Now and Not Yet

So one of the things that we do around here, if you go and look at our offices, we like to take personality tests and strengths finders and stuff like that. And so one of my favorite of all that is the strengths finders. And on there, that gives you the top five. And my top five, my first one is belief, which just basically means I'm stubborn. So once I figure something out, you can't change my mind.

Yeah, I'm stubborn. My second one on there is connectedness. So it's connections between people and ideas and how things play out. My 3, 4, and 5 are all in one category, and it's learner. One of those learners is a thing called input.

And so the way this works out in my life is I love to learn about things. And. And so last year, at some point, there was a video that came across my YouTube feed, and it was a woodworking video. I've never done anything with woodworking in my life, but that fascinated me. So for the next two and a half, three months, in my spare time, I inhaled everything you could possibly.

Probably not everything, but a lot of of woodworking materials. I learned different ways to do joinery, different shelving to build, you know, the little drill holders, planters, everything, even staining and everything that comes with it. So once I felt confident in my abilities, I quickly did nothing with it.

I had dreams, but I quickly just went to the next thing. And we can. We can do that in life, in our spiritual lives. It's really easy to do. And today we are celebrating.

We are celebrating Rooted. I've got so many emails and conversations with you guys that have gone through Rooted about what God did in your lives through Rooted. We have a big bunch of of our teens that are going through their own version of it, and it has done some amazing things. We are celebrating nine baptisms today. Nine.

Nine baptisms today.

All right.

We had six. Last service. Three. This service today is a day of about celebration of what God is doing in our lives through Rooted. And just in the people of this church in general, God is moving, but in that moment, we very much have the ability to take what Rooted has done in our lives and shelve it.

I've got a ton of books in my office, and some of them impacted me more than others, but there's a lot of them that I read and I put back on the shelf and I haven't thought about again.

We can't do that. We can't do that moving forward because we live in this thing called the now and not Yet. And this is kind of made famous by N.T. wright. Bible projects picked it up.

There's a bunch of people pushing it. But it's the now and not yet of what God is doing in his creation. So the now is how he is moving through creation right now, through us. And the not yet. What he is building towards, that one day where heaven and earth will be together and we will live in glory, in eternity.

That is the not yet. And that's actually where we're going to start. We're gonna break down this now and not yet. And there's no better place to do it than Revelation, chapter 21, verses 1 through 7. And this is, this is laying out at least in the big chunk of what's coming for us.

So verse one, Revelation, chapter 21 says this. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the old heaven. And the old earth had disappeared and the sea was also gone. And what this talks, what this is talking to is not us escaping this world. We have this idea sometimes that we are waiting for all this to be over and we are going to escape this world.

But to know what God is working towards, we can look to the beginning and what he created to start, because that's the ideal. And in that ideal was right here on earth, place called Eden, where heaven and earth became one.

That's what God is working towards, to renew, to recreate heaven and earth now or to come. That's what this is, not escape, but renewal. And also there's this weird statement. And the sea was also gone. And as we look at that today, we go, man, that's weird, because we go down to Florida or to California or Texas or wherever we can get by the ocean, and we look out and we just take in the beauty of the sea with all of our knowledge and everything we have now.

But that's not what the ancient reader saw. Yes, they saw the beauty of it. But in the ancient world, from the very beginning, that sea was chaos. In Genesis actually calls it chaos waters because they never knew what was going to happen out there. It could be a beautiful morning, they could shove out and send a boat out, and then a storm would roll through and you would never see it again.

The sea represented all of chaos to the first readers. Death and destruction. And everything that came bad came from the sea.

So in this moment when it says the sea was also gone, that is God taking away anything that could cause pain, that causes the hurt in our lives, the destruction.

God is making a safe place for us free of those fears. Verse 2. And I saw holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. This is covenant relationship. This is God, the image of God moving into a ceremony of a covenant.

And there's no more intimate covenant between two people than the marriage between a man and a wife. And so that's what we're seeing here. And I think back to our wedding. Our wedding was outside in California, and it was under a gazebo that kind of overlooked this lake. And it was a really pretty place.

But in that moment when Christy walked out from the building and hit the aisle, she's all I saw.

And in that moment, with her beauty and the dress being so beautiful, and everything in that moment just sucked me in. And not only what was happening there, everything from our past, everything that had built up into that moment was on display in my heart, everything that we had built together to that point. And then you also have what's coming.

Our family together, our marriage, whatever life has in store for us. It all came together in that moment. Past, present and future all came together in that very moment. That is what's being communicated here. All the glory, all the good.

Verse 3. I heard a loud shout from the throne saying, look, God, God's home is now among his people. He will live with them, and they will be his people. God Himself will be with him. And this is again pushing back to that Eden moment.

It's pushing back to the ideal where God brought heaven and earth together in the Garden of Eden and he lived amongst his people. He walked together in the cool of the evening. He. He was. It was a bond, a special relationship that his people had with him.

And that's what it's communicating here, the relationship we will have with him one day in the night. Yet, verse 4, he will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever. And in that moment, you have a couple verses ago where God gets rid of the danger and the pain that can happen again. But now he's moving in to a very personal moment of wiping the tears of what has been, of bringing healing to his people like only he can bring.

This is him moving into relationship with us because he loves us.

Our past, our pain, the moments of injustice that we felt, our sin, the hurt and the pain that we have caused in others lives, he's going to take that away, I guarantee you. A lot of us in here are longing for that moment. Now, I promise you that at least A taste of it. God. Healing your heart can be achieved in the now and the not yet.

Whatever you're carrying right now, whatever burden you have that's on your heart, you can give it to him now. And it's not going to make things perfect.

It's not.

But he will bring that healing and that love. Verse 5. And the one sitting on the throne said, look, I am making everything new. All of creation. Heaven, earth, all of creation, everything new.

And then he said to me, write this down for what I tell you is trustworthy and true. And he said. He also said, it is finished. We have heard that line several times in the Bible. The one that comes to your mind should be Jesus on the cross saying, it is finished.

In that moment, his purpose on the earth was finished. But this moment, it's all finished. Everything that he has been working towards, everything that he has been building for us, it is completely finished. And there for us.

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, it all rests on Him.

He's created this place. He's created us. He is the only one able to do this.

To all who are thirsty, I will give freely from the springs of the water of life. All who are victorious, I want the all will who are victorious will inherit all of the blessings. I will be their God and they will be my children. All who are thirsty. This goes back to the woman at the well.

This is the same language in there. And what's important about this moment is this is the. That is the first time the woman at the well that the gospel that the good news of Jesus went from the Jewish people out into the world.

It is the first time the message of Jesus and the woman at the well, she was thirsty, she drank. And then she took that message of Jesus and she ran out and she saved her village because of that moment, that experience with God. And what this opens up is this is for everybody. It doesn't matter what you've been through, it doesn't matter what you've done in this moment.

This is for you. This opportunity is for you.

That's what God is building for. That is the not yet of the now. And not yet. That is what we are looking towards. But what do we do in the now?

What do we do in the now?

Because Jesus launched his new creation, the now started at his resurrection. The day he walked out of the tomb is the day he set things into motion. What we are to achieve, what we are to move forward in the now that we are building, he set into motion in that very moment. Tim Mackey says this followers of Jesus are many temples, places where heaven and earth meet.

Where heaven and earth meet. Just like the new creation, just like Eden, we are now the places where heaven and earth meet. So everywhere we go, we should be bringing that reality with us through this rooted experience. When you prayed, when you served, when you forgave, and when you took your strongholds that have been holding you down in your life and you gave them over to God, you are joining in that work.

He is not just calling us to the not yet. He is calling us to the now. We are the ones that bring heaven to earth in the now. He does that through us. And it's one of my favorite things about being a Jesus follower is he entrusts us.

Would that work?

Revelation 19:8. Revelation 19:8. This is going back a couple chapters, and it's describing the bride of Christ, which is us.

It says she has been given the finest of pure white linen to wear. For the fine linen represents the good deeds of God's holy people.

These good deeds, they don't save us. I want to be clear on that. They don't save us. But these good deeds are what we are called to as saved people. Our job into now is to populate the not yet.

And I'm not talking about huge pressure stuff. Everyone's soul isn't on your soul.

All this is, is carrying Jesus wherever you go and taking opportunities that happen in front of you, no matter what that looks like.

We can't do what only God can do. We can't take away the sea and everything it represents in people's lives, the chaos that it brings, the. But what we can do with our presence is calm the waters.

Whatever chaos is going on in that moment, we can show up and calm the waters in people's lives, not take it away. Calm it.

When Grayson was. Christie was pregnant with Grayson. I've talked about this before. She went on bed rest. Four months.

Four months of bed rest. Every week, another appointment of if you go into labor, this is what happens. Chances are this that he survives. So the stress of that moment, having two other little kids at home needing their mom, and she has to sit on a couch or a bed.

The waters were rough and they brought pain and fear.

But we had a group of people from our church there every night. They showed up with a meal every night. Four months straight. I never had to cook anything.

And let me tell you, some of these ladies, when they want to cook you a meal, they cook their best. Which means that baby Weight, it triples.

It was not a good time for me, at least physically.

Every day when I went to work, there were people that came to our house and sat with our other kids because they weren't in school yet and sat with my wife and prayed with her and laughed with her and calmed the waters around. They couldn't take it away, but they definitely calmed the waters. They brought heaven to earth. It was a special time, not only in our lives to see the church come around us, but it was a special time in my growth because I was shown things that I never expected anyone to do.

It's not an option.

We are called to bring heaven to earth.

So what do we do?

Those of you, I'm actually going to ask those that are getting baptized to come over and line up over here. We're getting ready to celebrate life change.

For the rest of us that have been through this, rooted these last 10 weeks, this is not the time to put that book and the biblical principles on a shelf.

I think everyone can see God is moving not only in this church, but in our community and in our nation. He is moving and we are the ones that are supposed to be a part of it.

When we start to remove the sin of our life and the strongholds there, we can then move into other people's lives and help them do the same.

When we decide to be more generous, That little bit that we have that we give can turn around and do so much more in God's hands.

When we pray for our neighbors, when we open up our table as a place that is a literal spot of heaven and earth and bring people in and love on them and create these spots where we bring heaven.

We are fulfilling our purpose.

The wall back there before Today, for the one wall, 78 names have been signed on there that have been baptized since we put it up.

After today, there will be 87 names on that wall. And that wall is personal to me because when I started going to church as an adult, when I started moving in to the people of God, I wasn't met with a wide open road that showed me who Jesus was. I was met with roadblock. And after roadblock, after roadblock, I was somebody's one. We didn't use that language then.

I was somebody's one and the church was not ready for me.

So what does it mean for a church to be ready not only for your one, you're one. If you guys don't have one or you need to re evaluate that your ones should be burning a hole in your heart right now to be in this room and find Jesus.

But our arms also need to be wide open for the other ones that one day are going to walk through that door. And what that means is on our greeting team, we don't have holes.

Every position is filled with ready to open a welcoming door in our children's ministry. It's not a stressful thing to get the positions filled week after week after week, but people are ready. We're known for our youth and kids around here, we're known for it. It's still a struggle to keep it staffed.

A church that is ready for ones to move in will no longer have those troubles, will be ready with open arms, ready for someone's life to be changed, ready for that thing to be filled and that wall to be filled with names. That's what we're building towards and that's what we are going to celebrate in this moment right now is life change. So as the people come up, as they get ready, we celebrate. We haven't talked about this in a while. We don't.

We celebrate.

That's what we're gonna do. Let me pray. God, we thank you so much for this day. We thank you for the life change that has happened here today. We thank you for every person that has said yes to you and is going to put that on display right now.

God, this moment for them is not the end. It is the beginning of a special relationship. Foster that help your church right here in this moment to be ready.

Whatever you have for us, help us to be ready. And God, we again, we lift up these three today. We lift up the sixth and last service and we ask that you just bless this moment in Jesus name. Amen.