The Mission of God: All things new

we have been on a series called “One Matters”

We believe that there is nothing closer to the heart of the farther then when one of his lost kids comes home.

Today I want to talk about God’s overall mission.

What is God up to? what is he doing in the world?

Last week we dove in with specifics of how you share the gospel and what it means to find a person of peace but this week I want to cover some ground that I have covered in the past…

Last week we looked at Jesus sending out the 72 and what it means to be a person of peace

Jesus told his disciples that when they go out to proclaim the kingdom!

Well what on earth does that mean?

So I will start with a question: What is the Gospel?

This should be such an elementary question in faith in Jesus but unfortunately we complicate it. We make it harder than it has to be.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, part of the gospel is Jesus’ death on the cross

Part of the gospel is the resurrection

But what did Jesus say the gospel was?

Mark 1:15 NIV

“The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

The Phrase “The kingdom of God” encompasses all of that, Jesus’ life, death, resurrection and teachings

Jesus defined the good news as the availability of God’s rule and reign in our lives right now. (Mark 1:15)

Do you see that? Before he would ever go to the cross…Before he would ever raise from the dead, he would basically say…God’s way of life is available to you.

And this matters so much in our christian life

The really impotrant thing here is the entire goal of the christian life is to have salvation right here and now…

Far too often people believe that their salvation kicks in after they die with heaven.

Nope Heaven is not necessary the goal but the reward for your your life that is committed to Jesus

In my ministry I have said this 10,000 times and people still don’t get it.

So I am going to make you write it down.

The good news and salvation of Jesus is for today

This is why there is urgency to evangelism

The point of helping people find and follow Jesus isn’t just for keeping them out of hell, it is helping them to experience heaven on earth

Jesus told us to pray for this

Let’s look at this together

Matthew 6:9–13 NIV

“This, then, is how you should pray: “ ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

What do you think we are praying for when we say, Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven? ‘

Jesus is teaching us to pray for heaven here and now!

Pray for God’s rule and reign to get ahold of people right here and now!

When we think about our “one” person that we are praying for…

The thrust of God through the whole bible is to reunite heaven and earth and the way he is doing that through Jesus is by transforming people one at a time.

See when someone surrenders their life to Jesus, not only is there a party in heaven but the Holy Spirit dwells with people and changes them.

So what I hope to do in the next few minutes is tell you the story of heaven on earth

God & Humanity Together

You know me, you know I always go back to Eden. And for the first two movements of this story, this is ground we have covered really well in multiple sermons so I will just go fast

Heaven and earth meet in Eden

God and people walk freely together

God cares for his creation

The bible actually begins and ends with visions of heaven and earth being united

This might be a strange thought in a world where babies are voluntarily killed in abortions

This might seem strange when you have nuclear powers who can destroy the planet with the flip of a switch

This might seem strange in a world where people rape and kill each other

And I want to tell you that if it seems strange that the rightful place for heaven and earth to be is united then good! That just points to the fact that our world is needs to be made right

It points to the fact that our world needs saving

It points to our estrangement to heaven

God & Humanity Estranged

So again…We know this part of the story. Because of Adam and eve’s sin the perfection of Heaven and the evil of human kind had to separate

Humans were kicked out of the heaven on earth place.

Exile from the garden

Now the first pages after Eden show a world that goes so out of control that sin eventually destroys the world in a great flood

But God does something amazing He comes to us.

God’s Covenant with Humanity

In what we call a covenant or a promise he comes to humans in our messed up condition and he tells this man Abram who he makes a promise with

Genesis 12:2–3 NIV

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

In other words, Abraham I will place my favor on you and all the people on earth will experience God’s favor because of Abraham

The point is that Heaven is coming close to earth again…And we see it in little moments

Moses at the burning bush, God’s presence is literally on earth

The people of Israel follow God’s glory though the dessert

When Israel comes to their promised land and they make a temple, the presence of the Lord is in the temple

They are these little spots of heaven on earth

But all the way though we see that this is not the full story…That God wants to do more and more than we can ever imagine

God’s Promise to humanity

All through the story of the old testament we see these glimmers that God isn’t going to stick to the plan of having just one heaven on earth outpost…

That he really has something bigger in store

Ezekiel 36:25–27 NIV

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Here is the crazy thing about Ezekiel saying this…

Up until this point in the Bible…God’s spirit is in the temple…Thats where God lives.

But God here is saying look I am going to do something new!

I am going to move out of the temple and move into the hearts of people

And what happens when God moves into a sinful broken heart?

He heals it! He cleans it up

This is the story of the whole Bible.

Ok let me recap…

Heaven and earth are united in Eden…Heaven and earth are broken with sin…God gives little glimpses of heaven all the way though the Old Testament but then promises that one day everything will change…

My sprit will dwell in my people

And this is the reality of what Jesus did when he died for sin and rose again on the third day

It actually gives echos of

Isaiah 43:18–19 NIV

“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.

What is God doing?

Well God came to us

God Redeeming Humanity

This is the story of christmas

Matthew 1:22–23 NIV

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”).

God is now with humanity

Wait HEAVEN IS ON EARTH AGAIN!

God is now with us in the particular person of Jesus

and what did he do? He took on all of our sin and died on the cross

What the apostle Paul says is this

Colossians 2:15 NIV

And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

The words that Paul used for Power and Authorities are talking about the powers of evil in this world.

What Paul is saying is kind of an amazing word picture in the New Testament…When he says he disarmed the powers the word there is “stripped” or “de-robe” So basically the cross exposes the evil and the demonic powers behind sin

and where those evil powers believed that they won a victory over Jesus, What Paul says is that Jesus stripped them naked and exposed their evil!

Thats what the cross does…

But see the question here is where is heaven?

One of the reasons why Both the full humanity and full divinity of Jesus are impotrant is that heaven and earth show up in Jesus. jesus is the perfect representation of what a new creation human will be

But on the cross….All of heaven and earth are on the cross

But what I want to submit to you is that the one thing, that changed everything was what we might call Easter morning or Resurrection day

Why?

Because Easter morning is the first day of new creation.

Jesus all over the book of revelation is called this greek word, the Archetype its where we get the word Architect

And if we want to know where is heaven then we just need to look at Jesus

Jesus dies on the cross, spends three days in the grave (Takes the keys to hell) then he raised to life again

Much later after the resurrection, the apostle John would be exiled to the island of Patmos and you know the story, if you were here I spent 28 weeks going word for word through the book of Revelation.

It tells the story of the final judgment of sin and heaven ultimately invading earth…At the culmination of all things when Heaven and earth begin to be united

John records Almighty God speaking from the throne and here is what we see

Revelation 21:5 NIV

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

Now this would take a lot of Biblical work that I am not going to do in this sermon but here is what I want to show you there are three major places in the book of Isaiah where God says, I am going to make all things new…One of them we just read Isaiah 65:17, Isaiah 43:18-19, (which we just read) Isaiah 66:22,

It is so clear that John sees the death and resurrection of Jesus as the starting point for all of this.

In other words.

The resurrection of Jesus is the first day of new creation

When God is seated on the thrown saying behold, I am making all things new! He is looking at you

I know that was a lot of work to get here but it matters, it is so impotrant

What does it mean to be made new?

So the story continues…Because one of the questions I have been asking in this sermon is where is God

Because where God is, there is where heaven is

Well after the resurrection God astounded his people yet again…

God’s spirit came and rested on thousands of people on the day of Penecost and when people repented and were baptized then they recieved the Holy Spirt

In fact at one point the Apostle Paul had to discipline the corinthian church because they were backsliding into sin and he said to them

1 Corinthians 3:16 NIV

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?

Like do you get it?

The same God who was in the garden

The same God that made a covenant with Abram

The same God who led his people out of Egypt

The same God who promised new creation

The same God who died and rose for your sins

that SAME GOD is dwelling with you…The temple is where heaven and earth meet and guess what! You are that temple!

Paul is saying look! You now are God’s temple

Heaven and earth meet in your life…Or at least its supposed to!

God is making you new through the power of the Holy Spirit

It’s what Jesus told us to pray for!

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven!

This is the whole point!

And what does Jesus do when he dwells in your body?

Ephesians 4:22–24 NIV

You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.

Paul says take off the old self that is corrupted by sin

You are a new creation!

Embrace the fact that you no longer belong to this world, but you belong to Jesus

Be made new in the attitude of your minds! Put on the new self!

See this is what we are helping people to do when we share the gospel. We are pointing to a great heaven on earth…Life with God…You can be made new…whole new mindset, whole new life!

2 Corinthians 3:18 NIV

And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.

Paul here talks about this sort of every increasing transformation into the likeness of Jesus.

If you have been a christian for a number of years and you have not seen any major change in your life…I know that Game because I’ve played it

Christianity can be a fun intellectual game. You can dig so deep into the bible and theories and stuff like that, that you miss the simple reality that every day Jesus has new mercies for you. Every day jesus wants to be with you

Every day the Holy spirit wants to make you more like Jesus

One of the things that the apostle Paul talks about is putting to death the stuff that makes you alienated from God…

he keeps telling the church Look, God himself wants to dwell with you…take off the old stuff and put on the new!

Colossians 3:10 NIV

and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.

Paul is like a broken record on this.

You’ve got this old self that apart from God honors yourself! and this new person living in you…That new person is the person that Jesus has made in you…embrace it

If you’ve become a christian recently and people have said to you..>You have changed a lot

Thank them! How encouraging

The work of the Holy Spirit is to to make me new, transformed into the image of God.

Look there are at least 30 verses I have found in Paul’s works alone that say the same thing over and over again

When you have surrendered to Jesus then that is the first day of new creation for you

You are being made new by God…And for some of us its a process of God exposing sin and us repenting and conforming to the image of God

lets look at this very key passage:

2 Corinthians 5:17–21 NIV

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Why do I bring this up? The story and the thrust of all of scripture for this series One matters.

Because it hi lights the fact that

God is redeeming the world one person at a time

The entire Bible leads to this point

It is not some strange obscure Biblical point, you literally can not open a page of the Bible without finding in the heart of God his desire to redeem people

We get to watch heaven come to earth in o

We get to watch people who were estranged from God now become the righteousness of God

Being made new gave me the job of ambassador of Jesus

an ambassador speaks on behalf of the king!

An ambassador only does what the king wants him to do

An ambassador can not be on his own agenda! an ambassador can only be on the agenda of the king…

Closing

Why do I say all of this? Church….We have a huge mission on this earth…

To go into all the world and make disciples…

to introduce people to the king! This is our task…

Baked into the entire Bible is the idea that God wants to go after the one and he wants human partners to do it!

So he is making you into ambassadors

Take off the old stuff of your life…the stuff that likes sin the stuff that embraces the evil and put on the fullness of christ!

You are called to be a new creation! Revealing Jesus wherever you go!