Christ will come into the World again

Intro

We are in our last week before Christmas. This week is an important time for the church. We have looked at the proclamation that Christ will come into the world, that He has come into the world. And that He will again come into the world.

Advent is not only celebrating that Christ has come into the world, it is a recognition that He will come again.

God works on God’s timing and that we are called to respond to His timing. And Advent reminds us that we are called to wait on God who has come and will come again.

To celebrate Advent is to celebrate in the middle. Where Christ has entered our lives, and will enter our lives again.

And how we respond to God’s work shows us what we think of God’s work.

Big idea

The Church is called to be patient, always realigning itself between the Advent and Return.

To wait in Advent is like the difference between waiting at the start of a race and waiting for someone to return your call or text.

When you text or call someone you don’t know when they will call you back. It may be whenyou can take the call. It may be when youre busy. You don’t know what you will be doing, you just go about your day hoping they will get back to you. you are waiting and anything is possible at any time.

But When you are waiting for the start of a race, you know where you are and where you will end up. You don’t know what will happen in the middle but you know which paths to take to get to the end. You are waiting but you know eventually you will complete the race. you don’t know everything but you know where everything will end up eventually.

That is the Christian life. We don’t always know what the middle looks like but we can be assured we are starting in the right place and will end in the right place. Christ has come and will come. We have to figure out the middle.

Christ will come into the World Again

TO know this is to know a central understanding of Christianity.

We have been given life. Life for right now. We have been freed. Freedom begins right now.

But we are also moving toward something. We are not only given life for right now. We have eternal life. We have life forever with Christ. He has given us a home in Him that extends past and beyond death.

And we have been promised that we would live past and beyond death and that He Himself would raise us from the dead and come back to get us.

1 Thessalonians 4:16–17 ESV

For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.

This is called the Eschaton in theology. It means the last things.

To know that Christ is coming again, for those who have trusted Him means that while He has given life and has shown us how to live, HE has promised He would come back.

He came once as Savior. He will come again as King.

He would finish what He has started. He will complete everything that feels incomplete.

Revelation 21:3–5 ESV

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.” And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

That means that we are not just passing through life, hoping that God will do something with any sense of a wreck of a world, but that our lives in Christ have meaning. They are moving toward something.

Our certainty as a people of faith is found in Christs entrance and return. That He has shown and offered us life. And that He will come back for us. That we are not left for darkness. We are not left to figure it out ourselves.

God is at work.

There are plenty of parables in teaching where we hear a man went on a trip. The idea is that the master goes out on a trip and leaves a group of people behind to figure out how to live. But the promise is always inferred that he’s coming back. Our actions are to his return.

while He is at work in our lives, we still have to wait in the middle.

Every time we celebrate Advent we stretch our arms into the past and future.

We hold on and we can wait.

Waiting can be hard but it is the recognition of coming from somewhere and waiting for something. We’ve talked about this but waiting is not passive it is active. Because you recognize that you come from somewhere and you are going somewhere

For the church found in Christ, for the Christian who is a son or daughter of the King, for the seeker in Advent, waiting is never passive. Waiting is never wasted. We rejoice while we wait because we know where we come from and where we are going.

When we wait in Christ we reach back into recognizing His entrance into the world. That He came to us when we were in the dark. When we couldn’t find a way. He became the way. What we have been promised has been given and will be fulfilled.

What does that mean for us?

We are called to wait well

While we wait we don’t have to wonder, we already know. Christ has been revealed in our world. That is our great hope.

That hope in our waiting forms us a specific way. As we stretch our arms back we also stretch them forward. We are formed in that waiting on Christs entrance and return.

To be able to wait, knowing what is coming, means that we don’t have to react in frustration or fear. We act frustration and fear when we don’t know coming. But we do coming. We know Christ has come and He has beaten death and will come again and will bring justice.

To wait well requires trust. We are called to and can trust in what Christ has promised.

And something incredible happens when we add trust to waiting.

We can wait in trust. To wait while we trust is to be patient.

Trust plus waiting equals patience

Our ability to wait creates a patient church

Being patient is difficult and being patient is a lost skill.

But it is important. It is critical. It is a fruit of the Spirit. For those in the Spirit of Christ, we learn what it means to wait. Learning what it means to wait means we learn patience.

Patience is the witness of better things. Patience is the ability to wait fully trusting in the outcome. We know the outcome. We are called to wait.

in Christ, we ultimately know that he will come again into this world as a king and restore all things.

1 Thessalonians 4:17–18 ESV

Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

And because of this, we can wait patiently. If we trust that what Christ says is true then we can wait we can be patient about it. To be patient means that we apply long-term application to holding on knowing that at some point, what has been promised will Become true.

But trusting is hard. Waiting is hard

Often times when we are impatient, it is because we don’t know the outcome. It’s because we don’t know what will happen. It’s because we’re worried that something will get in the way of our plans.

When we are impatient, it is because we’re not lined We’re not looking at the right things. We are not oriented. Have you in a line for so long that you begin to wonder if you’re even in the right line anymore? You begin to think that they forgotten about you or that you’ve lined up or done something wrong? An anxiety begins to slip in a little bit?

Waiting is hard work, it forces us to question the very thing we’re waiting for. Is this even worth it?

But when we trust what it for. An advent a season where we can grow in our trust for the very thing that we are waiting for. We orient to that thing. We orient to Christ. We and we are reminded that who we are waiting for will come through. We are not forgotten because already Christ is working in our lives when we grow in our trust for who God is in the world and grow in our trust that he will come again we growing our ability to be patient.

Patience is witness because to be patient means that you trust the outcome, even though you don’t see it.

patience always points to better things. It always lines us up to look greater things.

It was January 31st 1997. I was a senior in high school. It was a cold morning and I was about to do something I had been looking forward to for a year. January 31st 1997 was the day that the stars wars trilogy special edition was released in theatres. The first showing was at noon and I wanted tickets. I got to the movie theatre about 9am and I was the third person in line. It was me and two other guys. We hung out for three hours, excited in the cold, waiting in line for tickets and stars wars in the theatre with about 7 additional minutes of never before seen footage. About an hour before the tickets went on sale people started showing up. The two guys i met in line had a cd player and I had in my car the sountrack to the trilogy. So we put it in and played the soundtrack all the way up to buying tickets. What a great line experience. I wasn’t doing anything but waiting. But I knew the movies were out. And I knew they were re-released and I was going to see it in the theatre. Waiting was part of the fun.

Patience allows to embrace where we are now with promise of restoration

Patience means we are pointing to better things. When we wait we can embrace what is around us. We can work with what is presented to us.

Patience, when we are holding on to Christ’s promises, allows us to see what is in front of us as gift and not burden.

Christ has come once to show what and how God handles darkness and conflict. Crisis come once to show us that he is the final resolution. Crisis come once already to show us what the goodness of God in the world looks like.

Christ will come again to resolve the irresolvable. Christ will come again to proclaim victory in every way that belongs to him. Christ will come again to bring justice to the injustice. Christ will come again to pay attention to everything that has been ignored.

Christians hold that line. Christians are the one pointing to a different way.

Christians are the one ones that wait.

Christians are the ones that can wait with patience.

And while we do we can embrace what is in front of us as a gift. The imperfect, less than, sometimes frustrating maddening things we find ourselves in, in Christ, as we wait, are gifts.

When we are impatient, we reject anything that gets in our way. Or we resign to horrible outcomes. We come into financial troubles and instead of seeing hope we sink. We had wanted to go to a certain event, but there wasn’t time. So you get mad at the person you view responsible.

Patience is the reminder that not everything is worked out. We still land somewhere in the middle. But it is a middle that always has a better option. Christ’s return means that no matter what is in front of us, we can act differently.

Have we figured everything out? No. Do we still have to wait with trust? yes. That means we can be patient and gracious with each other.

Watch video. This guy somehow is doing construction not 50 feet from this live band. He could have gotten frustrated. Angry. He could have yelled. He could have gone home.

But he acted in what I think is incredible patience. He took what he was given and made a gift out of it. He didn’t reject or resign. He worked with where he was.

The church is called to work with where we are. We are always imperfect. But we are oriented to the God who will restore all things. Because of that we can wait, we can

And patience, the spiritual act of patience, is a witness. We live in a world that wants everything now and is brutal to each other when we can’t get it.

Patience is peculiar. And it points to something greater.

We trust. We wait. Because whatever we have now is nothing in comparison to Christ who will come again. We know that whatever we have now is not the complete picture of what Christ will do when HE comes again.

So waiting recognizes we are unfinished. We are incomplete. So patience is necessary.

Waiting shows the world there are better things we are waiting for.

Advent shows us there are better things we are waiting for.

When we agree and act on this, it is not passive but active. Our witness right now, is one of patience. Because we celebrate the God who entered our world and gave everything.

Our active Hope this morning and taking communion is one of patience.