answer through a prophetic revelation? That’s possible. It’s also very possible that what David is expressing here is absolute confidence that the living God will answer Him. And it’s such a complete confidence that he can speak about it in the past-tense. “God answered me. He’s not ignoring me.”

But in the context of the Psalm, it appears that the answer God gave David was the experience of peace that we see in verses 5 & 6: “I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the LORD sustained me. I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.”

This is just astounding. I don’t know about you, but when I’m in a tough spot, when my worst nightmares are unfolding around me, one of the hardest things in the world to do is sleep.

But David—away from Jerusalem, no walls between him and his enemies—is able to lie down and sleep. His enemies are still arrayed against him but he’s not afraid of them. 

And the secret to this experience is there at the end of verse 5—“For the LORD sustained me.” God has not yet taken away David’s difficult circumstances. His enemies are still there. But in the middle of his difficult circumstances, God is sustaining David. Helping him. Supporting him. Giving him peace and taking away his fear and enabling him to rest.

Isn’t this the experience of Psalm 23:4? “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me” (Psalm 23:4). God does not promise to deliver us from the valley of the shadow of death, but He does promise to be with us in that valley. And that’s what David is experiencing here in Psalm 3. God’s sustaining grace in his suffering.

A Final Prayer

And yet, David knows that it’s not over. His fear is gone, but the enemies aren’t, and they do need to be dealt with. And so in verse 7, David prays again. “Arise, O LORD! Save me, O my God!” (Psalm 3:7a). David is asking God to deal with his enemies and to save him from them.

Now you’ll remember that God had promised David in the Davidic covenant to do this very thing: to deliver him from his enemies. And so David is doing here what we learned about biblical prayer a few weeks ago: he’s asking God to do what God has promised to do. That’s what he’s pointing to in the last half of verse 7: “For you strike all my enemies on the cheek; you break the teeth of the wicked.” (Psalm 3:7b). 

“This is what You do; this is what You’ve promised to do. So come to it now for me. Do what You’ve promised.”

As the Psalm draws to a close, he makes one more statement of confidence at the beginning of verse 8. “Salvation belongs to the LORD.” David’s salvation does not depend on David and it certainly does not depend on his enemies. David’s salvation belongs to the Lord. And if God wants to save David, He’ll do it, regardless of how many thousands of enemies surround him.

And then the Psalm ends with one more prayer: “Your blessing be on your people” (Psalm 3:8b). Wow. David could be asking God to curse His people for their rebellion against him. But instead he asks God to bring this rebellion to an end and to bring the people back under David’s rule so they can experience God’s blessing again.  And when we read the story in 2 Samuel we see that this did, in fact, happen.

Conclusion

And with that, Psalm 3 is done. And what a journey it is. From the cries of “O Lord, how many are my foes!” to the confidence of “Salvation belongs to the LORD.” 

What can you and I learn from this Psalm? A lot, actually. More than we’ll have time to consider this morning. But what we are going to do this morning is focus on David’s example, and see how we can learn from his example when we find ourselves in our own impossibly difficult circumstances.

Whatever those circumstances are, whatever our worst nightmare is, when it’s exploding all around us, what should we do?

Tell God

David shows us that we should begin with honest prayer. Just start talking to God about what’s going on around you, and what’s going on in your heart. Tell Him.

I’ve talked with people in the middle of difficult circumstances and they’re kind of freaking out and I’ll ask them, “have you talked to God about this?” And it’s surprising how often the answer is “no.” And I wonder if the problem is that we feel like we need to get ourselves together, get a handle on things, before we can talk to God in prayer.

But that’s the wrong way to think about it. The way we get a handle on things, the way we get ourselves together, is by talking to God about it. He’s big enough for us! He’s big enough for our emotions and our struggles. We can start talking to Him right in the middle of our pain. And just doing that will begin to orient our souls in the right direction and begin to push us towards faith and confidence.

Remember What’s True

The second thing we should learn from David is how he reminded himself of what was true and what was real.

Don’t we so often read into his circumstances and listen to our own feelings? When things look bleak, we give in to the bleakness. When things feel hopeless, we listen to our feelings and give up hope. When we feel abandoned by God, we assume that we must be abandoned by God.

But David shows us the better way. He chooses to remember that what he sees with his eyes and feels in his heart are not the final measure of truth in the universe. He chooses to remember that God is alive, and he chooses to remember who God has promised to be for Him. 

So if you’re in an impossible situation right now, what are the messages you’re hearing? Who have you been listening to? What have you been telling yourself?

And have you stopped to ask yourself, “Who is God, and who has God promised to be for me in this?” Have you opened up the Bible to a place like Romans 8, and reminded yourself of all that God has promised to be for you?

I had a friend a couple of years ago who was seriously depressed. And to this day they don’t know what combination of physical or emotional or spiritual causes were behind their depression. But they do know that one of the most helpful ways they fought back at their depression was by meditating on the attributes of God.

As they were falling asleep at night—one of the hardest times of the day—they would pick a word and go through each letter and think of an attribute of God that began with that letter. And over the days and weeks this had a massive effect on them.

That’s what David is doing here. “God is my shield. God is my glory. God is the lifter of my head.” He’s speaking the truth about God and worshipping Him for it. And this will have a powerful effect on us when we do the same.

Sleeping on the Battlefield

Third, let’s follow David’s example of resting in God's sustaining grace while we pray and ask for His final salvation.

So often, when things are hard, we want God to fix them now. But when we read 2 Samuel 14-19, we see that David’s situation didn’t get fixed right away. It took a while. But David was able to experience God’s peace in the middle of the storm.

And so that is so very often our story, isn’t it? We walk with God and experience His grace in the suffering. In the trial. In the fire. Remembering His promises and asking Him to fulfill them as we patiently trust Him here and now, today.

And as we do that, we remember the ultimate way that this Psalm will be fulfilled in our life. Jesus, the greater Son of David, who Himself was so often beset by enemies, will return in triumph. All of His enemies will be placed under His feet. And like Hebrews 9:28 tells us, when He appears this second time, He will “save those who are eagerly waiting for him” (Hebrews 9:28).

Our salvation is coming, and that salvation gives us hope today. And this isn’t just pie-in-the-sky stuff. We’re about to sing a song written by a man after he lost his four daughters to a shipwreck. That was his worst nightmare exploding all around him. And yet listen to the words of this song. Listen to the promises that helped this man say, in the middle of his heartbreak, “It is well with my soul.” It’s the death and the return of Jesus Christ. It’s the final salvation we’ve been promised. It’s all that God has been for us and all that God will be for us, forever.

I don’t know what all you’re going through today, but I know that it can be well with your soul in the middle of your pain. So let’s ask God for the faith to believe this and to experience His sustaining grace today.

Last week was wonderful, wasn’t it? Wrapping up our series, singing each of those songs that reminded us of the journey we’ve been on in these months, and then ending with “Is He Worthy?”. It was wonderful. Someone made the comment that singing that last song felt like heaven, and I had the same thought.

There’s nothing better to me than being in the company of the redeemed with our attention fixated on the most worthy person in the universe with nothing to compete or distract. And as our service came to a close last week, I just wanted it to keep on going. I wanted to go further up and further in and I wanted to be in glory already.

But we’re not in glory already. The service had to end and we all left and went home and ate lunch and continued on with the rest of our lives in this fallen world.

So how did you do with that? How did it go for you? As you headed to bed on Sunday evening, or as you woke up on Tuesday morning, did your heart feel the same things towards Christ, and did you have the same awareness of His glory, as you did while we sang together on Sunday morning?

It kind of goes without saying, doesn’t it? Mountaintop experiences are wonderful, but most of us find that we don’t get to stay up there for very long.

But that doesn’t mean that our time on the mountaintop is a waste. It doesn’t mean that those experiences aren’t worthwhile or meaningful or important. What it does mean is that we need to know how to take the truths we experience on the mountaintop and carry them with us into the plains and valleys below where we spend much of our time.

And that’s why today’s passage is so encouraging and helpful to us, because it teaches us how to do that. It teaches us how to take the truth we know, the truth of the resurrection of Jesus that we’ve celebrated today, and take it with us into the realities of the broken world in which we live.

And this is an absolutely necessary thing to learn if we’re going to sustain a lifetime of love for Jesus. This is an absolutely necessary thing to learn if these past eight months of this sermon series are actually going to mean something for you long-term. This is an absolutely necessary thing if Easter Sunday is going to be more than just a flash in the pan of your life.

Paul to Timothy

And so we’re going to lean in to these words which come to us from God through the Apostle Paul. Paul was a man who knew the mountaintop. He had been caught up to heaven itself and been taught directly by the risen Lord Jesus (2 Corinthians 12:1-4, Galatians 1:11-12).

And yet as he writes this last letter to Timothy, he’s locked up in a Roman prison. Early church history suggests that the place Paul was imprisoned was little more than a cistern with a hole in the roof and a direct connection to the city sewer, which often flowed into the cistern itself.

And Paul’s stuck there, while Timothy is struggling away in Ephesus trying to help a church that seems stuck. They don’t seem to be responding to his leadership, the issues don’t seem to be getting any better, and he’s got his own personal health issues to deal with on top of that. The suffering is starting to pile up.

And from what we can gather from this letter, Timothy is getting worn down. He’s starting to feel weak. Fear and shame are nipping at his heels and he’s finding faithfulness a lot harder than he thought. And everything he’s experienced in the past, all of his amazing adventures with Paul, all of his own moments on the mountaintop, are not magically making everything easier for him in this day-to-day grind. 

And so Paul writes to encourage him and help him find his strength again. We hear that in verse 1 of our passage- “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1). Timothy needed strength and he needed to seek it in Jesus, who was able to strengthen Him.

Timothy also needed perspective. He needed to remember that the Christian life is war, and especially so when you’re on the front lines like he was, and so instead of being surprised by this suffering, he needed to embrace it. “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus,” as verse 3 says.

And then in verses 5 & 6, Paul uses two more metaphors to push Timothy even further into this idea of embracing difficulty and long-term endurance. Nobody becomes a farmer or an athlete because they think it will be easy. But they embrace the difficulty, and they buckle in for the long-haul, and they defer their hopes and expectations for the future, being content to wait for their reward—all qualities Timothy needed to emulate.

“Remember Jesus Christ”

But then Paul gets to the heart of his exhortation in verse 8, and what is also the heart of our message this morning. “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel.”

This verse is so important that we’re going to take the next few minutes to reflect on it, one piece at a time.

Let’s first consider this word “remember.” Keep this in mind. Think about this. And, by implication, don’t forget!

Does that seem strange to you that Paul would tell Timothy not to forget about the person Who is the whole reason he’s in ministry in the first place? Some think so. One commentary on this verse said, “Paul certainly doesn’t think that Timothy is in danger of forgetting Jesus.”

But I’m not so sure about that. I have no problem with the idea of Timothy forgetting about Jesus, because don’t we all? Isn’t that what we’re doing every time we sin, every time we give in to temptation and doubt? We forget about Jesus.

Not permanently, but certainly in the moment. It’s horrible to actually describe it in these words, but that’s kind of the point, and that’s the point of Paul’s exhortation here. Remember Jesus Christ. Keep Him in your mind. Don’t forget about Him.

That’s what Timothy needed to do, and that’s what we need to do.

“Risen from the Dead”

But he doesn’t leave it there. He goes on: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.” Paul deliberately tells Timothy to remember the risen Jesus, which is why this is such a good verse for us to be considering this Sunday. It tells us that the remembering Timothy was supposed to do was not just a memorial type of remembering. Like what we do on Remembrance Day. Like what every other religion in the world is confined to. Remembering the past and the past alone.

But that’s not the kind of remembering that this passage is speaking about. It’s telling us to keep in mind a person who is raised from the dead and who is therefore alive.

I wonder if you’ve ever stopped to think about this major implication of the resurrection. I remember when this first hit me like a ton of bricks. Yes, Jesus died, and yes, He rose from the dead, but for years I tended to leave it there, filing the resurrection away as a historical event.

But if He’s alive, then He’s still alive. Today, Jesus is alive. Today, Jesus has a heart that is still beating, lungs which are still breathing. And I don’t totally get how that works—where the present heaven is, and if there’s oxygen there—but we know that Jesus’ body wasn’t something He left behind. He ascended into heaven bodily, and has sat down at the right hand of God, where He is interceding for His people (Romans 8:34).

And that means that the man Jesus Christ is alive today. He’s not a figure of history. He is a living person. And I don’t know about you, but just realizing that Jesus, in the body, is alive somewhere today is a thrilling thought. It’s like if you heard that He was in the other room—what would that do to you? Well, it’s not that different. He’s alive.

And that means Jesus knows you. If you have trusted in Him, then you can know that He died for you on the cross, and He intercedes for you today. Through His Holy Spirit, He is at work in your life. He is intimately acquainted with your every weakness and every nuance of your story.

And so we can’t just take Him or leave Him, because He won’t leave us. We can’t just ignore Him, because He won’t ignore us. He rose from the dead and He is a living and active person today, and we must to remember this.

The fact that Jesus is risen from the dead has some other big implications that would have been meaningful to Timothy in his situation. The resurrection reminds us of the incredible suffering that Jesus endured in His life and in His death. He faced constant opposition from His enemies. And as He suffered on the cross, it looked like his enemies were right. It looked like they won.

And there’s Timothy, suffering away, feeling all alone, his enemies stacking up. 

And so the resurrection of Jesus from the dead would have been hugely encouraging to Timothy.  God’s enemies don’t get the last word, despite all the appearances. Suffering doesn’t get the last word. Death doesn’t get the last word. And just like this was true of Jesus, so it will be true of us, His followers, as we suffer with Him faithfully. 

Like Romans 8 says, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:16–17). We suffer along with Christ in order to be glorified along with Christ. 

And this isn’t just a metaphor. We literally will be raised from the dead and glorified just like Jesus was. And Paul makes this exact point in verse 11 of our passage: “The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him.”

When people are suffering we’re often tempted to say glib things like “cheer up, things will get better.” And yet a statement like that is quite a bit more true that we think. It will get better—in the resurrection, when you arise with a new body. It’s that long-term hope that Paul is speaking of here. This isn’t your best life now—it’s your best life later. That’s the hope that keeps us going in our suffering.

And that’s the hope we’re reminded of in the resurrection of Jesus. He is the firstfruits of a great harvest that will one day include us.

Charles Simeon was a man who understood this truth well. He was an English pastor in the 1800s who stayed in one church for 49 years. And you might think that a pastor must be well-loved to stay in one spot for that long, but in fact the opposite was true. He was hated and opposed by many in his church. People would literally lock the front doors of the church to keep people out. And then for ten years they locked the little doors at the end of the pews so that nobody could sit down and people had to stand through the whole service.

He faced incredible opposition. And he stuck it out for almost 50 years. And a friend once asked him how he did it, and here’s the answer he gave: “My dear brother, we must not mind a little suffering for Christ’s sake. When I am getting through a hedge, if my head and shoulders are safely through, I can bear the pricking of my legs. Let us rejoice in the remembrance that our holy Head has surmounted all His suffering and triumphed over death. Let us follow Him patiently; we shall soon be partakers of His victory.”

That’s it right there. That’s the lesson Paul is trying to teach Timothy. Jesus, our head, has passed through suffering and death into resurrection life, and so will we. So remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.

“The Offspring of David”

There’s one more important phrase Paul adds in verse 8 that we need to consider: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David.”

I hope you pick up on the significance of this phrase after our journey in these past few months. Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, the One long-promised by God. Jesus is the fulfillment of the hope of God’s people and the Son of David who, right now, is reigning at the right hand of God, just like David foresaw in Psalm 110. Jesus is the king who is going to reign upon the earth one day, like we sang earlier: “He lives forever with His saints to reign.”

And this hope would have profound implications for Timothy. Timothy would be familiar with the parable we considered last week, and he would have known that as he laboured away in Ephesus, he was being tested and was proving himself as a faithful servant who was going to reign with King Jesus.

And isn’t that, once again, exactly where Paul goes in verse 12? “if we endure, we will also reign with him…” So endure, Timothy, because you serve the risen Son of David, and you are going to reign with Him when He takes up His throne here on earth. 

Our Need to Remember

So that’s what Timothy needed. He needed to remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David.

Just think about how much Timothy had experienced. He was mentored by a guy who had seen saw the risen Jesus face-to-face. He got letters in the mail that were inspired by the Holy Spirit and became a part of Scripture. He lived in a time where you could go talk to eyewitnesses who still remembered what Jesus’ face looked like and tell you what His favourite food was. He ministered in a city—Ephesus—which had so recently been turned completely upside-down by the power of the gospel (Acts 19). Everything was still so new and fresh, and yet here he is, struggling away, and Paul needs to say “remember!”

How much more for you and me? How much more do we need to remember, to call to mind, to make sure we don’t forget Jesus Christ, risen from the dead?

I know that some of you are in a similar set of circumstances as Timothy—suffering hardship, feeling your weakness, and needing to remember.

Another angle on this command to remember is the sermon series we just finished. I’ve poured my heart out for you these past eight months, trying as best as I can to teach you the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27) and show you who Jesus is from one end of the Bible to the other. But it won’t mean much if you just go and forget about it all. In many ways, it is up to you now to remember what you’ve been taught, to remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, and to carry that remembrance into every corner of your life.

Remembering to Remember

So how do we actually do that? How do we remember to remember the risen Jesus? I mean, we’re doing that this morning, on resurrection Sunday. But once a year is not often enough.

So how do we remember Jesus Christ? How do we take the truths we learn on the mountaintops and not forget about them in the plains and valleys below? How do we make sure that these past eight months aren’t a waste of time? How do we make sure that we don’t wait until Easter 2020 before the next time we remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead? I have four answers I want to suggest to you today.

1) The first one is: come to church every Sunday. And I know that sounds like an obvious one, but it’s maybe not. Many Christians treat church like an optional extra in their life, something they very quickly give up for other priorities. I’ve had people tell me not to preach too long because they need to get home to watch the football game. 

Or maybe you come, but you don’t engage very deeply. You let your mind wander through each of the songs. You use the sermon to get caught up on some missed sleep. You’re here, but it’s not that important to you.

But I would argue that gathering once a week with God’s people, and fully engaging ourselves while we’re here, should be one of the greatest priorities in your life.

Do you know why Christians meet on Sunday? It’s because it’s the day of the week that Jesus rose from the dead. The early Christians called it the “Lord’s Day,” and they would meet together every week to remember the resurrection of Christ. 

So make it a life priority to remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, by meeting with God’s people every week. This is a priority for me even on vacation. We’ll plan travel around Sunday and make sure that, as much as possible, we can be in a good church on Sunday morning. 

2) Second, connect with God’s people throughout the week. It’s another thing we see in the New Testament: that the people of God shared life with one another. Whether it’s through our homes in hospitality, or in our small groups, or meeting people for coffee, we should be a part of each other’s lives, and we should be making the Lord a regular part of our conversation. It should be normal for us to ask each other, “How goes the spiritual battle? What has God been teaching you recently? What have you been reading in the Word? How can I pray for you?” And we use those times to remind each other about our risen Saviour and His grace for us. We help each other not forget, just like Paul was doing for Timothy here.

3) Third —and you knew I was going to say this—read your Bible often. As we consistently spend time in the word we’re going to be reminded of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, and we won’t be allowed to forget.

To bring it back to the sermon series again, a part of my goal in this series was to lay a foundation of understanding so that as you read the Bible on your own, you have a better understanding of what’s going on and how the pieces fit together. These past eight months have been an investment into your own personal study for all the years yet to come.

So do that. Make it a priority. Yes, we all have time, we just decide to spend it on other things. If you don’t have a Bible, we’ve got some by the water cooler and you can just take one. If you’re not sure how to read or where to start, come talk to me and I can recommend some great reading plans to get you started.

Remember Jesus Christ by letting His word remind you day in and day out.

4) I have a fourth suggestion. I find that for myself, I can have a great time in God’s word in the morning, but by three in the afternoon, with all of the other stuff that comes at us in a day, I’m not doing a great job of remembering and living in that truth the way I should. And so I need to embrace the discipline of remembering throughout the day, just like Daniel, who prayed three times each day.

And I don’t do this perfectly, and I’m still figuring this out, but I’m trying. When I sit down for supper with my family, I don’t just thank God for the food. I thank Him for His grace and ask for His help to trust Him in the hours that are ahead. I try to use things like lock screens on my phone that have Scripture verses. Ways to remind myself to pray and think about the love of Christ and ask for His help throughout the day. 

We are each so prone to forget, prone to wander, prone to not remember our Saviour. And all the distractions of life in the modern world don’t help with this. But it doesn’t need to happen. We can turn off the TV, put the phone on Do Not Disturb. We can take advantage of these means of grace—the church community and our own personal disciplines—to make sure we remember Jesus Christ and live in the light of His resurrection from the dead.

So we’re going to end here with “O Church Arise.” We’re going to remember the resurrection in this song. We’re going to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to put strength in our every stride. And then we’re going to go out into the rest of our week, ready to fight the good fight and ready to remember.

Last week was wonderful, wasn’t it? Wrapping up our series, singing each of those songs that reminded us of the journey we’ve been on in these months, and then ending with “Is He Worthy?”. It was wonderful. Someone made the comment that singing that last song felt like heaven, and I had the same thought.

There’s nothing better to me than being in the company of the redeemed with our attention fixated on the most worthy person in the universe with nothing to compete or distract. And as our service came to a close last week, I just wanted it to keep on going. I wanted to go further up and further in and I wanted to be in glory already.

But we’re not in glory already. The service had to end and we all left and went home and ate lunch and continued on with the rest of our lives in this fallen world.

So how did you do with that? How did it go for you? As you headed to bed on Sunday evening, or as you woke up on Tuesday morning, did your heart feel the same things towards Christ, and did you have the same awareness of His glory, as you did while we sang together on Sunday morning?

It kind of goes without saying, doesn’t it? Mountaintop experiences are wonderful but most of us find that we don’t get to stay up there for very long.

But that doesn’t mean that our time on the mountaintop is a waste. It doesn’t mean that those experiences aren’t worthwhile or meaningful or important. What it does mean is that we need to know how to take the truths we experience on the mountaintop and carry them with us into the plains and valleys below where we spend much of our time.

And that’s why today’s passage is so encouraging and helpful to us, because it teaches us how to do that. It teaches us how to take the truth we know, the truth of the resurrection of Jesus that we’ve celebrated today, and take it with us into the realities of the broken world in which we live.

And this is an absolutely necessary thing to learn if we’re going to sustain a lifetime of love for Jesus. This is an absolutely necessary thing to learn if these past eight months of this sermon series are actually going to mean something for you long-term. This is an absolutely necessary thing if Easter Sunday is going to be more than just a flash in the pan of your life.

Paul to Timothy

And so we’re going to lean in to these words which come to us from God through the Apostle Paul. Paul was a man who knew the mountaintop. He had been caught up to heaven itself and been taught directly by the risen Lord Jesus (2 Corinthians 12:1-4, Galatians 1:11-12).

And yet as he writes this last letter to Timothy, he’s locked up in a Roman prison. Early church history suggests that the place Paul was imprisoned was little more than a cistern with a hole in the roof and a direct connection to the city sewer, which often flowed into the cistern itself.

And Paul’s stuck there, while Timothy is struggling away in Ephesus trying to help a church that seems stuck. They don’t seem to be responding to his leadership, the issues don’t seem to be getting any better, and he’s got his own personal health issues to deal with on top of that. The suffering is starting to pile up.

And from what we can gather from this letter, Timothy is getting worn down. He’s starting to feel weak. Fear and shame are nipping at his heels and he’s finding faithfulness a lot harder than he thought. And everything he’s experienced in the past, all of his amazing adventures with Paul, all of his own moments on the mountaintop, are not magically making everything easier for him in this day-to-day grind. 

And so Paul writes to encourage him and help him find his strength again. We hear that in verse 1 of our passage- “You then, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1). Timothy needed strength and he needed to seek it in Jesus, who was able to strengthen Him.

Timothy also needed perspective. He needed to remember that the Christian life is war, and especially so when you’re on the front lines like he was, and so instead of being surprised by this suffering, he needed to embrace it. “Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus,” as verse 3 says.

And then in verses 5 & 6, Paul uses two more metaphors to push Timothy even further into this idea of embracing difficulty and long-term endurance. Nobody becomes a farmer or an athlete because they think it will be easy. But they embrace the difficulty, and they buckle in for the long-haul, and they defer their hopes and expectations for the future, being content to wait for their reward—all qualities Timothy needed to emulate.

“Remember Jesus Christ”

But then Paul gets to the heart of his exhortation in verse 8, and what is also the heart of our message this morning. “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel.”

This verse is so important that we’re going to take the next few minutes to reflect on it, one piece at a time.

Let’s first consider this word “remember.” Keep this in mind. Think about this. And, by implication, don’t forget!

Does that seem strange to you that Paul would tell Timothy not to forget about the person Who is the whole reason he’s in ministry in the first place? Some think so. One commentary on this verse said, “Paul certainly doesn’t think that Timothy is in danger of forgetting Jesus.”

But I’m not so sure about that. I have no problem with the idea of Timothy forgetting about Jesus, because don’t we all? Isn’t that what we’re doing every time we sin, every time we give in to temptation and doubt? We forget about Jesus.

Not permanently, but certainly in the moment. It’s horrible to actually describe it in these words, but that’s kind of the point, and that’s the point of Paul’s exhortation here. Remember Jesus Christ. Keep Him in your mind. Don’t forget about Him.

That’s what Timothy needed to do, and that’s what we need to do.

“Risen from the Dead”

But he doesn’t leave it there. He goes on: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.” Paul deliberately tells Timothy to remember the risen Jesus, which is why this is such a good verse for us to be considering this Sunday. It tells us that the remembering Timothy was supposed to do was not just a memorial type of remembering. Like what we do on Remembrance Day. Like what every other religion in the world is confined to. Remembering the past and the past alone.

But that’s not the kind of remembering that this passage is speaking about. It’s telling us to keep in mind a person who is raised from the dead and who is therefore alive.

I wonder if you’ve ever stopped to think about this major implication of the resurrection. I remember when this first hit me like a ton of bricks. Yes, Jesus died, and yes, He rose from the dead, but for years I tended to leave it there, filing the resurrection away as a historical event.

But if He’s alive, then He’s still alive. Today, Jesus is alive. Today, Jesus has a heart that is still beating, lungs which are still breathing. And I don’t totally get how that works—where the present heaven is, and if there’s oxygen there—but we know that Jesus’ body wasn’t something He left behind. He ascended into heaven bodily, and has sat down at the right hand of God, where He is interceding for His people (Romans 8:34).

And that means that the man Jesus Christ is alive today. He’s not a figure of history. He is a living person. And I don’t know about you, but just realizing that Jesus, in the body, is alive somewhere today is a thrilling thought. It’s like if you heard that He was in the other room—what would that do to you? Well, it’s not that different. He’s alive.

And that means Jesus knows you. If you have trusted in Him, then you can know that He died for you on the cross, and He intercedes for you today. Through His Holy Spirit, He is at work in your life. He is intimately acquainted with your every weakness and every nuance of your story.

And so we can’t just take Him or leave Him, because He won’t leave us. We can’t just ignore Him, because He won’t ignore us. He rose from the dead and He is a living and active person today, and we must to remember this.

The fact that Jesus is risen from the dead has some other big implications that would have been meaningful to Timothy in his situation. The resurrection reminds us of the incredible suffering that Jesus endured in His life and in His death. He faced constant opposition from His enemies. And as He suffered on the cross, it looked like his enemies were right. It looked like they won.

And there’s Timothy, suffering away, feeling all alone, his enemies stacking up. 

And so the resurrection of Jesus from the dead would have been hugely encouraging to Timothy.  God’s enemies don’t get the last word, despite all the appearances. Suffering doesn’t get the last word. Death doesn’t get the last word. And just like this was true of Jesus, so it will be true of us, His followers, as we suffer with Him faithfully. 

Like Romans 8 says, “The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:16–17). We suffer along with Christ in order to be glorified along with Christ. 

And this isn’t just a metaphor. We literally will be raised from the dead and glorified just like Jesus was. And Paul makes this exact point in verse 11 of our passage: “The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him.”

When people are suffering we’re often tempted to say glib things like “cheer up, things will get better.” And yet a statement like that is quite a bit more true that we think. It will get better—in the resurrection, when you arise with a new body. It’s that long-term hope that Paul is speaking of here. This isn’t your best life now—it’s your best life later. That’s the hope that keeps us going in our suffering.

And that’s the hope we’re reminded of in the resurrection of Jesus. He is the firstfruits of a great harvest that will one day include us.

Charles Simeon was a man who understood this truth well. He was an English pastor in the 1800s who stayed in one church for 49 years. And you might think that a pastor must be well-loved to stay in one spot for that long, but in fact the opposite was true. He was hated and opposed by many in his church. People would literally lock the front doors of the church to keep people out. And then for ten years they locked the little doors at the end of the pews so that nobody could sit down and people had to stand through the whole service.

He faced incredible opposition. And he stuck it out for almost 50 years. And a friend once asked him how he did it, and here’s the answer he gave: “My dear brother, we must not mind a little suffering for Christ’s sake. When I am getting through a hedge, if my head and shoulders are safely through, I can bear the pricking of my legs. Let us rejoice in the remembrance that our holy Head has surmounted all His suffering and triumphed over death. Let us follow Him patiently; we shall soon be partakers of His victory.”

That’s it right there. That’s the lesson Paul is trying to teach Timothy. Jesus, our head, has passed through suffering and death into resurrection life, and so will we. So remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.

“The Offspring of David”

There’s one more important phrase Paul adds in verse 8 that we need to consider: “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David.”

I hope you pick up on the significance of this phrase after our journey in these past few months. Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, the One long-promised by God. Jesus is the fulfillment of the hope of God’s people and the Son of David who, right now, is reigning at the right hand of God, just like David foresaw in Psalm 110. Jesus is the king who is going to reign upon the earth one day, like we sang earlier: “He lives forever with His saints to reign.”

And this hope would have profound implications for Timothy. Timothy would be familiar with the parable we considered last week, and he would have known that as he laboured away in Ephesus, he was being tested and was proving himself as a faithful servant who was going to reign with King Jesus.

And isn’t that, once again, exactly where Paul goes in verse 12? “if we endure, we will also reign with him…” So endure, Timothy, because you serve the risen Son of David, and you are going to reign with Him when He takes up His throne here on earth. 

Our Need to Remember

So that’s what Timothy needed. He needed to remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David.

Just think about how much Timothy had experienced. He was mentored by a guy who had seen saw the risen Jesus face-to-face. He got letters in the mail that were inspired by the Holy Spirit and became a part of Scripture. He lived in a time where you could go talk to eyewitnesses who still remembered what Jesus’ face looked like and tell you what His favourite food was. He ministered in a city—Ephesus—which had so recently been turned completely upside-down by the power of the gospel (Acts 19). Everything was still so new and fresh, and yet here he is, struggling away, and Paul needs to say “remember!”

How much more for you and me? How much more do we need to remember, to call to mind, to make sure we don’t forget Jesus Christ, risen from the dead?

I know that some of you are in a similar set of circumstances as Timothy—suffering hardship, feeling your weakness, and needing to remember.

Another angle on this command to remember is the sermon series we just finished. I’ve poured my heart out for you these past eight months, trying as best as I can to teach you the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27) and show you who Jesus is from one end of the Bible to the other. But it won’t mean much if you just go and forget about it all. In many ways, it is up to you now to remember what you’ve been taught, to remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, and to carry that remembrance into every corner of your life.

Remembering to Remember

So how do we actually do that? How do we remember to remember the risen Jesus? I mean, we’re doing that this morning, on resurrection Sunday. But once a year is not often enough.

So how do we remember Jesus Christ? How do we take the truths we learn on the mountaintops and not forget about them in the plains and valleys below? How do we make sure that these past eight months aren’t a waste of time? How do we make sure that we don’t wait until Easter 2020 before the next time we remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead? I have four answers I want to suggest to you today.

1) The first one is: come to church every Sunday. And I know that sounds like an obvious one, but it’s maybe not. Many Christians treat church like an optional extra in their life, something they very quickly give up for other priorities. I’ve had people tell me not to preach too long because they need to get home to watch the football game. 

Or maybe you come, but you don’t engage very deeply. You let your mind wander through each of the songs. You use the sermon to get caught up on some missed sleep. You’re here, but it’s not that important to you.

But I would argue that gathering once a week with God’s people, and fully engaging ourselves while we’re here, should be one of the greatest priorities in your life.

Do you know why Christians meet on Sunday? It’s because it’s the day of the week that Jesus rose from the dead. The early Christians called it the “Lord’s Day,” and they would meet together every week to remember the resurrection of Christ. 

So make it a life priority to remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, by meeting with God’s people every week. This is a priority for me even on vacation. We’ll plan travel around Sunday and make sure that, as much as possible, we can be in a good church on Sunday morning. 

2) Second, connect with God’s people throughout the week. It’s another thing we see in the New Testament: that the people of God shared life with one another. Whether it’s through our homes in hospitality, or in our small groups, or meeting people for coffee, we should be a part of each other’s lives, and we should be making the Lord a regular part of our conversation. It should be normal for us to ask each other, “How goes the spiritual battle? What has God been teaching you recently? What have you been reading in the Word? How can I pray for you?” And we use those times to remind each other about our risen Saviour and His grace for us. We help each other not forget, just like Paul was doing for Timothy here.

3) Third —and you knew I was going to say this—read your Bible often. As we consistently spend time in the word we’re going to be reminded of Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, and we won’t be allowed to forget.

To bring it back to the sermon series again, a part of my goal in this series was to lay a foundation of understanding so that as you read the Bible on your own, you have a better understanding of what’s going on and how the pieces fit together. These past eight months have been an investment into your own personal study for all the years yet to come.

So do that. Make it a priority. Yes, we all have time, we just decide to spend it on other things. If you don’t have a Bible, we’ve got some by the water cooler and you can just take one. If you’re not sure how to read or where to start, come talk to me and I can recommend some great reading plans to get you started.

Remember Jesus Christ by letting His word remind you day in and day out.

4) I have a fourth suggestion. I find that for myself, I can have a great time in God’s word in the morning, but by three in the afternoon, with all of the other stuff that comes at us in a day, I’m not doing a great job of remembering and living in that truth the way I should. And so I need to embrace the discipline of remembering throughout the day, just like Daniel, who prayed three times each day.

And I don’t do this perfectly, and I’m still figuring this out, but I’m trying. When I sit down for supper with my family, I don’t just thank God for the food. I thank Him for His grace and ask for His help to trust Him in the hours that are ahead. I try to use things like lock screens on my phone that have Scripture verses. Ways to remind myself to pray and think about the love of Christ and ask for His help throughout the day. 

We are each so prone to forget, prone to wander, prone to not remember our Saviour. And all the distractions of life in the modern world don’t help with this. But it doesn’t need to happen. We can turn off the TV, put the phone on Do Not Disturb. We can take advantage of these means of grace—the church community and our own personal disciplines—to make sure we remember Jesus Christ and live in the light of His resurrection from the dead.

So we’re going to end here with “O Church Arise.” We’re going to remember the resurrection in this song. We’re going to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to put strength in our every stride. And then we’re going to go out into the rest of our week, ready to fight the good fight and ready to remember.

This morning is significant for a number of reasons. We’ve already touched on it being our last weekend with the NBC students for this particular school year, and for some of you, this is going to be your last Sunday with us, period (until you come back to visit, which of course you will).

Today is also the conclusion to a journey that we began back in September—a sermon series that has taken us from one end of the Bible to the other, in which we’ve explored how the Bible is one story, and how Jesus Christ is the main character of that story, and how you and I are a part of this story today.

And what we’re going to do for the first part of this message is go back and survey where we’ve been this year and review what we’re learned. And then we’re going to end with Luke 19 and a final reminder about why all of this matters.

One Story

So let’s go back to where we began in September, which is where the Bible begins—“In the beginning, God” (Genesis 1:1). Before there was time, there was the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, existing in perfect fellowship and love. And the story of creation and fall and redemption and restoration was written before any of it began. 2 Timothy 1:9 says that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Timothy 1:9).

That week we also considered the purpose of this plan of redemption, which is that we would become partakers of the love and fellowship of the Trinity itself. We catch a glimpse of this mind-boggling truth in John 17, when Jesus prayed “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world…I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:24, 26).

Before there was time, the Father chose us and gave us to the Son that we would be brought to the Son and be enabled to love Him with the very same love that the Father has had for Him for all of eternity. It’s almost unbelievable, but it’s true, and it was all planned out before the beginning. 

And then the plan was put into motion. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).  God created everything for His glory, and He made Adam and Eve in His image, to reflect His glory and represent Him here on earth. And we saw how Adam and Eve were given work to do and a mission to fulfill—to fill the earth and subdue it and reign over it as God’s representatives (Genesis 1:28).

But they rebelled. They were seduced by the snake and committed treason against their maker.  And in response to their sin, God cursed the earth. He brought the whole creation crashing down around them as a physical display of the horror of their sin. From that point on, the world has been broken, and in it’s brokenness, we see our ourselves.

And yet in the midst of His words of curse, God spoke hope. He promised that an offspring of the woman would come, and that while the serpent would bruise his heel, in that very act the heel of the offspring would come down and crush the head of the snake and finish him forever.

And from that point on, people were looking for this saviour to come. When Noah was born, his father said “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands” (Genesis 5:29). Maybe Noah is the promised one. And while Noah certainly did save humanity from extinction, and God did make a covenant with Him, Noah and his family quickly proved that not even the fresh start of the flood could erase the stain of sin from the human heart. Noah helps us see more clearly what kind of a saviour we really need.

And so God began a new work of redemption through a man called Abraham, making a covenant with him and promising that through one of his offspring—there’s that word again—all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

That promise began to take shape when Abraham’s descendants became a nation, and after raising up Moses and rescuing them from Egypt, God made a special covenant with them at the foot of Mount Sinai. He promised to dwell with them and bless them and make them a nation of royal priests for the sake of the nations.

But time and time again, Israel failed in their calling broke the covenant and experienced God’s curse more often the His blessing. And so God raised up a faithful king to lead them. And God made a covenant with David, promising to raise up one of his offspring—there’s that word again—who would reign forever.

And at first it seemed like Solomon might be that promised offspring. But once again, we were disappointed. Solomon quickly turned after other gods, and Israel’s golden age came to a quick end as they began their downward slide into exile.

And so finally, just like Adam and Eve, God’s people were sent away from His presence and away from their land into the darkness of exile. And even though they were able to come back to the land after 70 years, the exile never really ended. They rebuilt the temple, but God’s presence never came to fill it the way He had with Moses’ tabernacle or Solomon’s temple. Even though they were within their own land, Israel remained locked in slavery to sin, waiting for the promised one to come and deliver them.

One Main Character

And then, one night in David’s town, one of David’s descendants had a baby. And in the fields nearby, angel armies showed up to a group of shepherd to tell them that it had finally happened. He had finally come. Jesus—the One whom they had been waiting for from the very beginning—had come. This Jesus is the main character of the story and the One whom it had always been about all along.

Jesus is the last Adam, the Father of a new humanity. He is God’s true representative and perfect image (Hebrews 1:1-3), and the one who succeeded in every place where Adam failed. And Jesus gives His perfect record of righteousness to His people us in place of Adam’s guilt (Romans 5:12-21).

Jesus is the Offspring of Eve who came to crush the head of the serpent, just like God promised. He is the stronger man who has tied up Satan and is plundering his house (Luke 11:22). And in His death on the cross, Jesus won the decisive victory over the Devil, robbing him of his grounds for accusation and taking away the judgement of death which Satan had used to enslave us in fear (Colossians 2:14, Hebrews 2:14-15).

Jesus is the Offspring of Abraham who brings blessing to all the nations, dying to ransom people for God from every tribe, language, people and nation, and making them a kingdom and priests to God (Revelation 5:9-10).

Jesus is the High Priest of the New Covenant who represents us before God (Hebrews 8:1) and who sacrificed Himself on the cross to satisfy God’s justice and pay for all of our sins once and for all (Hebrews 9:25-26).

Jesus is the Son of David who reigns as king forever (Luke 1:31-33) and who today sits enthroned at the right hand of God just like the Scriptures foretold (Acts 2:33-35).

Jesus is our true Temple—God in flesh who tabernacled among us (John 1:14). And today, we approach the Father not through a building or a location but through the person of Jesus (John 4:21, Hebrews 10:19-20).

And Jesus is the Son of Man in Daniel’s dream, the One appointed by God to judge humanity and give eternal life to those who are counted righteous in Him. Jesus is the one who will bring the fullness of the kingdom and usher in the Age to Come (Daniel 7:13-14, 12:1-4, John 5:19-29).

And that’s the story, and when we arrange it like that we can see how, from first to last, Genesis to Revelation, creation to New Creation, Jesus is the main character of this story. It’s all about Him, it’s always been all about Him, and it’s all for His glory.

We Are a Part of the Story Today

So the Bible is one story, and Jesus is the main character. But there’s a third crucial element we’ve explored in this series, which is that we are a part of this story today.

The story is not about us. We’re the supporting cast, not the main character. But we are a part of the story, and we have an important part to play.

And in order to understand what that role is, we need to understand where we are in the story, in between the first and second comings of Christ, where so much has changed and yet so much is still waiting to change.

When Jesus came the first time, He brought the kingdom of God, and has made us citizens of it. And yet, even though God’s kingdom is here, the kingdoms of this world continue to roll on in rebellion to Jesus, who still waits for His enemies to be placed under His feet (Hebrews 10:12-13).

The New Creation began on the day that Jesus walked out of His grave, and through the Holy Spirit we have been born again and become New Creations in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). And yet our bodies still belong to this decaying Old Creation which is still waiting to be redeemed (Romans 8:23, 2 Corinthians 4:16).

Through the blood of Jesus we are a part of the New Covenant, and this New Covenant has changed so much in regards to how we relate to God and how we relate to the world. And yet God Himself has not changed, and the Old Covenant Scriptures still have profound relevance for us today.

And so we occupy this space of tensions, of already-but-not-yet. And when we recognize this, when we see where we are in the story, it brings a lot of clarity to the Christian life. It helps us understand how to read the Bible and understand what God expects of us today.

And so, beginning in January, we took three months to explore twelve different aspects of the Christian life, and saw how the big story of the Bible brings clarity to our individual stories.

We began by considering our role as the New Covenant people of God, children of Abraham by faith in Christ (Galatians 3:29).

Next was work. Just like Adam and Eve were given work to do, so we in the New Covenant have been called to give ourselves to good works (Titus 3:3-8), which might include our 9-5, but is so much bigger than just our jobs.

We looked into our relationship with money and possessions, and saw how that has changed from the Old Covenant—where God promised financial prosperity as a blessing for obedience—to the New, where Christ has commanded us not to store up treasures for ourselves on earth (Matthew 6:19).

We looked at marriage, which we now understand to be a glorious picture of Christ’s relationship with His church (Ephesians 5:25). And in the New Creation, when we experience the fullness of our union with Christ, human marriage will no longer be needed (Matthew 22:30). You don’t need the baseball card when you’re at the game.

And here today, while marriage is still a good thing for many of God’s people, it’s no longer necessary the way it was in the Old Covenant. Single people like the Apostle Paul can be spiritual fathers to many. 1 Corinthians 7 tells us that singleness is no longer a problem to be fixed but, for many, a gift to be invested.

Next, we considered our family relationships, and how Jesus challenges us to love and honour Him more than all of our other natural relationships (Matthew 10:34-39). “Family is everything” was perhaps true in the Old Covenant, but is no longer the case for us at our spot in the story. 

We then looked at our relationship with the law, and how we’ve been set free from the law through the death of Christ (Galatians 3:23-26).

And yet, our freedom from the law is not a freedom to sin. Rather, we are to pursue holiness and love as put our sin to death by the power of the Spirit (Galatians 5:13-14, Romans 8:13).

We next turned to the themes of suffering and healing, and saw how God does not guarantee us a pain-free life at our spot in the story. We should expect to suffer. But our suffering is hopeful suffering, the suffering of a woman in labour who knows that her pain is leading to new life (Romans 8:18-25).

Next was spiritual warfare. We saw that the entire story of the Bible from Genesis 3 onwards is a story about a war between the serpent and the woman’s offspring. And so spiritual warfare isn’t one part of our lives; it is our lives. Ephesians 6 confirms this by describing the armour of God in terms of the basic equipment of the Christian life (Ephesians 6:10-20).

Then we looked at prayer. Prayer began in Genesis 4 as people called upon God to send the serpent-crusher. And the last prayer in the Bible is much the same: “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20). And we looked at the Lord’s prayer and saw how Jesus teaches us to ask God to keep His promises and fulfill His purposes.

Next we focused on our mission, revealed in the Great Commission as a command to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19). We saw how those words “all nations” deliberately echo God’s promise to bless all the nations through Abraham’s offspring (Genesis 22:18).

And so this is our #1 job at our part in the story. We must go to the tribes and languages and peoples and nations who have not yet heard the good news of Jesus. And it’s only once we’ve completed this work of proclaiming the gospel to all nations that Christ will return like He promised (Matthew 24:14).

Because Christ is going to return. He will come and reign on the earth like He promised. Last week we saw how the Bible concludes with a glorious vision of the New Creation, where we will be resurrected, bodily, and God will dwell with us, and we will reign with Him over the New Earth just like He intended from the beginning.

The Parable of the Minas

So take a deep breath. For many of you, that’s review, but that might be a lot to take in if you’re just visiting with us today. If you want to explore any of this more for yourself, I’d encourage you to check out our website where you can read or listen to any of these messages from this year or the blog posts that have gone along with it.

But as I thought about how to conclude this morning, my mind went immediately to the parable from Luke 19 which we read together earlier. 

Jesus told this parable to warn people that the fullness of the kingdom was not going to arrive on the timeline they were expecting. We see that here in verse 11. They’re on their way to Jerusalem, Palm Sunday is about to happen, and they think everything is about to go down all at once. All God’s promises are going to be fulfilled at once, and the Age to Come is going to begin.

And Jesus uses this parable to tell them that it’s not going to happen the way they expected. He was going to go away for a season. And in this parable He tells them what to do as they await His return.

And so this is a perfect place for us to end this series. This is what our Lord wants us to know at our spot in the story.

So as we consider what the different elements in this parable represent, it’s clear that the nobleman represents Jesus. And he calls his servants, who represent us, and he gives them each a mina. A mina was a unit of money, about three month’s wages for a labourer. Giving this money to them is an act of trust. They could go out and spend it on themselves. But he tells them to manage it for him, to “engage in business” until he comes (Luke 19:13)

So what do these minas represent for you and me? In another version of this parable, Jesus said that the master gave his servants “talents,” and that word has often caused people to assume that these talents or minas are special abilities, the kinds of things you’d see at a talent show.

But a talent, like a mina, was just a unit of money. And they just represent resources. Things that came from God which we get to invest for His sake.

These resources can certainly include our abilities. Are you good at something? That’s a gift that came from God and you should use it for Him. That’s a part of your mina. But it can be broader than that. Your mina includes anything—abilities, opportunities, relationships, time, even actual money—anything that He’s given you which we can and should use for Him. Bible college students, think about your years of training at NBC—that’s a part of your mina.

So the nobleman gives his servants a mina, and he goes away for a time, and then he returns. This represents the second coming of Jesus. This is the part we are still looking forward to.

And when the nobleman returns, he calls his servants together and takes an account of what they’ve done with what he gave them. And once again, this is what is going to happen for you and I as well. 2 Corinthians 5 tells us, “…we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:9–10).

Those who have trusted in Jesus are not going to face God’s judgement against our sin. It’s not a question of whether we get into heaven or not. But we will give an account for what we’ve done in this life. And this accounting will have real consequences for us.

We see this in verses 16-17. The first servant comes, and he’s made a 1000% ROI. And what does the master say? “Well done, good servant! Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities’” (Luke 19:17). 

Three Truths About Rewards

Now there’s three things we need to notice about verse 17.

1) First, notice that the faithful servant is rewarded. This reminds us that God is going to reward Christians for their faithful service to Him.

I remember hearing about this truth for the first time and being somewhat hesitant towards it. It seemed so different than what I had been taught. But then I began to read the Bible more carefully and realized that Jesus spoke repeatedly about God rewarding us. And he explicitly used reward as a motivation for us.

“But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:3–4). 

“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). 

“But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:13–14). 

Over and over again, Jesus tells us that God will reward our faithfulness, and He tells us to seek that reward.

2) The second thing we need to see is that there are different levels of reward for different amounts of fruitfulness. The first servant made ten minas and his reward is ten cities. The second servant in verse 18 made five minas, and so he is given responsibility over five cities. Our reward will be in proportion to our fruitfulness. And more on this in a minute.

3) The third truth about rewards is this: the reward for fruitfulness is more responsibility. Did you notice that the servant who earned ten minas wasn’t given 100 minas and told to go on a shopping spree? His reward was authority over ten cities.

The ten minas were a test. And now that he had proved his abilities, he was rewarded with a position of real responsibility in the nobleman’s kingdom.

So what does that mean for us? Just remember what we learned last week. Eternity is not just going to be an endless family reunion in a floating cloud city. God is going to create a New Heaven and New Earth, and Revelation 22:5 says that His servants “will reign forever and ever.” Or like Paul said in 2 Timothy 2:12: “if we endure, we will also reign with him…” Or like he wrote to the Corinthians, “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world?” (1 Corinthians 6:2). 

That’s what’s ahead of us: a position of responsibility and authority and even royalty within the eternal kingdom of Jesus.

And the parable of the minas tells us that our position, our amount of authority within that kingdom, will depend on how fruitful we are with what He’s given us today.

The master has entrusted you with resources, and what you do with them is telling Jesus what kind of responsibility He can trust you with when His kingdom comes.

And you know what that means? It means that your life today is an internship for the Kingdom of God. Right now you are enrolled in an internship for eternity.

And so your life matters. What you do matters. Your decisions and your habits matter. What you do with what Jesus has given you matters for eternity.

In Conclusion

So connect this truth up with some of our topics in the last three months. Think about what we’ve heard about the priority of good works, loving and serving each other in the body of Christ. Think about the radical, counter-cultural truths we’ve heard regarding money and marriage and family. Think about the summons to mission, and the challenge that we need a good reason not to go to the unreached.

Do you want some motivation to take these things seriously? To not shrug them off but to get to work being fruitful for Jesus? You’ve got it, right here in Luke 19. You’re in an internship, and you’re being tested. You’re going to give an account for what you do with what you’ve been given.

Right now, even in how you are responding to this sermon this morning, you are telling Jesus what kinds of things He can trust you with in the Age to Come.

Isn’t this powerfully motivating? Doesn’t this make our excuses sound as weak as they actually are? Doesn’t this make the story feel as real as it actually is? Doesn’t this make actually doing something—like moving across the world to reach the unreached—seem like less of a big deal and more like the kind of thing you just do when you really believe that your life is an internship for eternity? Doesn’t this make you want to crumple up your bucket list and throw it in the trash and say with Paul, “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24)?

He is Worthy

That Scripture I just read points us to the very final stop we need to make this morning. Because we have to close the loop and remind ourselves of why this matters. Why even the idea of an internship and eternal reward matters. It matters because Jesus matters. Being a faithful steward of your resources matters because those resources came from Jesus. Reigning with Jesus matters because it was Jesus who died to make us a kingdom of priests to reign with Him in the first place.

Your life matters because Jesus matters and He is worthy of all of your faithfulness, all of your obedience, all of your sacrifice, all of your worship.

And so we’re going to end this morning by singing a song together about the worthiness of Jesus. This song comes from Revelation chapter 5, which pictures God the Father holding a scroll that contains His purposes for history. And someone needs to open it, but nobody in heaven or on earth or under the earth is able to do so.

But then we read in verse 5, “And one of the elders said to me, ‘Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’” (Revelation 5:5). 

And as the chapter goes on, the heavenly choir celebrates the worthiness of the Lion and the Lamb. “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9–10).

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12). 

And all of heaven worships, transfixed on the worthiness of Jesus Christ. And we’re going to join them this morning as we conclude our service, and conclude this series, with these words about the worthiness of Jesus.

This morning is significant for a number of reasons. We’ve already touched on it being our last weekend with the NBC students for this particular school year, and for some of you, this is going to be your last Sunday with us, period (until you come back to visit, which of course you will).

Today is also the conclusion to a journey that we began back in September—a sermon series that has taken us from one end of the Bible to the other, in which we’ve explored how the Bible is one story, and how Jesus Christ is the main character of that story, and how you and I are a part of this story today.

And what we’re going to do for the first part of this message is go back and survey where we’ve been this year and review what we’re learned. And then we’re going to end with Luke 19 and a final reminder about why all of this matters.

One Story

So let’s go back to where we began in September, which is where the Bible begins—“In the beginning, God” (Genesis 1:1). Before there was time, there was the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, existing in perfect fellowship and love. And the story of creation and fall and redemption and restoration was written before any of it began. 2 Timothy 1:9 says that God “saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began” (2 Timothy 1:9).

That week we also considered the purpose of this plan of redemption, which is that we would become partakers of the love and fellowship of the Trinity itself. We catch a glimpse of this mind-boggling truth in John 17, when Jesus prayed “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world…I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:24, 26).

Before there was time, the Father chose us and gave us to the Son that we would be brought to the Son and be enabled to love Him with the very same love that the Father has had for Him for all of eternity. It’s almost unbelievable, but it’s true, and it was all planned out before the beginning. 

And then the plan was put into motion. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).  God created everything for His glory, and He made Adam and Eve in His image, to reflect His glory and represent Him here on earth. And we saw how Adam and Eve were given work to do and a mission to fulfill—to fill the earth and subdue it and reign over it as God’s representatives (Genesis 1:28).

But they rebelled. They were seduced by the snake and committed treason against their maker.  And in response to their sin, God cursed the earth. He brought the whole creation crashing down around them as a physical display of the horror of their sin. From that point on, the world has been broken, and in it’s brokenness, we see our ourselves.

And yet in the midst of His words of curse, God spoke hope. He promised that an offspring of the woman would come, and that while the serpent would bruise his heel, in that very act the heel of the offspring would come down and crush the head of the snake and finish him forever.

And from that point on, people were looking for this saviour to come. When Noah was born, his father said “Out of the ground that the LORD has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands” (Genesis 5:29). Maybe Noah is the promised one. And while Noah certainly did save humanity from extinction, and God did make a covenant with Him, Noah and his family quickly proved that not even the fresh start of the flood could erase the stain of sin from the human heart. Noah helps us see more clearly what kind of a saviour we really need.

And so God began a new work of redemption through a man called Abraham, making a covenant with him and promising that through one of his offspring—there’s that word again—all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

That promise began to take shape when Abraham’s descendants became a nation, and after raising up Moses and rescuing them from Egypt, God made a special covenant with them at the foot of Mount Sinai. He promised to dwell with them and bless them and make them a nation of royal priests for the sake of the nations.

But time and time again, Israel failed in their calling broke the covenant and experienced God’s curse more often the His blessing. And so God raised up a faithful king to lead them. And God made a covenant with David, promising to raise up one of his offspring—there’s that word again—who would reign forever.

And at first it seemed like Solomon might be that promised offspring. But once again, we were disappointed. Solomon quickly turned after other gods, and Israel’s golden age came to a quick end as they began their downward slide into exile.

And so finally, just like Adam and Eve, God’s people were sent away from His presence and away from their land into the darkness of exile. And even though they were able to come back to the land after 70 years, the exile never really ended. They rebuilt the temple, but God’s presence never came to fill it the way He had with Moses’ tabernacle or Solomon’s temple. Even though they were within their own land, Israel remained locked in slavery to sin, waiting for the promised one to come and deliver them.

One Main Character

And then, one night in David’s town, one of David’s descendants had a baby. And in the fields nearby, angel armies showed up to a group of shepherd to tell them that it had finally happened. He had finally come. Jesus—the One whom they had been waiting for from the very beginning—had come. This Jesus is the main character of the story and the One whom it had always been about all along.

Jesus is the last Adam, the Father of a new humanity. He is God’s true representative and perfect image (Hebrews 1:1-3), and the one who succeeded in every place where Adam failed. And Jesus gives His perfect record of righteousness to His people us in place of Adam’s guilt (Romans 5:12-21).

Jesus is the Offspring of Eve who came to crush the head of the serpent, just like God promised. He is the stronger man who has tied up Satan and is plundering his house (Luke 11:22). And in His death on the cross, Jesus won the decisive victory over the Devil, robbing him of his grounds for accusation and taking away the judgement of death which Satan had used to enslave us in fear (Colossians 2:14, Hebrews 2:14-15).

Jesus is the Offspring of Abraham who brings blessing to all the nations, dying to ransom people for God from every tribe, language, people and nation, and making them a kingdom and priests to God (Revelation 5:9-10).

Jesus is the High Priest of the New Covenant who represents us before God (Hebrews 8:1) and who sacrificed Himself on the cross to satisfy God’s justice and pay for all of our sins once and for all (Hebrews 9:25-26).

Jesus is the Son of David who reigns as king forever (Luke 1:31-33) and who today sits enthroned at the right hand of God just like the Scriptures foretold (Acts 2:33-35).

Jesus is our true Temple—God in flesh who tabernacled among us (John 1:14). And today, we approach the Father not through a building or a location but through the person of Jesus (John 4:21, Hebrews 10:19-20).

And Jesus is the Son of Man in Daniel’s dream, the One appointed by God to judge humanity and give eternal life to those who are counted righteous in Him. Jesus is the one who will bring the fullness of the kingdom and usher in the Age to Come (Daniel 7:13-14, 12:1-4, John 5:19-29).

And that’s the story, and when we arrange it like that we can see how, from first to last, Genesis to Revelation, creation to New Creation, Jesus is the main character of this story. It’s all about Him, it’s always been all about Him, and it’s all for His glory.

We Are a Part of the Story Today

So the Bible is one story, and Jesus is the main character. But there’s a third crucial element we’ve explored in this series, which is that we are a part of this story today.

The story is not about us. We’re the supporting cast, not the main character. But we are a part of the story, and we have an important part to play.

And in order to understand what that role is, we need to understand where we are in the story, in between the first and second comings of Christ, where so much has changed and yet so much is still waiting to change.

When Jesus came the first time, He brought the kingdom of God, and has made us citizens of it. And yet, even though God’s kingdom is here, the kingdoms of this world continue to roll on in rebellion to Jesus, who still waits for His enemies to be placed under His feet (Hebrews 10:12-13).

The New Creation began on the day that Jesus walked out of His grave, and through the Holy Spirit we have been born again and become New Creations in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17). And yet our bodies still belong to this decaying Old Creation which is still waiting to be redeemed (Romans 8:23, 2 Corinthians 4:16).

Through the blood of Jesus we are a part of the New Covenant, and this New Covenant has changed so much in regards to how we relate to God and how we relate to the world. And yet God Himself has not changed, and the Old Covenant Scriptures still have profound relevance for us today.

And so we occupy this space of tensions, of already-but-not-yet. And when we recognize this, when we see where we are in the story, it brings a lot of clarity to the Christian life. It helps us understand how to read the Bible and understand what God expects of us today.

And so, beginning in January, we took three months to explore twelve different aspects of the Christian life, and saw how the big story of the Bible brings clarity to our individual stories.

We began by considering our role as the New Covenant people of God, children of Abraham by faith in Christ (Galatians 3:29).

Next was work. Just like Adam and Eve were given work to do, so we in the New Covenant have been called to give ourselves to good works (Titus 3:3-8), which might include our 9-5, but is so much bigger than just our jobs.

We looked into our relationship with money and possessions, and saw how that has changed from the Old Covenant—where God promised financial prosperity as a blessing for obedience—to the New, where Christ has commanded us not to store up treasures for ourselves on earth (Matthew 6:19).

We looked at marriage, which we now understand to be a glorious picture of Christ’s relationship with His church (Ephesians 5:25). And in the New Creation, when we experience the fullness of our union with Christ, human marriage will no longer be needed (Matthew 22:30). You don’t need the baseball card when you’re at the game.

And here today, while marriage is still a good thing for many of God’s people, it’s no longer necessary the way it was in the Old Covenant. Single people like the Apostle Paul can be spiritual fathers to many. 1 Corinthians 7 tells us that singleness is no longer a problem to be fixed but, for many, a gift to be invested.

Next, we considered our family relationships, and how Jesus challenges us to love and honour Him more than all of our other natural relationships (Matthew 10:34-39). “Family is everything” was perhaps true in the Old Covenant, but is no longer the case for us at our spot in the story. 

We then looked at our relationship with the law, and how we’ve been set free from the law through the death of Christ (Galatians 3:23-26).

And yet, our freedom from the law is not a freedom to sin. Rather, we are to pursue holiness and love as put our sin to death by the power of the Spirit (Galatians 5:13-14, Romans 8:13).

We next turned to the themes of suffering and healing, and saw how God does not guarantee us a pain-free life at our spot in the story. We should expect to suffer. But our suffering is hopeful suffering, the suffering of a woman in labour who knows that her pain is leading to new life (Romans 8:18-25).

Next was spiritual warfare. We saw that the entire story of the Bible from Genesis 3 onwards is a story about a war between the serpent and the woman’s offspring. And so spiritual warfare isn’t one part of our lives; it is our lives. Ephesians 6 confirms this by describing the armour of God in terms of the basic equipment of the Christian life (Ephesians 6:10-20).

Then we looked at prayer. Prayer began in Genesis 4 as people called upon God to send the serpent-crusher. And the last prayer in the Bible is much the same: “Come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20). And we looked at the Lord’s prayer and saw how Jesus teaches us to ask God to keep His promises and fulfill His purposes.

Next we focused on our mission, revealed in the Great Commission as a command to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19). We saw how those words “all nations” deliberately echo God’s promise to bless all the nations through Abraham’s offspring (Genesis 22:18).

And so this is our #1 job at our part in the story. We must go to the tribes and languages and peoples and nations who have not yet heard the good news of Jesus. And it’s only once we’ve completed this work of proclaiming the gospel to all nations that Christ will return like He promised (Matthew 24:14).

Because Christ is going to return. He will come and reign on the earth like He promised. Last week we saw how the Bible concludes with a glorious vision of the New Creation, where we will be resurrected, bodily, and God will dwell with us, and we will reign with Him over the New Earth just like He intended from the beginning.

The Parable of the Minas

So take a deep breath. For many of you, that’s review, but that might be a lot to take in if you’re just visiting with us today. If you want to explore any of this more for yourself, I’d encourage you to check out our website where you can read or listen to any of these messages from this year or the blog posts that have gone along with it.

But as I thought about how to conclude this morning, my mind went immediately to the parable from Luke 19 which we read together earlier. 

Jesus told this parable to warn people that the fullness of the kingdom was not going to arrive on the timeline they were expecting. We see that here in verse 11. They’re on their way to Jerusalem, Palm Sunday is about to happen, and they think everything is about to go down all at once. All God’s promises are going to be fulfilled at once, and the Age to Come is going to begin.

And Jesus uses this parable to tell them that it’s not going to happen the way they expected. He was going to go away for a season. And in this parable He tells them what to do as they await His return.

And so this is a perfect place for us to end this series. This is what our Lord wants us to know at our spot in the story.

So as we consider what the different elements in this parable represent, it’s clear that the nobleman represents Jesus. And he calls his servants, who represent us, and he gives them each a mina. A mina was a unit of money, about three month’s wages for a labourer. Giving this money to them is an act of trust. They could go out and spend it on themselves. But he tells them to manage it for him, to “engage in business” until he comes (Luke 19:13)

So what do these minas represent for you and me? In another version of this parable, Jesus said that the master gave his servants “talents,” and that word has often caused people to assume that these talents or minas are special abilities, the kinds of things you’d see at a talent show.

But a talent, like a mina, was just a unit of money. And they just represent resources. Things that came from God which we get to invest for His sake.

These resources can certainly include our abilities. Are you good at something? That’s a gift that came from God and you should use it for Him. That’s a part of your mina. But it can be broader than that. Your mina includes anything—abilities, opportunities, relationships, time, even actual money—anything that He’s given you which we can and should use for Him. Bible college students, think about your years of training at NBC—that’s a part of your mina.

So the nobleman gives his servants a mina, and he goes away for a time, and then he returns. This represents the second coming of Jesus. This is the part we are still looking forward to.

And when the nobleman returns, he calls his servants together and takes an account of what they’ve done with what he gave them. And once again, this is what is going to happen for you and I as well. 2 Corinthians 5 tells us, “…we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (2 Corinthians 5:9–10).

Those who have trusted in Jesus are not going to face God’s judgement against our sin. It’s not a question of whether we get into heaven or not. But we will give an account for what we’ve done in this life. And this accounting will have real consequences for us.

We see this in verses 16-17. The first servant comes, and he’s made a 1000% ROI. And what does the master say? “Well done, good servant! Because you have been faithful in a very little, you shall have authority over ten cities’” (Luke 19:17). 

Three Truths About Rewards

Now there’s three things we need to notice about verse 17.

1) First, notice that the faithful servant is rewarded. This reminds us that God is going to reward Christians for their faithful service to Him.

I remember hearing about this truth for the first time and being somewhat hesitant towards it. It seemed so different than what I had been taught. But then I began to read the Bible more carefully and realized that Jesus spoke repeatedly about God rewarding us. And he explicitly used reward as a motivation for us.

“But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:3–4). 

“But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). 

“But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just” (Luke 14:13–14). 

Over and over again, Jesus tells us that God will reward our faithfulness, and He tells us to seek that reward.

2) The second thing we need to see is that there are different levels of reward for different amounts of fruitfulness. The first servant made ten minas and his reward is ten cities. The second servant in verse 18 made five minas, and so he is given responsibility over five cities. Our reward will be in proportion to our fruitfulness. And more on this in a minute.

3) The third truth about rewards is this: the reward for fruitfulness is more responsibility. Did you notice that the servant who earned ten minas wasn’t given 100 minas and told to go on a shopping spree? His reward was authority over ten cities.

The ten minas were a test. And now that he had proved his abilities, he was rewarded with a position of real responsibility in the nobleman’s kingdom.

So what does that mean for us? Just remember what we learned last week. Eternity is not just going to be an endless family reunion in a floating cloud city. God is going to create a New Heaven and New Earth, and Revelation 22:5 says that His servants “will reign forever and ever.” Or like Paul said in 2 Timothy 2:12: “if we endure, we will also reign with him…” Or like he wrote to the Corinthians, “Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world?” (1 Corinthians 6:2). 

That’s what’s ahead of us: a position of responsibility and authority and even royalty within the eternal kingdom of Jesus.

And the parable of the minas tells us that our position, our amount of authority within that kingdom, will depend on how fruitful we are with what He’s given us today.

The master has entrusted you with resources, and what you do with them is telling Jesus what kind of responsibility He can trust you with when His kingdom comes.

And you know what that means? It means that your life today is an internship for the Kingdom of God. Right now you are enrolled in an internship for eternity.

And so your life matters. What you do matters. Your decisions and your habits matter. What you do with what Jesus has given you matters for eternity.

In Conclusion

So connect this truth up with some of our topics in the last three months. Think about what we’ve heard about the priority of good works, loving and serving each other in the body of Christ. Think about the radical, counter-cultural truths we’ve heard regarding money and marriage and family. Think about the summons to mission, and the challenge that we need a good reason not to go to the unreached.

Do you want some motivation to take these things seriously? To not shrug them off but to get to work being fruitful for Jesus? You’ve got it, right here in Luke 19. You’re in an internship, and you’re being tested. You’re going to give an account for what you do with what you’ve been given.

Right now, even in how you are responding to this sermon this morning, you are telling Jesus what kinds of things He can trust you with in the Age to Come.

Isn’t this powerfully motivating? Doesn’t this make our excuses sound as weak as they actually are? Doesn’t this make the story feel as real as it actually is? Doesn’t this make actually doing something—like moving across the world to reach the unreached—seem like less of a big deal and more like the kind of thing you just do when you really believe that your life is an internship for eternity? Doesn’t this make you want to crumple up your bucket list and throw it in the trash and say with Paul, “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24)?

He is Worthy

That Scripture I just read points us to the very final stop we need to make this morning. Because we have to close the loop and remind ourselves of why this matters. Why even the idea of an internship and eternal reward matters. It matters because Jesus matters. Being a faithful steward of your resources matters because those resources came from Jesus. Reigning with Jesus matters because it was Jesus who died to make us a kingdom of priests to reign with Him in the first place.

Your life matters because Jesus matters and He is worthy of all of your faithfulness, all of your obedience, all of your sacrifice, all of your worship.

And so we’re going to end this morning by singing a song together about the worthiness of Jesus. This song comes from Revelation chapter 5, which pictures God the Father holding a scroll that contains His purposes for history. And someone needs to open it, but nobody in heaven or on earth or under the earth is able to do so.

But then we read in verse 5, “And one of the elders said to me, ‘Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’” (Revelation 5:5). 

And as the chapter goes on, the heavenly choir celebrates the worthiness of the Lion and the Lamb. “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth” (Revelation 5:9–10).

“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” (Revelation 5:12). 

And all of heaven worships, transfixed on the worthiness of Jesus Christ. And we’re going to join them this morning as we conclude our service, and conclude this series, with these words about the worthiness of Jesus.

This morning we come to the very last topic in our “You Are Here” series. Next week will be our conclusion to the series, and then on Easter Sunday we’ll reflect further on some of the themes in light of the resurrection of Christ, but today is our last major stop in terms of topics.

And hopefully it’s not a surprise that today we’re considering how the biggest story every told ends.

And so today is going to be like one of those moments—I’m sure you’ve had one before—when you’re reading a book or watching a movie and things were so tense and so uncertain and so hard to watch that you just had to skip ahead to find out how it ends. I admit that I’ve done that a couple of times in my life. I had to make sure that things worked out okay, and then I could go back and actually enjoy the story.

And that’s true for you and I. Even though we’re still in the story, we get to read the back of the book and find out who wins. We get to know how it all works out. And as we’re going to see today, and again next week, this makes all the difference for how we live out our part of the story today. 

The Trajectory of Redemption

Now hopefully, much of the material we cover today is review. We spent four sessions at family camp last June digging in to this topic, and many times throughout this series we’ve talked about the ending of the story. But it’s important for us to spend another morning focused on this, because we don’t want to assume to much. We want to make sure that we’re putting the pieces together in the proper order. And, I don’t think any of us can hear these truths too often.

So let’s begin by remembering God’s purpose in creation in the first place. The reason God made everything was for His own glory. He created this world as a theatre for His glory, and He created us to see His glory and respond in worship and love.

And that worship and love were not meant to be passive, mystical experiences. God made Adam and Eve to work. They were to participate with Him as covenant partners, ruling this world as His representatives, working and keeping the garden and filling and subduing the earth.

And they did all this in close relationship with God. The Garden of Eden really functioned as His temple, and He would walk with them there, communicating directly with them. They experienced close relationship with Him as they served Him and fulfilled their mission. 

And then the fall happened and broke all of this. Their relationship with God was permanently damaged, and their work was made hard and painful and futile.

And so God put His plan of redemption into effect. And what I hope you’ve seen in the past months is that God’s plan of redemption always had the goal of bringing us back to His original intention for us. Bringing us back into covenant partnership with Him, back into worshipping and loving Him, back into walking with Him.

Just think of what God did with Israel. We saw that the tabernacle was like a mini-Garden of Eden, and that the Levites worked it and kept it just like Adam (Numbers 3:7–8, 8:26; 18:5–6). Through the tabernacle God once again walked among His people (Leviticus 26:11–12). And in the blessings of that covenant, God was dialling back the curse and bringing Israel back closer to paradise.

But because of sin, it didn’t work. Israel broke the covenant and ended up in exile, far away from God’s presence.

And so through the prophets, God promised to come fix things once and for all. He promised to remove sin and create a New Creation where the curse would be removed and the whole world would be turned back into a perfect paradise.

One of those promises came in Isaiah 11. Listen to what God said would happen when the Messiah came to reign: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6–9). 

Animals aren’t eating each other, there’s no danger, and everything is restored to the way it was meant to be. Daniel adds to this picture the resurrection from the dead (Daniel 12:2-3), which gave people hope that even if they died before the Messiah came, they could still be a part of this New Creation.

And so this was the hope of God’s people. This is what they were expecting the Messiah to bring when he came. And so when Jesus did come, and people began to believe in Him as the Messiah, this is what they were expecting Him to bring.

And it’s very important for us to remember that Jesus did begin the New Creation. 1 Corinthians 15:20 says that when Jesus rose from the dead, He was the “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” The picture there is that the great end-times resurrection is like a harvest, and Jesus is the first bushel of wheat off of the field. The New Creation began when He walked out of His grave.

And so when we are united to Christ through faith, we become spiritually resurrected, born again, and our souls experience the reality of the New Creation. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

And yet we’re still waiting, aren’t we? Our inner self is being renewed, but our outer self is wasting away with the rest of this old creation (2 Corinthians 4:16). We’re still waiting. We’re still groaning. We’re still longing.

But we know that the day will come. The day when the gospel has been preached to all nations and the full measure of God’s chosen ones have come to faith in their saviour. The day when God’s purposes for this season of history will be fulfilled. The day when Jesus will return like He promised.

And then the day when all of God’s enemies will be finally destroyed, all wickedness utterly judged, and all of God’s promises totally fulfilled. The day when creation itself will be restored and made new, and all of God’s people from all of time will rise with new bodies to a new life on a new earth.

And there, finally, at last, we will experience the life that we were made for.

Paradise Restored

I know we’ve read Revelation 21:1-4 already, but we can’t hear these words too often: “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, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away’” (Revelation 21:1–4). 

Do you hear what God is describing here? He’s describing the perfect fulfillment of everything He had always intended for this world. This is what His plan was from the beginning: a paradise where He would dwell with His people.

And as we read through this passage and the rest of chapter 21 & 22, the final two chapters of the Bible, we hear echo after echo of the first two chapters of the Bible. For example, did you notice the tree of life in 22:2? Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden so that they wouldn’t eat of this tree and live forever. And yet here it is, in the midst of the city, free for us to partake of.

Chapter 22 verse 3 tells us that there is nothing accursed here. The curse from Genesis chapter 3 is done. The creation has finally been set free from its futility and bondage to corruption (Romans 8:20-21).

And on that New Earth we will experience what we were made for in Eden. 22:5 says that God’s servants will reign forever and ever. God intended Adam and Eve to reign as His representatives here on earth, and in Christ, we’ll be restored to this glorious office, reigning with Him forever. 

Better Than Eden

So in these ways, and so many others, the New Creation will be like Eden. And yet, if we compare these last chapters of the Bible with the first chapters of the Bible, we’ll discover that the New Creation will be even better than Eden. Way better. Our experiences will be richer and our reality will be more thrilling and our communion with God that much deeper.

For example, we won’t be just innocent like Adam and Eve, who only knew God as their Creator. We’ll know Him as our Redeemer, the one who loved us and pursued us and saved us. We’ll know Christ as our husband who laid down His life for us, and we’ll never run out of praise for the Lamb of God who was slain.

We read in Genesis 3 that God came and walked with Adam and Eve in the garden. But in the New Creation, He will actually dwell with us. Heaven won’t be a far-away place we go to. Heaven will be earth. This will be where God lives. 

And do you know how wonderful that will be? Psalm 16 says that “in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). And that fullness of joy at the right hand of God will be ours to enjoy forever.

Like Revelation 22:4 says, we will “see His face.” Those are some of the most precious words in the Bible to me. We will get to finally see God. We won’t die, like we would if we were to see Him today (Exodus 33:20). We’ll have new bodies and new eyes and we will see what today we only believe. We will walk by sight and not by faith.

And we will finally be included into the greatest experience of all, the love of the Trinity. Like we saw back in September, our eternal destiny is to be caught up within the fellowship and love of the Trinity which had been going on forever before we were ever around. And there in the New Creation, we will finally be able to see Jesus’ glory and love Him with the very same love that the Father has for Him (John 17:24, 26).

The End is the Beginning

So here’s a way of summing this all up. Our experience on the New Earth will be the perfect realization of everything we were ever created for.

C.S. Lewis expressed this so perfectly in his book “The Last Battle,” which pictures a group of characters arriving in the New Creation, and one of them says “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”

Please hear this morning that our eternity is not going to be boring. It’s not going to be a castle floating in the clouds. It’s not going to be a church service or a family reunion that never ends. It’s going to be real life, life to the full (John 10:10), better that we could have ever dreamed.

Every truly good experience we have had in this life, every fleeting moment of genuine joy or real satisfaction—it’s all been just a glimpse, just a little taste, of the true reality waiting for us in the New Creation, the reality we’ve been looking for even if we’ve never known it.

And friends, we have no idea at the exciting adventures waiting for us. If we as sinful people who only live for eight or nine decades have been able to make the kinds of things we’ve been able to make—like computers and farm equipment and iPhones—and have been able to do the kinds of things we’ve been able to do—like land on the moon—think about what kinds of things we’ll be able to do with perfect bodies and perfect hearts and eternity to spare.

Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah says that “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end” (Isaiah 9:7). It doesn’t just say that Jesus’ government won’t end. It says that of the increase of His government there will be no end. The empire of Jesus will never stop growing.

Now consider the fact that it’s not just a new earth that God will create, but a new heavens (Isaiah 65:17)—a word that often refers simply to the skies and stars above us. And this has caused some people to wonder if we will be confined to the new earth, or if we will get to explore the cosmos and rule over other planets and solar systems and galaxies. And I say, why not? If we are just a few years away from landing on Mars and we’ve been able to dream up Star Wars, why would the New Creation be more boring than that?

And so we should understand that the end of the story isn’t really the end of the story. Revelation 22 is not the end. It’s actually when the real story finally begins. Everything from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 is just a prologue, just setting the stage. When we burst out of our graves to a New Creation, that will be when the real story begins.

And once again C.S. Lewis helps us out. As the characters explore their version of the New Creation and finally meet Aslan, he tells them “‘The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’” Lewis goes on to write, “And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

And that is what we have to look forward to. The biggest story ever told going on for age after age after age of eternal, unending joy.

Questions and Conclusions

Now at this point I want us to ask two questions to help work this truth into the fabric of our lives a little bit more. And the first one is this: everything we’ve talked about today sounds like it’s going to happen after the end, after the return of Jesus and the final judgement. And if that’s true, then what do we have to look forward to until then? What happens to us now when we die?

The answer is that when we die, our souls will leave our bodies, and if we have been saved by Jesus, they will go to be in the presence of God in Heaven, in the place where God dwells and rules. Scriptures like 2 Corinthians 5:8 point us in this direction, which speak about death as being “away from the body and at home with the Lord.”

And having our souls be in the presence of God will be wonderful. It will be better than anything we experience today. Paul said that his desire was to “depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). So heaven today, having our souls be in God’s presence, will be wonderful.

But it’s not our final stop. Our final destiny is when Heaven comes down to earth, and God dwells here with us, and we won’t just be a soul but will once again live in a resurrected body. That’s our ultimate hope.

Thank about it this way. Imagine you were homeless and lived in a tent. And one day a terrible storm came through and flattened your tent, destroying it. And someone sees you standing there, and they pay for you to stay in a really nice hotel while they take care of things for you. And at the end of a few weeks, you get to move in to a brand new house that they made for you.

Was the hotel better then the tent? Way better. But your own home is even better.

And the present heaven, the way it is today, is kind of like that hotel. It’s way better than what we experience here. But even better still will be the New Creation, where our souls will be reunited with new bodies and everything will be as it was meant to be from the beginning.

Now here’s the second question. And it might sound strange to you, but I’m going to as it. Why does this matter? Why is this important? I hope all of this sounds nice, but what difference does it make?

Here’s why it’s important: when we believe what God has told us about the New Creation, we will have the courage and the freedom to sacrifice for Jesus like He has asked us to.

Because Jesus does ask us to sacrifice for Him. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). Like we saw last week, this means dying. When we come to Jesus, we come willing to do anything He would ask of us, up to and including our own death on a cross.

But Jesus doesn’t ask us to sacrifice just because. He asks us to sacrifice temporarily in view of eternity. Because what did He go on to say? “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

If we refuse to take up our cross and try to hang on to our best life now, then we’ll end up losing it. But if we lose our life here and now for Jesus’ sake, we’ll actually gain it, in eternity. In the New Creation. And it’s the hope of the New Creation that frees us to give literally everything else up here and now.

What I’m saying is that the Christian life, with all of its sacrifice and self-denial, only makes sense, and is only possible, with a strong hope in the New Creation. This is what Paul was getting at when he wrote, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

Do you hear what he’s saying? If being a Christian was only about what we get out of it here and now, then it’s not worth it. If being a Christian were about this life only, that we’re worse off than the rest of people. We’re to be most pitied. Because all we would be doing is missing out, sacrificing, denying ourselves, and for nothing.

He goes on to say, “Why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (1 Corinthians 15:30–32).

If there’s no resurrection to look forward to, then forget about this missionary life. Let’s just settle in and get comfortable.

But if there is a resurrection, if there is a New Creation, then let’s get up and lose our lives for the sake of Christ. Because we are not actually sacrificing anything. “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

Choosing to suffer for the sake of Christ, choosing to not store up treasures on earth, choosing to lay down the priority of family relationships, choosing to embrace singleness, choosing to move across the world to an unreached people—none of that is even worth comparing to the surpassing glory waiting for us in the New Creation.

So if you find yourself struggling to obey, struggling to be willing to go like we talked about last week, if your present life feels too good and the life to come feels too foggy or distant, then soak yourself in Scripture, read what God has promised us, and beg God to open your eyes to it. Pray, like Ephesians 1 says, for the “eyes of your hearts” to be “enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you” (Ephesians 1:18). Because it’s that hope which will free you up to lose your life today.

“Until He Comes”

So how do we finish off a message like this? We finish it off together, that’s how. We’re going to finish proclaiming the truth together by celebrating the Lord’s Supper—communion. We’re doing this after the message today because of those crucial words we read in our call to worship. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). 

And that’s what we do today. We proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus until He comes. And in doing that, we proclaim that He is coming. We proclaim that what we see with our eyes is not all that there is. We proclaim that the New Creation is real, and it’s already begun, and that one day it will come to this whole world just like God promised.

And in this meal we also remember that there is only one way to experience this New Creation. It’s only through the death of Christ.

If you are here this morning and you don’t know that Jesus died for your sins, then this hope of the New Creation is not for you—yet. Apart from Jesus, eternity will be filled with God’s deserved judgement.

But Jesus suffered God’s judgement on the cross for everyone who would believe in Him. And so Jesus bought this hope for us with His own blood. And so I would beg you this morning to come to Christ. Trust that He paid for all of your sins on the cross, and rose from the dead as your king and Lord. Turn to Him this morning and receive His eternal mercy.

And if you believe that, if you are trusting in Jesus as your Saviour and following Him as your King, then I invite you to share this meal with us this morning and proclaim the hope that we have.

This morning we come to the very last topic in our “You Are Here” series. Next week will be our conclusion to the series, and then on Easter Sunday we’ll reflect further on some of the themes in light of the resurrection of Christ, but today is our last major stop in terms of topics.

And hopefully it’s not a surprise that today we’re considering how the biggest story every told ends.

And so today is going to be like one of those moments—I’m sure you’ve had one before—when you’re reading a book or watching a movie and things were so tense and so uncertain and so hard to watch that you just had to skip ahead to find out how it ends. I admit that I’ve done that a couple of times in my life. I had to make sure that things worked out okay, and then I could go back and actually enjoy the story.

And that’s true for you and I. Even though we’re still in the story, we get to read the back of the book and find out who wins. We get to know how it all works out. And as we’re going to see today, and again next week, this makes all the difference for how we live out our part of the story today. 

The Trajectory of Redemption

Now hopefully, much of the material we cover today is review. We spent four sessions at family camp last June digging in to this topic, and many times throughout this series we’ve talked about the ending of the story. But it’s important for us to spend another morning focused on this, because we don’t want to assume to much. We want to make sure that we’re putting the pieces together in the proper order. And, I don’t think any of us can hear these truths too often.

So let’s begin by remembering God’s purpose in creation in the first place. The reason God made everything was for His own glory. He created this world as a theatre for His glory, and He created us to see His glory and respond in worship and love.

And that worship and love were not meant to be passive, mystical experiences. God made Adam and Eve to work. They were to participate with Him as covenant partners, ruling this world as His representatives, working and keeping the garden and filling and subduing the earth.

And they did all this in close relationship with God. The Garden of Eden really functioned as His temple, and He would walk with them there, communicating directly with them. They experienced close relationship with Him as they served Him and fulfilled their mission. 

And then the fall happened and broke all of this. Their relationship with God was permanently damaged, and their work was made hard and painful and futile.

And so God put His plan of redemption into effect. And what I hope you’ve seen in the past months is that God’s plan of redemption always had the goal of bringing us back to His original intention for us. Bringing us back into covenant partnership with Him, back into worshipping and loving Him, back into walking with Him.

Just think of what God did with Israel. We saw that the tabernacle was like a mini-Garden of Eden, and that the Levites worked it and kept it just like Adam (Numbers 3:7–8, 8:26; 18:5–6). Through the tabernacle God once again walked among His people (Leviticus 26:11–12). And in the blessings of that covenant, God was dialling back the curse and bringing Israel back closer to paradise.

But because of sin, it didn’t work. Israel broke the covenant and ended up in exile, far away from God’s presence.

And so through the prophets, God promised to come fix things once and for all. He promised to remove sin and create a New Creation where the curse would be removed and the whole world would be turned back into a perfect paradise.

One of those promises came in Isaiah 11. Listen to what God said would happen when the Messiah came to reign: “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6–9). 

Animals aren’t eating each other, there’s no danger, and everything is restored to the way it was meant to be. Daniel adds to this picture the resurrection from the dead (Daniel 12:2-3), which gave people hope that even if they died before the Messiah came, they could still be a part of this New Creation.

And so this was the hope of God’s people. This is what they were expecting the Messiah to bring when he came. And so when Jesus did come, and people began to believe in Him as the Messiah, this is what they were expecting Him to bring.

And it’s very important for us to remember that Jesus did begin the New Creation. 1 Corinthians 15:20 says that when Jesus rose from the dead, He was the “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” The picture there is that the great end-times resurrection is like a harvest, and Jesus is the first bushel of wheat off of the field. The New Creation began when He walked out of His grave.

And so when we are united to Christ through faith, we become spiritually resurrected, born again, and our souls experience the reality of the New Creation. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

And yet we’re still waiting, aren’t we? Our inner self is being renewed, but our outer self is wasting away with the rest of this old creation (2 Corinthians 4:16). We’re still waiting. We’re still groaning. We’re still longing.

But we know that the day will come. The day when the gospel has been preached to all nations and the full measure of God’s chosen ones have come to faith in their saviour. The day when God’s purposes for this season of history will be fulfilled. The day when Jesus will return like He promised.

And then the day when all of God’s enemies will be finally destroyed, all wickedness utterly judged, and all of God’s promises totally fulfilled. The day when creation itself will be restored and made new, and all of God’s people from all of time will rise with new bodies to a new life on a new earth.

And there, finally, at last, we will experience the life that we were made for.

Paradise Restored

I know we’ve read Revelation 21:1-4 already, but we can’t hear these words too often: “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, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away’” (Revelation 21:1–4). 

Do you hear what God is describing here? He’s describing the perfect fulfillment of everything He had always intended for this world. This is what His plan was from the beginning: a paradise where He would dwell with His people.

And as we read through this passage and the rest of chapter 21 & 22, the final two chapters of the Bible, we hear echo after echo of the first two chapters of the Bible. For example, did you notice the tree of life in 22:2? Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden so that they wouldn’t eat of this tree and live forever. And yet here it is, in the midst of the city, free for us to partake of.

Chapter 22 verse 3 tells us that there is nothing accursed here. The curse from Genesis chapter 3 is done. The creation has finally been set free from its futility and bondage to corruption (Romans 8:20-21).

And on that New Earth we will experience what we were made for in Eden. 22:5 says that God’s servants will reign forever and ever. God intended Adam and Eve to reign as His representatives here on earth, and in Christ, we’ll be restored to this glorious office, reigning with Him forever. 

Better Than Eden

So in these ways, and so many others, the New Creation will be like Eden. And yet, if we compare these last chapters of the Bible with the first chapters of the Bible, we’ll discover that the New Creation will be even better than Eden. Way better. Our experiences will be richer and our reality will be more thrilling and our communion with God that much deeper.

For example, we won’t be just innocent like Adam and Eve, who only knew God as their Creator. We’ll know Him as our Redeemer, the one who loved us and pursued us and saved us. We’ll know Christ as our husband who laid down His life for us, and we’ll never run out of praise for the Lamb of God who was slain.

We read in Genesis 3 that God came and walked with Adam and Eve in the garden. But in the New Creation, He will actually dwell with us. Heaven won’t be a far-away place we go to. Heaven will be earth. This will be where God lives. 

And do you know how wonderful that will be? Psalm 16 says that “in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). And that fullness of joy at the right hand of God will be ours to enjoy forever.

Like Revelation 22:4 says, we will “see His face.” Those are some of the most precious words in the Bible to me. We will get to finally see God. We won’t die, like we would if we were to see Him today (Exodus 33:20). We’ll have new bodies and new eyes and we will see what today we only believe. We will walk by sight and not by faith.

And we will finally be included into the greatest experience of all, the love of the Trinity. Like we saw back in September, our eternal destiny is to be caught up within the fellowship and love of the Trinity which had been going on forever before we were ever around. And there in the New Creation, we will finally be able to see Jesus’ glory and love Him with the very same love that the Father has for Him (John 17:24, 26).

The End is the Beginning

So here’s a way of summing this all up. Our experience on the New Earth will be the perfect realization of everything we were ever created for.

C.S. Lewis expressed this so perfectly in his book “The Last Battle,” which pictures a group of characters arriving in the New Creation, and one of them says “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.”

Please hear this morning that our eternity is not going to be boring. It’s not going to be a castle floating in the clouds. It’s not going to be a church service or a family reunion that never ends. It’s going to be real life, life to the full (John 10:10), better that we could have ever dreamed.

Every truly good experience we have had in this life, every fleeting moment of genuine joy or real satisfaction—it’s all been just a glimpse, just a little taste, of the true reality waiting for us in the New Creation, the reality we’ve been looking for even if we’ve never known it.

And friends, we have no idea at the exciting adventures waiting for us. If we as sinful people who only live for eight or nine decades have been able to make the kinds of things we’ve been able to make—like computers and farm equipment and iPhones—and have been able to do the kinds of things we’ve been able to do—like land on the moon—think about what kinds of things we’ll be able to do with perfect bodies and perfect hearts and eternity to spare.

Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah says that “Of the increase of his government and of peace there will be no end” (Isaiah 9:7). It doesn’t just say that Jesus’ government won’t end. It says that of the increase of His government there will be no end. The empire of Jesus will never stop growing.

Now consider the fact that it’s not just a new earth that God will create, but a new heavens (Isaiah 65:17)—a word that often refers simply to the skies and stars above us. And this has caused some people to wonder if we will be confined to the new earth, or if we will get to explore the cosmos and rule over other planets and solar systems and galaxies. And I say, why not? If we are just a few years away from landing on Mars and we’ve been able to dream up Star Wars, why would the New Creation be more boring than that?

And so we should understand that the end of the story isn’t really the end of the story. Revelation 22 is not the end. It’s actually when the real story finally begins. Everything from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22 is just a prologue, just setting the stage. When we burst out of our graves to a New Creation, that will be when the real story begins.

And once again C.S. Lewis helps us out. As the characters explore their version of the New Creation and finally meet Aslan, he tells them “‘The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.’” Lewis goes on to write, “And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story, which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

And that is what we have to look forward to. The biggest story ever told going on for age after age after age of eternal, unending joy.

Questions and Conclusions

Now at this point I want us to ask two questions to help work this truth into the fabric of our lives a little bit more. And the first one is this: everything we’ve talked about today sounds like it’s going to happen after the end, after the return of Jesus and the final judgement. And if that’s true, then what do we have to look forward to until then? What happens to us now when we die?

The answer is that when we die, our souls will leave our bodies, and if we have been saved by Jesus, they will go to be in the presence of God in Heaven, in the place where God dwells and rules. Scriptures like 2 Corinthians 5:8 point us in this direction, which speak about death as being “away from the body and at home with the Lord.”

And having our souls be in the presence of God will be wonderful. It will be better than anything we experience today. Paul said that his desire was to “depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23). So heaven today, having our souls be in God’s presence, will be wonderful.

But it’s not our final stop. Our final destiny is when Heaven comes down to earth, and God dwells here with us, and we won’t just be a soul but will once again live in a resurrected body. That’s our ultimate hope.

Thank about it this way. Imagine you were homeless and lived in a tent. And one day a terrible storm came through and flattened your tent, destroying it. And someone sees you standing there, and they pay for you to stay in a really nice hotel while they take care of things for you. And at the end of a few weeks, you get to move in to a brand new house that they made for you.

Was the hotel better then the tent? Way better. But your own home is even better.

And the present heaven, the way it is today, is kind of like that hotel. It’s way better than what we experience here. But even better still will be the New Creation, where our souls will be reunited with new bodies and everything will be as it was meant to be from the beginning.

Now here’s the second question. And it might sound strange to you, but I’m going to as it. Why does this matter? Why is this important? I hope all of this sounds nice, but what difference does it make?

Here’s why it’s important: when we believe what God has told us about the New Creation, we will have the courage and the freedom to sacrifice for Jesus like He has asked us to.

Because Jesus does ask us to sacrifice for Him. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). Like we saw last week, this means dying. When we come to Jesus, we come willing to do anything He would ask of us, up to and including our own death on a cross.

But Jesus doesn’t ask us to sacrifice just because. He asks us to sacrifice temporarily in view of eternity. Because what did He go on to say? “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

If we refuse to take up our cross and try to hang on to our best life now, then we’ll end up losing it. But if we lose our life here and now for Jesus’ sake, we’ll actually gain it, in eternity. In the New Creation. And it’s the hope of the New Creation that frees us to give literally everything else up here and now.

What I’m saying is that the Christian life, with all of its sacrifice and self-denial, only makes sense, and is only possible, with a strong hope in the New Creation. This is what Paul was getting at when he wrote, “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

Do you hear what he’s saying? If being a Christian was only about what we get out of it here and now, then it’s not worth it. If being a Christian were about this life only, that we’re worse off than the rest of people. We’re to be most pitied. Because all we would be doing is missing out, sacrificing, denying ourselves, and for nothing.

He goes on to say, “Why are we in danger every hour? I protest, brothers, by my pride in you, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die every day! What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’” (1 Corinthians 15:30–32).

If there’s no resurrection to look forward to, then forget about this missionary life. Let’s just settle in and get comfortable.

But if there is a resurrection, if there is a New Creation, then let’s get up and lose our lives for the sake of Christ. Because we are not actually sacrificing anything. “The sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18).

Choosing to suffer for the sake of Christ, choosing to not store up treasures on earth, choosing to lay down the priority of family relationships, choosing to embrace singleness, choosing to move across the world to an unreached people—none of that is even worth comparing to the surpassing glory waiting for us in the New Creation.

So if you find yourself struggling to obey, struggling to be willing to go like we talked about last week, if your present life feels too good and the life to come feels too foggy or distant, then soak yourself in Scripture, read what God has promised us, and beg God to open your eyes to it. Pray, like Ephesians 1 says, for the “eyes of your hearts” to be “enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you” (Ephesians 1:18). Because it’s that hope which will free you up to lose your life today.

“Until He Comes”

So how do we finish off a message like this? We finish it off together, that’s how. We’re going to finish proclaiming the truth together by celebrating the Lord’s Supper—communion. We’re doing this after the message today because of those crucial words we read in our call to worship. “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). 

And that’s what we do today. We proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus until He comes. And in doing that, we proclaim that He is coming. We proclaim that what we see with our eyes is not all that there is. We proclaim that the New Creation is real, and it’s already begun, and that one day it will come to this whole world just like God promised.

And in this meal we also remember that there is only one way to experience this New Creation. It’s only through the death of Christ.

If you are here this morning and you don’t know that Jesus died for your sins, then this hope of the New Creation is not for you—yet. Apart from Jesus, eternity will be filled with God’s deserved judgement.

But Jesus suffered God’s judgement on the cross for everyone who would believe in Him. And so Jesus bought this hope for us with His own blood. And so I would beg you this morning to come to Christ. Trust that He paid for all of your sins on the cross, and rose from the dead as your king and Lord. Turn to Him this morning and receive His eternal mercy.

And if you believe that, if you are trusting in Jesus as your Saviour and following Him as your King, then I invite you to share this meal with us this morning and proclaim the hope that we have.