The First Things Have Passed Away

He is risen. We gather this morning to remember and to celebrate our Lord Jesus Christ's victory over sin and death over the grave. But our work this morning is not only to remember, to look back, but also to look forward to what will be accomplished through his resurrection, what we have to anticipate. During Advent season, when we remember Jesus' birth, we remember his birth, his first coming, and we look forward to his second coming. The resurrection has a past and a future element as well. The past element is what happened when Jesus rose from the grave, and the future element is what's going to happen for us when we die, and then after when he returns. And so this morning, what I want to do is talk about what life will be like on that day. If you were here on Good Friday, my point in my sermon was to talk about what the death of Christ...

secured for us like what did it mean to us we could talk about it theologically but we chose to talk about it personally and what it secured for us was the forgiveness of our sins and so we're going to take the same sort of approach to our text this morning what is it what is what is the what is the resurrection produced for us what does it mean we should look forward to or hope in or anticipate resurrection of our own bodies yes eternal life with jesus in heaven yes What does that mean and what does that look like? And how are we to live in light of that? Many of us, I think, when we live our lives day to day, when we get up in the morning, you may have this experience where you wake up and you're kind of like unaware of all of the burdens of life or the day or whatever happened last night or whatever's coming on Thursday or whatever. And you just kind of wake up and you're like, oh, you're free. And then all of a sudden, it's like the world closes in on you and you're like, oh.

There was this project at work, or there was this problem here, or I'm behind on that, or I'm sick, or whatever. My shoulder hurts because I slept. Whatever it is, all of a sudden reality comes to bear on you. And it makes it harder to get out of bed, doesn't it? Because you've lost the freedom of ignorance, the ignorance you have when you're just waking up of what all the work is. Some mornings you wake up and you hear the birds and the sun and what have you, and it strengthens you and you say, I want to get up and go. But most mornings, if we're honest, that's not what we hear and that's not how we behave as we get out of bed. Maybe we look forward to a cup of coffee or something in the morning where we say, well, there's something to look forward to, some sort of comfort. If we live our lives as Christians, always bogged down with the weights and the burdens of this life, it doesn't do our hearts or our minds any good.

And it doesn't lead to us serving God well because our whole bandwidth is taken up with, what am I supposed to do today? Or what didn't I get done? Or what is the list? What are the tasks? My hope this morning is to be able to present to you, as much as I'm able and Scripture allows us, a vision for what you should look forward to, okay? So that our hearts and our minds can be reoriented to the glory that's yet to be revealed. We can't see it yet. And the reason I want us to look at these things is so that we don't grow weary as we wait and as we anticipate our own bodily resurrection. Our text this morning is Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 to 4. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.

made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and he will dwell among them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be among them. And he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will no longer be any death, there will no longer be any mourning or crying or pain. The first things have passed away. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, if you've been a Christian for very long around America, Revelation's an interesting book. It depends on where you come from, how it's viewed. In some places, it's like the thing that we base our whole Christian life and experience on. And in other places, it's like got cooties. You just can't touch the book of Revelation because no one knows what it means.

No one can sort their way through it and figure it out. And the only conception we have of it is charts and graphs and timelines and events. So we're studying a section from Revelation. In this section, John, the Apostle John, is prophesying. And prophecy is a weird thing. Because prophecy can come in a couple of different ways to us. One way that we can... that prophecy can come to us is that the Lord would speak to a prophet. We see this most often in the Old Testament where the prophet will hear a word from God and the Lord will say to him, say to the people this. And then the Lord says it and then it's like, and then there's a replay because then he goes and says it to the people. The same thing the Lord said, this is going to happen. And what the prophecy is doing is predicting future events. It's not predicting it like the weatherman predicts it. When the weatherman predicts it, we anticipate that he's going to be wrong. Or at least not, not,

perfectly right, you know? But it's a foretelling. Prophecy is simply a foretelling of future events. So most often in Scripture, it comes to us that way, where the word of the Lord comes to us from a prophet that the Lord has spoken to directly. Other times, less commonly, though this is not the only example of it, miraculously, God takes somebody out of time in their minds, a vision, a dream. And they experience something. They go somewhere. We would just think of them as, you know, maybe the closest we get to this is simply having a dream. You know, you were walking through this house and it wasn't yours, but then there was a person you knew and a thing you didn't, and you're like, it's weird. Most of the time we forget them. We don't know how to make any sense of them. But these visions from the Lord are different. He takes John here in this example, and it's like he rolls the clock of time forward. We don't know how long, but he rolls it forward. And he stops it at the time after Jesus has returned.

Right after he's come. And he's looking up and he's seeing this new thing happening. He says, I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth passed away. And that's just a strange thing to us. And there's these little comments that don't make any sense. And there was no longer any sea. We're supposed to have in our minds, quite literally, there's going to be a picture of a, there's going to be a land and there's not going to be any water anymore. No seas. The things we're accustomed to seeing is not going to be that way. Now that's just hard for us to grasp. And that's not uncommon for people to struggle to understand prophecy, a foretelling of future events. We struggle to understand them. It doesn't make sense to us. We don't have a point of reference for that. I mean, if I were to ask you, if this earth is to pass away, how is it most likely to pass away? The closest we could get to answering that question is potentially atomic war, nuclear war.

Like that would actually destroy stuff. And if there was enough of it, it would just destroy all of creation. Like it'd wipe out all the people. And then we're left being like, that would be so awful, so terrible. And why would anyone do that? Of course no one would do that. No one would want to do that. We don't have a category in our heads for the earth passing away. Because it's all we've ever known. It's all man's ever known. And so these words are strange to us. We don't quite know how to process them. And so when that happens with us, it's common to reserve our judgments about what's being prophesied and to say, well, we'll see. I'm just going to kind of put that on a back burner over there. I'm not really going to pay too much attention to it. I just want to see how that's all going to play out. Is it really going to happen? Is it not? We don't want to get our hopes up. We also don't want to be led astray. And so our approach becomes a wait and see approach. Common approach in life. Sometimes people say things and you say, well.

I'm not even really going to take that seriously. I'm going to see if they say it again first. I'm just going to wait and see if they're serious about it. Now, a wait and see approach often changes. What can a wait and see approach turn into when we're thinking about things like the new heaven and the new earth? Well, it can turn into a wait and get impatient approach. You ever get tired of waiting? Maybe not for the coming of the Lord, maybe just for like dinner or the end of the workday or the work week. You ever get impatient and you're like, I'm sick of it.

Maybe wait and see changes to wait and change our minds. Or maybe wait and see changes to wait and forget. As we wait, we just sort of forget what we were waiting for. Life is constantly coming at us, and we're busy with it, and it just sort of takes up our whole bandwidth. We're just busy thinking about the cares and the concerns of life today. It's hard for us to keep our minds and our hearts fixed on something that's so far off and that we know so little about. It is interesting in Scripture. The Bible is not a small book, but there's very, very little, comparatively, compared to the size of the book, about what life will be like in heaven. It really just doesn't talk about it a whole lot. And that also contributes to us not being able to conceive of it because there's not a whole lot of explanation of what it's like. And so that presents a problem for me as the preacher. How much can I tell you about what heaven will be like? I can only tell you what the Scripture tells us, and the Scripture doesn't actually say,

tons and tons and tons about it. But our passage this morning does say some things about it, and that's what we're going to be looking at. The first is the unbelievable reality that heaven and earth, as we know them and understand them, will pass away and that God will make a new one. Now, that doesn't make logical sense to us. We don't have a category in our minds for something like that happening. It just doesn't exist. And I'm not saying that's a fault, and you should be able to do that. I'm saying as... As finite human beings, men and women, we don't naturally possess any ability to reason our way through and say, yeah, that makes sense. This whole world is going to pass away and God's going to make a new one. I mean, honestly, how hard is it? How much difficulty is there in people believing that God made this earth? Where is creation at in the Christian church in terms of people believing it and saying, yes, that's what happened?

If we can't reason and logic and make sense of all of it, we say, well, no, I just don't know that that's quite right. Well, if we can't get a hold of the earth that we live on and inhabit today being made by God, you do realize that a new earth is just so far beyond our ability to grasp. We just don't, it's like does not compute. We can't put it anywhere, so we just leave it aside. Our reason and our logic can't make this make sense to us. The only way that we are able to accept these words, these sorts of things, is by faith. The only way we can accept the things that we can't see or touch or feel or smell or cognitively work out in our minds is to receive them by faith. It's the only thing that makes them believable.

John has a vision where he has gone into the future and is now talking about things that have already happened or that are happening currently. There's a new heaven and a new earth that's being descended out of heaven. The old heaven and the old earth are passed away. And you're kind of left wondering questions like, but where are you at exactly if there's not an old earth but there's not a new earth? Like, where are you perched in watching all of this? I don't know. I don't know. The Bible doesn't tell us where John's sitting. And he speaks about these things as they're happening, though they haven't happened yet. He's telling us what will come to pass. And so this whole concept is hard for us to grasp. It's foreign to us. We've never seen anything like it. We can't make sense out of it. And what I want to say simply to you is, you don't have to reconcile these hidden things in your mind to believe in them.

Because what's at stake right now? The thing that really is being questioned is not whether you can make sense of exactly what John is saying in this moment, but the question of whether or not you believe that God said that that was what was going to happen. It's very possible and often the case for Christians to say, I believe that God is going to do this and I don't know how. I don't know how he's going to do it. I'm not God. But he said that he would. And we can apply this sort of thinking to all kinds of areas in our lives. That God would be merciful to sinners. Why? How? Does that make any sense? Do we deserve for God to be merciful with us once, twice, every day for the rest of our lives? Are we in a relationship with God where we're doing good and doing bad and doing a little more good and over time doing more? Is that how it works? It's not how it works.

God's merciful to us because he chooses to be merciful to us. And it doesn't make sense to us. And you think, no, no, it does make sense to us. Then I simply would push you to think about your relationship with people in your life when they sin against you. Are you as merciful with them as God is with you? And you say, no. And the reason is because you get sick and tired of it. You think they should know better, they should stop, or this should be over. That you shouldn't have to endure this sort of thing. So why do we believe that God is merciful to sinners, that he saves sinners?

Is it because they're not all that bad or not as bad as the guy next to them? No, because the Bible tells us that God loves sinners. That's it. That's it. It doesn't make any real sense to us if we sit and think about it and are honest. We don't deserve God to be good to us, and yet he is. We can't reason it out in our heads unless we take what Scripture says about it and we say, well, this is how God's mind works, and it's not like mine. And actually, the Bible tells me that his thoughts and my thoughts are not the same and that his thoughts are better than mine.

And he has more thoughts than I have. In Psalm 139 verse 6, the psalmist says, Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is too high. I cannot attain to it. In Paul's writing in 2 Corinthians chapter 12, he says, I know, and I know how such a man, whether in the body or apart from the body, I don't know, God knows, was caught up into paradise and heard inexpressible words which a man is not permitted to speak. And so what do these passages and others like them teach us? Well, it teaches us that there's a lot of things that God's got going on that are hidden from our eyes. And they're not just hidden like, and if we could get a hold of them, then they would make sense to us. They're hidden from us because we wouldn't know what to do with them if we had them. We don't have the capacity to hold on to them, to interpret them, to put them in their proper place. And the future things, the fruit of the resurrection, and especially life after the resurrection,

are in the category of those things that are hidden from us, that are inaccessible to us. Maybe you children have had experience with your parents, or maybe you adults, you think back on your childhood, and you had a parent, or maybe you have a boss who's told you something, and you went, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make a lick of sense to me. In fact, I think it's foolish. And the reason you think it's foolish is because it doesn't make any sense to you. So what do you tell the person that says, well, I don't want to do that because I don't understand why that's important?

What does the parent say to the child that says, I don't want to do that yet because it doesn't make any sense to me? We tell the child, honey, you don't have to understand to obey. I love you. Do this. And what's often the case with children as the days and months and years go on is that they come to understand some of the things that their parents were telling them much later, sometimes years later, sometimes not until they have their own children. And then they go, oh. Now I understand my mom and my dad a whole lot better. One of the silly things parents do is try to explain. When I see people talking to their three-year-old and they're rationalizing with them, well, honey, we need to do this because of this and that and the other. And if we don't do that, then this other thing is going to happen. And the three-year-old doesn't get it. They just don't get it. They don't understand that. They just aren't capable of carrying all of that reasoning in their head.

And so it's better to tell the three-year-old, honey, you need to do it and you need to do it now. Well, I don't understand. That's okay. I wasn't asking you to understand. I was asking you to do it. And much of our lives as Christians are lived just like that little kid, not understanding all of the details and all of the hows and whens and whys of God's counsel and his secret will. What's important for us is to believe the things and to do the things that God says to us. even if we don't have quite a category to put it in. What we have to do then is we have to create a new category. Things I don't understand but are true because God said them. Christians must have a category, this category, and it's a category that unbelievers don't have. And it's a category that we could title, if we had to put a name on it, the title could be, Thus Says the Lord. God said it. Like, I don't know all of the details of it.

He hasn't said everything about it, but he did say this. And so I do believe this much of it. Some of you guys who are more interested in theology or proper and enjoy talking about that kind of stuff, this is the sort of thinking that you run into with a discussion of, say, the Trinity. What do you do when you talk about the Trinity? What you know is if you study the Trinity is that if you say too much about the Trinity, you will say something wrong. Because God has given us an incomplete... Explanation. And yet we believe that everything he said about the Godhead, about the Father and the Son and the Spirit, is true. And yet we can't reconcile all of it, but we've said, you know what, I've come to say, I know the Bible says this, I know God has said that, and so we build out this puzzle of explanation for the Trinity, realizing there are pieces missing from the puzzle.

And so we put as many of them together as we can, and we leave the holes that God has left. And we say, this is the picture. This is as much of the picture as he's given to us, and we're going to content ourselves with that. But we don't deny the Trinity because we can't put every piece in its place. And we don't start trimming the pieces and moving them around so that we make a puzzle with no missing pieces. We say, this is how much we know. This is what God has said. We believe it to be true. We know it is the truth.

We just don't have all of the pieces to this puzzle yet, and that's okay. The life after death, our bodily resurrection fits in that sort of category, but we don't talk about it as much. We have a little bit of what life will be like after the resurrection. It's really quite strange to think about. If you read in 1 Corinthians 15, it's a whole chapter of Scripture dedicated to the resurrection. If you read in there, you'll start scratching your head and be like, there's a seed, and the seed has to die, and the seed has to be planted, and then it's going to grow, and it's not going to be like, It was before and you're left with this imagery. Paul's using something we understand, seeds. So you take a tomato seed, right? Little tiny thing. You plant it in the ground and then it produces this, like the seed, the plant doesn't look anything like, anything like it. And the fact is they don't, like every tomato plant is not exactly the same. There's all these different types of tomato plants and some are big and some are tall and some are determinate and some are indeterminate and some grow like vines and some grow like bushes and you're like, but none of it, however it grows, looks anything like the seed.

And you're like, but that's the analogy that Paul uses for the resurrection is that like these bodies we have are seeds and they're dying and they're decaying and they have to die. And then they have to be planted in the ground and then God's going to raise them from the dead. And then they're going to be, they were perishable when they went into the ground and they're going to be raised immoral. And what is that going to be like? I don't know. I don't know because the Bible doesn't give us a whole lot of specificity about what that will be like. We know a few things about what life will be like in the resurrection. We know there won't be any marriage.

How many of us don't like that? I mean, just honestly, if you didn't know that God had said that, and we said that after you die, you're going to come back to life, but the one thing that's going to be different is you're not going to be married to your spouse anymore. You'd be like, well, I don't know that I want to go there. And so we live in these tensions with life after death because there's so little said about it, and the things that are said cut across our sensibilities. We're like, well, I don't know that that sounds like the kind of place that I would enjoy being. If I can't be married, life after death.

Death in our resurrected bodies is largely unknown to us and mysterious. And what I'll tell you about that idea there of there not being marriage in heaven is that to all of God's people, when they get there, they will realize the foolishness of their resistance to it now. They'll say, oh, there was something better than marriage. There's a sweeter relationship and community and family that I'm a part of. And it's better than the love between me and my wife or me and my husband. That's inconceivable. No one has a perfect marriage, but you probably have at least a good bit of time where you're like, you know, I really like the person I'm married to. I think they're pretty cool. If I could marry them again, I would do it. But in heaven, you're not going to be married to them. And you're like, that's just one example of things that go in and we're like, that doesn't make any sense to me. Like heaven and earth are going to pass away. Does not compute.

There will not be marriage in heaven. Does not compute. There'll be no sun and moon in heaven. There'll be no nighttime in heaven. There'll be no temple in the city. There's all these weird things and you're just like, I don't know what to, I don't have anywhere to put any of this stuff. And here's the danger. Because we don't know how to process any of those things, we tend to diminish them because they don't make sense to us and we're not sure about it. And so the reason I chose this text for us to study this morning is because I think it gets closest. to things that we can get a hold of, and things actually that would be attractive to us in the resurrection. Toward the end of this passage, the voice from the throne says, Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men. He'll dwell among them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be among them. And we'll stop there for just a second. And you should be thinking, that sounds something like the garden, like God was with his people, like in a way that none of us have ever experienced, ever.

experienced, cannot experience. And not because we don't try hard enough, but because there's sin in this world. And God has removed himself from it in a way that was not the case before the fall and will not be the case after the resurrection. And we don't have a category for how that's going to be. Because our conception of God and interacting with God and getting close to God all throughout scripture and all throughout history is a fearful thing. It's a terrifying thing. When the Israelites went out of Egypt and went out into the mountain to worship God, it was a fearful thing. When they would bring their sacrifices into the temple, there was just blood and death everywhere. Hebrews warns us that our God is a consuming fire. And so our conception of God, what we see and can get our hands on is that distance between God, we've never known anything else.

And we actually appreciate there being some distance between God because he's holy and we're not. And then we add to that our own sinfulness and our own wandering further away from God. I'll tell you, the closest you get to being in the presence of God is corporate worship. It's the closest you'll get in this life to being in the presence of God in some way, with some small picture of what it'll be like in heaven. And so we're having a class in Sunday school about what is the church, and last week we asked the question, what is worship? And what I want to say to you is it's the closest you'll get to being in the presence of God and seeing some little bit of what heaven will be like. It's the closest you'll get in this life. And that's the reason you should love worship and prioritize it, because there's no place else on earth where you're going to get that close to the life to come.

Have you not come to worship and felt like this is the only place where you feel like there's finally some distance between you and your sins? Like they're not just hounding you? Won't it be nice when you won't even be aware, they won't even be there ever? It won't be that there's just a little space, but they'll be gone. Worship's as close as we get to that in this life. And so God's going to dwell among us, among his people. In a way that we have never experienced. And then the passage ends with what he's going to do. Living among us, yes. But then John touches on the things that define our lives. Okay? This is contrary to what you're going to read on social media. This is contrary to what your mom's group or your coworkers are going to tell you their lives are about. But these are the things that...

that make up our lives, that create the Ebenezers, the things we remember, the things that stick with us, the things that change us on a day-to-day and year-by-year basis. Death, mourning, tears, and pain. In life to come, we're told that what God will do is wipe away every tear from his people's eyes, that he'll be done with, that death will finally be done. That our mourning and our crying and our pain will be removed from us, and God will do it. That those are the things that attend us in this life. Some of you guys know that this last week, my boy from my kid's school passed away. 17, tragic accident, passed away. We went to the funeral on Tuesday. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people there at this young man's funeral. Tragic, right? Is that a unique thing?

Well, it's not commonplace. It's not every single day. It's not the sort of thing we're accustomed to. But I would bet that everyone in this room has had something like that happen. And it marks your life. It's the sort of thing you don't forget. You remember silly things like the shirt you wore that day or where you parked in the parking lot or whatever. Just some arbitrary thing because that event, that death marked your life. No one said, hey, remember this. Don't ever forget it. It's the sort of thing that just... gets burned into us, changes us, and hopefully for the better over time. But these are the things that mark life in this world. Death, mourning, sorrow, pain. In the life to come, God's going to take those things away. Those things that essentially, all of those things are the result of sin in this life. Our sins and the fact that this world has fallen. Those things are going to be taken away. Now, what will life be like then? What will be left?

If we could take away from your life all of the pain, all of the sorrow, all of the death, all of the crying, all of the mourning, like if we could run a rake over your life and pull all that stuff away, there wouldn't be a whole lot left. They're the things we remember. And so the thing that I want to impress upon you or show you, if I could pull the curtain back a little bit and say, this is one place where God pulled the curtain back a little bit and most personally came to us and said, this is what life's going to be like in the resurrection. These things are going to be no more.

The tears that we cry, the pains that we feel, the sorrows that we bear are going to be gone. They're going to be gone. What will our bodies be like? I don't know. I really don't know. Will we sleep in heaven? I don't know. Will we have work to do in heaven? I think we will have work to do in heaven. But it won't be work that's encumbered by thorns and thistles and the pain of childbirth. The curse will be gone from our work. But I think there will be work. I think we'll live among people packed in in a way that we're unaccustomed to. But here's the thing. It won't bother you. You won't be upset about it. It won't be bad. You know, I think so many people like to go out and live in the country. They just like to go out and live in the country because they don't like people. They just want a little bit of space. I just want to get away. I just don't want to deal with all their drama. You know, maybe you live in an apartment and you could hear the neighbors pounding next door or upstairs or downstairs. You can hear them fighting or whatever. Their inability to get their kid to go to sleep at night or whatever you've heard.

She said, I'm going to move out in my own house. I'm going to move out way. It's worth noting that it's a city that comes down out of heaven. And if you read later on in that passage, it's a big city. It's a tall city. And I can't help but think that's where all the people live. And the people who live there would be happy. They'd be happy. And so as Christians, this is what we have to always keep in front of our hearts and minds. This world is passing away, and one day it will finally end, and God will make a new one. And when he does that, the pains and sorrows, in many ways, the only things we've ever known in this life, will be gone. They'll be gone. Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4, verses 13 to 18, he says, But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep. They were worried about those who had died and whether or not they could be with God. Brethren, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve, as do the rest who have no hope.

And that really is the distinction between a Christian, a believer, someone who looks forward to the resurrection of the dead, and those who don't. Hope. Do you have hope? We don't want you to be uninformed about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of our Lord, Again, can you see that? No. Do you believe that? Yes. And so we shall always be with the Lord. And then the part that matters.

comfort one another with these words. Comfort one another with these words. This thing that we can't get our hands on and we can't get a hold of and seems so far away as to be unimportant to us. Paul tells us to comfort one another with these words. John gives us in Revelation some picture of the things that we ought to look forward to. When you're at a funeral, when your body stops working the way it used to, when things are broken and falling apart, the natural response, is to try to go backwards to being younger. So we exercise more and we eat better and we cut our hair like young people and we dress like young people and we dye our hair and we do all these things that in the end are just aimed at like we're going to be younger. We're going to fight against death, but this is how we're going to fight against it. We're just going to try to act like things aren't messing up. Instead, we should comfort ourselves with the words that this falling apart, this breaking, this pain,

will not last. It will not last. Not forever. It may mark our life in this world, but it'll be resolved in eternity. And we'll be happy and contented with the wisdom and the will of God in dealing with his people, in caring for them, and guiding them, and providing for them. But it's very difficult to be comforted by these words. Have you ever had, or maybe you've had someone say this type of thing to you? Or maybe you've been the one who said it. These are hard things to say. We say, you know, death is real in this world. And pain and sorrow and the things you thought life was going to be like don't turn out. Sometimes they don't turn out. Sometimes they go horribly wrong. In the resurrection, those things will be wiped away for God's people. And their tears associated with them and their pains and sorrows associated with them will be removed from them. And so Jesus' resurrection guarantees us this comfort.

That when we die or are separated from those that we love, it's not the final end. And so this is our hope, and this is what we as Christians have to cling on to, and this is what we have to present to one another. It's incomplete. The knowledge is incomplete. The timing is undetermined by us. It's unknown to us. But if you're a Christian, then you believe that God will do the things that he says he's going to do. And he'll do them. in his time and in his way, and it'll be better than it would be if you had done it. And so this is the fruit of Jesus' resurrection. It gives us a hope that cannot waver or be broken by all the storms of life. Have you guys ever seen that picture of the light tower? It's got this giant, enormous wave that's crashing around it. Why is that picture so inspiring? Because there's this thing, just this outpost, you know, it's out at the end of a...

of a levee or whatever they're called, and there's just this big stone thing standing out there, and there's this enormous wave, 30 or 40 feet, just doing its best to tear it down. And what happens when the wave goes away? There stands the light tower. Christians are that light tower. The waves of this life are going to come. For some of you, they've already come, and they've been big waves, and they've been hard waves, and some of them are breaking right now. And there's another one behind them. But all of those waves of sorrow and pain and death and mourning and grief, none of that can remove from you or break down the hope that you have of the resurrection. Even though God doesn't show us a whole lot of it in Scripture, these words ought to be precious to us. We shouldn't be afraid of these words because they're in Revelation. God promises to reconcile all of our hearts, our hurts, and our sorrows. And so we should hope in it.

It's the only place you're going to find as a Christian to stand against all of the sorrows. What can you turn to when death strikes? I mean, what is there? We turn to things, but they don't satisfy. They don't work. They don't help. The resurrection of the dead, living with God in his presence, with him dwelling among us, that's what will happen. Whatever happens between now and then, I can't say to you with detail, but I can say to you with full confidence, that will happen. And your tears will be wiped away. And your sorrows will be assuaged. And your joy will be made complete. So pursue that day and live now like you believe in that day. So that when the waves come, you've got roots sunk down deep into the providence and the provision of God so that you're able to stand.

This is what the resurrection secured for us. This is what we ought to hope in. Let's pray.