High Preist's Prayer 4

OPENING

Are we there yet? How many times in your life have you heard those four words ring out from the back seat? ARE WE THERE YET? How many times have you shouted that up to Mom and Dad in the front seat? ARE WE THERE YET? As I remember back to asking those 4 words in my memory its like I could hear my Mom’s eye twitch from the back seat.

Are we there yet? I don’t know about you, but waiting to get to the destination still isn’t my favorite thing. Especially when I have to drive up or down I57, some of the most boring roads. I think the reason Kankakee has been under construction for all of my adult life is just to keep the drivers awake.

The question of Are we there yet is really about waiting. Waiting to get to the destination is excruciating. Tom Petty was right when he sang “The Waiting is the Hardest Part”

Prior research has calculated that Americans spend 37 billion hours a year waiting in line, and the average commuter spends 42 hours a year stuck in traffic. For her second paper, also with Fishbach, Roberts tracked the emotional trajectory of those waits. They found that the distress of waiting intensifies as the wait nears an end.

"This paper was about people's feelings, their experiences while they wait," Roberts says. "When you expect the wait to be ending soon, you become more impatient closer to that expectation."

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-exploring.html

TRANSITION

What these psychological studies on waiting show us is that the higher the stakes in waiting and the closer the results or closure get the more anxious we become.

And isn’t that how it feels with our faith sometimes too? We live in this strange tension where Jesus has already come, already won, already risen — and yet the world around us still feels so broken. We long for the full arrival of what Jesus promised. We ask: ‘Are we there yet?’

And Easter, ironically, highlights this tension. Because on one hand, it’s the ultimate ‘We made it’ moment — Jesus conquered death! The tomb is empty! Everything changed! But on the other hand, here we are. Still waiting for cancer to go away. Still waiting for wars to end. Still waiting for grief to lift. Still waiting for heaven to fully come.

Introduce John 17:24-26

And it turns out, Jesus knew we’d feel this way. In His final prayer before the cross — the one we’ve been walking through these last few weeks — Jesus prays something beautiful and incredibly hopeful about this very tension.

John 17:24–26 NIV

“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”

We have spent the last month walking through Jesus’ High Preist’s prayer. Today we come to it’s crrescendo. In the last three verses of this prayer Jesus is praying for the day we’ll be with Him in glory, but He’s also praying that we’ll experience His love and presence right here, right now.

What we are experincing at our present moment is a tension that many call the now and not yet. We have Victory in Jesus, but we also face trials, hardships, brokenness, hurt, pain, loss, addiction, tears, depression, anxiety, sickness, hopelessness, grief, poverty, injustice. So we are left asking ARE WE THERE YET!?

This feeling was also felt by the early Christians and the author of Hebrews talks about this same tension.

Hebrews 2:6–11 NIV

But there is a place where someone has testified: “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, a son of man that you care for him? You made them a little lower than the angels; you crowned them with glory and honor and put everything under their feet.” In putting everything under them, God left nothing that is not subject to them. Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them. But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. In bringing many sons and daughters to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through what he suffered. Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family...

We live in a world where Jesus has already won, but we don’t yet see the full results — and yet, we can live in His love right now. What the author of Hebrew points us to is realizing that while we are in the now we can currently see Jesus

but we do see Jesus. But we do see Jesus now (at present) crowned with glory and honor. So in affect our station is in tension. We now have hope in the midst of the tension.

Our flesh here in the world, but not of the world because our spirit, our soul, is abiding in a new reality that is namely in the kingdom of heaven. Paul tells us this in Romans 8

Romans 8:9–12 NIV

You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you. Therefore, brothers and sisters, we have an obligation—but it is not to the flesh, to live according to it.

We need to reckognize that while we aren’t there yet, We have access to heaven through the great mediator, Christ, who has reconnected those are in Christ to the Father. We have hope and we bare that hope, and because of that hope we have we don’t have to wait around to die.

Don’t sit around waiting to die. The light of the world is here, and now. The light of the world is us. Not all the other things around us.

Illustration In filmmaking, there's this phrase people throw around: “We’ll fix it in post.”

It means when something isn’t right during filming — bad lighting, awkward acting, a missing background — instead of fixing it in the moment, they’ll patch it up later in post-production, with editing or CGI.

The problem is — sometimes you just can’t. Bad acting is bad acting. Shaky stories stay shaky. And when you rely too much on green screens and computers, like in some famously messy movies, it doesn’t feel real. Fun fact — Ian McKellen, one of the greatest actors alive, actually broke down crying on the set of The Hobbit because he was acting alone in a green room, surrounded by tennis balls on sticks, pretending to be with people who weren’t there. He said, “This isn’t why I became an actor.”

The same thing happens to us spiritually. Too many Christians treat life like a sloppy film shoot — they’ll ignore character, habits, spiritual maturity, obedience, justice, discipleship — assuming God will “fix it in post.” “I’ll get serious about following Jesus later.” “He’ll sort me out in heaven.”

But Jesus isn’t offering a salvation that waits in the editing room. The Kingdom is now. The freedom is now. The love is now. Eternal life isn’t something that starts after the credits roll. It’s happening right here, right now.

And if you put it off — if you bank on fixing it in post — you might find yourself living a life full of green screens, propped-up sets, fake relationships, and missed moments with God’s love surrounding you the whole time.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a part of a church body that is sitting around waiting to croak to expereince the riches of grace that Christ made avaliable to us.

Jesus prays that we would know the love, be in relationship with God here and now. Not in some far of country, not in some land that our passport is getting buried 6 feet under. We have been buried and have died with Christ. We are living in the not yet, that is for sure, but by defering the experience of God’s love to the afterlife we subvert what God is wanting to do with us here and now.

Too many christians who see this life as something to just get through so the real good stuff can happen misunderstand what God is trying to accomplish. God is trying to accomplish in us what Paul prays in

Dallas Willard puts it this way:

The Gospel of Jesus is that life in the Kingdom is available to us now. We can experience the Kingdom and live in it by placing our confidence in Jesus for everything and by being His constant students precisely because we have confidence in Him.

Eternal life starts right here right now. If we are simply talking mathmatically right now is part of eternity. We are called to run the race with endurance and to throw off all the things that hinder us to do so. We get that it means we should throw off the sins and the habits and the things that are in us that aren’t like Christ, through the power of the holy spirit. It also means that we shouldn’t shackle ourselves with the spiritual handicap of thinking that God will fix it in post.

Jesus didn’t die and rise again so we could slap some spiritual CGI on a life we didn’t live with Him. He came so we could live free now — fully alive, fully loved, fully His.

Main Point

Because of Easter, we don’t wait in chains — we walk in freedom.

Jesus prays that the father’s love would be in us and that Jesus himself would be in us.

And here’s the thing — the resurrection doesn’t just give us hope for heaven someday. It gives us freedom for today. Because Jesus lives, the chains of sin, shame, legalism, and fear don’t get the last word. And that’s exactly what Paul will write about to the Galatians — a church tempted to trade freedom for slavery, grace for rules, life for law.

Next week we begin our next series where we will study together the book of Galatians. This book is a defense of gospel freedom. We have access to the good news, we have access to redemption, we have freedom to live a life with God here and now. All of this is possible because of the grace Jesus secured for us on the cross. The letter of Galatians will hopefully encourage all of us to see what it is that Jesus accomplished here. My prayer is that it would encourage us to not be a bunch of church goers sitting around waiting to die, but that we would live right here and right now.

So to answer your question, Are we there yet? Yes and no.

We may not be there yet, but we’re not stuck on the side of the road. We’re moving, together, with Jesus leading us — and there’s joy and freedom along the way. And that joy, that freedom, it’s not something we have to wait for — it’s something we get to live into now.

It reminds me of this beautiful moment from a live concert...

Closing

I have always loved listeing to live records and live music. I like to see what the bands will do differently, but ive always enjoyed the little intros or things the artists would say. In 1973 Bill Withers recorded a live record at carnegie hall. It is one of my favorite albums. Bill withers had a song called grandma’s hands, and it has one of my favorite intros to a song. It goes like this

Lotta folks of all different nationalities and thangs, come up to me and say, "I dug my Grandmother, too." And I remember, the first responsibility I ever had was to take care of my Grandmother, make sure she got everywhere OK. And at that time I was maybe 5 or 6 years old. And the most I could ov done was let her fall on me if she decided to fall. But it was a hip job, becos Grandma never went no where but the Church. And it wasn't one of them sad churches, where they sing them songs and make you wish you could just hurry up and die and get it over with. One a them kind of "Lead me on...", no, no.... Grandma them had one a them churches where they sung "If you wanna help me Jesus, it's alright. If you wanna help me Jesus, it's alright". And at the funeral they used to have to tie the caskets down! Yeah. Yeah.

Walnut Grove Christian Church, can we become a type of people so rejoicing in the Lord that they have to tie our caskets down?

Walnut Grove Christian Church, can we become the kind of people so rejoicing in the Lord that they have to tie our caskets down?

Here’s one way we start living into that kind of kingdom freedom: Practice gratitude in the tension.

Every day this week, take a moment — maybe in the morning, maybe before bed — and name one place where you feel stuck, weary, or broken. And then, right there in that very spot, name one thing God is still doing, one thing you’re grateful for, one way you’ve seen His goodness, even in the waiting.

It could be something small. A conversation. A sunrise. A memory. A hand on your shoulder. Because when we start naming where grace is already at work, joy begins to rise. Freedom starts to take root.

That’s how graves turn into gardens. That’s how mourning turns to dancing.

Can we become a people of Easter who are abiding in the freedom grace gave us? Can we allow God to take our mourning to dancing, and turn our graves and make us into gardens?

Galatians 1:3–5 NIV

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.