Our text this morning is the perfect companion to the sermon on bitterness. It
acknowledges the reality and the pain of the brokenness around us. In that sense, it
validates our pain. But it places that pain in the panorama of the grand story of
redemption and in that great story of God making all things new – we find our pain giving way to hope and our bitterness transformed into anticipation. The genius of the gospel story is that God, in Christ, gives us a brand-new way of looking at the world around us, and a brand-new perspective of our own life. It gives us a birds-eye view of our life in this world so that we aren’t lost or disoriented by the pain of our immediate context.