Most of us want to live our best life. We want to thrive as human beings. But it’s totally normal to not thrive. It’s normal to feel stuck in life, or burned out or depressed, or weighed down by all kinds of baggage from our past.
Today we’re starting a new sermon series in the book of Revelation. Revelation is one of the strangest books in all the Bible. It’s full of images of strange creatures and epic battles and plagues and disasters. And it’s written that way, because it’s helping us to understand an invisible world.
See, the most important things in life are invisible. God is invisible. Love is invisible. The past and future are invisible. Heaven is invisible, and souls are invisible. So all these pictures in the book of Revelation help us to understand how all these invisible things work.
In our main Bible passage today, a church is like a lampstand, because it helps people to see the truth of God. And Jesus is walking among seven lampstands, because there are seven churches that originally received this book.
Our big question today is: How can we live our best life by God’s standards? When we unpack our passage we’ll find out two things:
Glory. Praise. Recognition. Credit. We all crave it to some degree.
Last week, Pastor David unpacked the first part of Jesus’ prayer that we’re looking at today and it was all about his glory. For his greatness to be seen. That’s the main idea of glory. But the word greatness kind of describes the quantity, like “BIG GOODNESS” but not so much the quality. We learned that the QUALITY of his glory (seen in Exodus 34) is his LOVE. AND all the things that come from his love, like self-sacrifice, mercy, grace, forgiveness, justice, compassion, and so on. That’s where his greatness lies. And we all intuitively understand this because we were created to long for this kind of greatness, especially when we’re reading books or watching movies/and someone sacrifices themselves for another.
Jesus wants his glory because when he gets his glory, people come to him, and they find eternal abundant fulfilling life, not just later, but NOW. His glory is good for everyone. That was the jist of last week’s sermon.
Now as we move on in the prayer, Jesus begins to pray for his disciples, a.k.a. Us! And he says something crazy about his glory.
Right before our main passage, he says, “And glory has come to me through them. (John 17:10) Them being his followers. Us. The church.
Now just sit with that for a second. Jesus’ greatness, the glory of God. The very essence at the center of the universe. We’re not simply observers of that glory, WE ARE THE MEANS, THE VESSEL, THE VEHICLE through which Jesus is glorified! We are to represent the essential nature of God for Jesus! What a privilege! What a dignifying and satisfying motive for life. To play volleyball and BRING GLORY TO GOD. To be a janitor, AND BRING GLORY TO GOD. To eat and BRING GLORY TO GOD. We’ve been given incredible meaning and importance to life, but since we are so important to God’s mission, we are also in danger. Those who oppose God will put a target on our backs. And so, in our passage today, Jesus prays for our protection. Let’s read.
“11b Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. 12 While I was with them, I protected them in your name that[b] you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost,[c] so that the scripture might be fulfilled. 13 But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. 14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. 15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.”
We’re working backwards today in our text so we can see what God is protecting us from and what he’s protecting us for and how he is protecting us!
In all our own unique situations, we have issues that bring up feelings of guilt or even despair. Whether we’ve hurt people intentionally or unintentionally. Maybe we’ve been hurt ourselves and we are mourning the death of a trust or friendship. Or maybe we’ve invested everything into a dream that was supposed to fulfill us but it did not lead to joy or love, but rather this pervasive feeling of emptiness and dissatisfaction. This all leads us to the feeling of despair. A loss of hope.
Today, our question is, “How does God deal with our despair?”
We get to see that he deals with our despair by getting to the root of the issue which is the sin and evil in our lives and in our world. We’ll touch on this a bit more later, but for now, this is the lens in which we’re looking at the problem of despair.
What’s going on is that there’s a war happening inside of you. A war between good and evil. Between God’s child and the sin that’s been with you since forever.
EVERY Christian has this war going on inside of them. And so today, let’s ask the question, How do we win the battle within?
Our answer today is this: Admit sin’s reign and Accept Jesus’ reign.
Not all things that we trust in are reliable. You can probably think about many times where our friends let us down. Or our workplace, even our governments! And especially ourselves. How many times have you let yourself down?
This raises a question. What are we trusting in right now that might be unreliable? If I’m building my life on my success, is that good enough? If I’m building it on the hope that I’m well loved and wanted by people, is that going to satisfy me?
And I don’t think it will. I don’t think it’ll ever be enough. But there is something that can be enough.
So this is our focus today: What is a trustworthy foundation for life?
Our relationship with our parents makes such a huge difference in our lives. And so today, I want to talk about parents. And when I say parents, I’m talking about people who are FUNCTIONALLY your parents.
So most obviously, it’s usually the mom and dad who made you, but families are complex. If you got abandoned at birth and grew up with loving adoptive parents, I’m talking about your adoptive parents. Not your biological parents. Because God has given you other people to take their place. Parent-figures. You may have both!
I have 2 biological parents that love me dearly but missed out on some key moments of my life! They never gave me the talk about girls (other than stay away from them), and they never taught me to drive. But my mentor did that for me. He is a parent figure to me. So we all have parents or parent-figures that God has placed in our lives to take care of us, believe in us, teach us and love us. Before we go on, I just want to take 10 seconds to think about the people who are functionally your parents. Moms. Dad. Parent figures. God parents. Mentors. Think of their faces.
Alright, now that we have that, I want to make an observation. Most people I know do not have a healthy relationship with their parents. Because on both sides, we simply don’t know how to make these important relationships thrive, especially in families with first generation immigrants because we’re working off such different ideas, beliefs, expectations and standards. That tension is enough to destroy families!
But what can we do about it? Who can we go to for wisdom?
I think the most qualified person to look to is the one who created this whole system of families. God’s creation included the relationship between parents and children and so it reasons that HE knows the ideal design and plan for our relationship with our parents! So let’s look through the book of proverbs to see what God’s wisdom says.
One of the biggest reasons why Christianity is so offensive is because we claim to have the exclusive, absolute truth. The ONLY way to life and we try to convince everyone that we’re right and they’re wrong. And that just does not fly in our culture. It’s so narrow, it’s so close minded. We’re taught to be progressive and accepting of everything! ANd Christianity is NOT that.
But what if Jesus was right about himself? What if he is the cure to our broken world? And the only way to an abundant life? At the very least, it’s worth taking a look at.
In our passage today, Jesus makes a claim about himself and I want you to join me in thinking about it before we blindly accept it or reject it.
Jesus offers a way of living where we can go beyond just simply surviving. He offers a life where we thrive. Something that’s better than whatever the world has to offer. An abundant life with him.
How can we have abundant life? Our passage today shows us that we can have abundant life when:
These past few weeks, we’ve been going through a series on love and romance. And we’ve been talking about how wonderful and beautiful love is… but as I was thinking about it this past week, love is also really weird. It makes weird things happen, like if you took a magnet to a compass and the compass just goes out of whack. That’s what love does sometimes!
Well, depends what you mean by love. So many people have different ideas about love.
There’s a love people use to describe things and food. There’s another love that is obsessive. There’s a love that only acts as a remedy for loneliness. There’s a love of convenience. And finally, a love that comes at us like a tornado and sweeps up off our feet and twirls us around and it’s the greatest feeling in the world… But just for a moment before it spits us out more disappointed than before. These all fail.
So our question today is,
Is there a kind of love that satisfies and completes us?
Some people read the Bible and they become these really gross monsters that just judge and shame other people. Or some people even use the bible to justify doing whatever they want because Jesus loves them and will forgive them. Why is that? Aren’t we supposed to come out better after experiencing God’s words?
I think the problem is, it’s easy to misunderstand what God has said in the Bible. It’s an ancient book, from a different time and culture, with a complicated story, and unusual language. But I’ve seen that when people really take the time to understand what God is saying, there’s power in his words. Power that leads to transformed lives, and God helps us to do things that we would never be able to do on our own – if we go through the trouble to understand what he’s saying.
That leads me to our main question today; How do we know we have understood God’s words?
