Christ our Hope Anglican Church Valparaiso

We must acknowledge we are blind and that we only see so far as God shows us. God invites us to reject living in the dark and instead live in the Light. We are commanded to try, and keep trying, to discern what is pleasing to the Lord, and fully depend on God's light for each step.

When we say no to God, we’re saying no to rest, to water, to bread. We're saying no to the good that he is offering us. Think about the things that the people of Israel were stubborn about: they turned away from blessing to live in the desert. What God asks us for is a yes that leads us into life.

Faith is living in a future reality. But not because we can see it. We have faith and hope not because we can see the promise but because we can see the one who made the promise. We can see him wandering in the wilderness of our exile, we can see the one who made the garden, hungry. We can trust him because we can see him, and seeing him we see the great, rescuing love of God.

We can't repair what's broken and twisted up inside of ourselves. And we don't have any way to remedy our guilt. But Jesus succeeded where Adam failed and offers us a new and better inheritance.

Our hope is that seeing Jesus, we will be transformed. That Seeing him, our hearts will be so enraptured with his glory and goodness, and with the love of God, that we will be forever changed.

Jesus tells people who they are. We are Salt: the seasoning of the OT sacrifices and a sign of God's covenant. We are Light: the Beacon on the Hill, the city on the mountain, God's temple, and the expression of his word.

The beatitudes declare Jesus — he is the suffering one and he is the blessed one, and he is the one who brings blessing to all. And they declare Jesus especially to the sick and weak and poor and oppressed— to the crowds he's gathered who are longing for another kingdom

Repentance is about turning toward Jesus. We’re the always-turning-towards Jesus people. We're always turning our faces and our hearts and our minds to Jesus: to see him, and so that seeing him, we can be changed and follow him to new life.

In our baptism, as the free gift of God, by casting ourselves upon the Jesus as our savior, we have all become sons of God. And when you hear the word “son" in the context of baptism, we really ought to think of Jesus's baptism and the voice that speaks from heaven: this is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.

As little children, we should follow the example of the child Jesus. We are not yet what we will be. There is no end to the growth we can and will experience in God. Our hearts, abilities, and thoughts are child-like and unfinished. We should let our immaturity remind us of the hope we have in God's desire for us to "grow-up" in his everlasting love.

Jesus comes as light into the deep darkness of the world, and he comes with the power of creation, of life, and with the presence of God. His arrival is an invitation for us to lay down the weapons of darkness that we use to protect ourselves and to trust him to be our rescuer.

The wonder of the Incarnation is that God came all the way down to dwell with us… we could not climb to heaven to see him, could not even enter the holy place, and so the holy one tore down the gates of the world and brought his holiness out into our wilderness. He descended and descended and descended until the word that was spoken became the Word in flesh one night in Judea.

Jesus came to show us the Father and to open blind eyes. Our call as his people is to look away from the distractions around us (both good and bad) and turn our opened eyes toward God.

“Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you.” In Jesus, we see God’s welcome and we are invited to repent of our ways and live like the good king who came to serve.

What the end of Revelation shows us—what the end of the whole cosmos shows us—is that everything in creation, from the beginning to the end, was designed by God to tell the story of Jesus Christ. Marriage and civilization, days and seasons—all of it has always been about Jesus.

Built upon the foundation of the Apostles, we enter the New Jerusalem through gates that remind us that, like the 12 tribes of Israel, we are all God's adopted children. These images have layers of meaning, as we, God's people, are the city of God; we are His Temple, as He makes us perfect for Himself.

God made us in all the complexity of our relationships to image him, to shine his glory as it reflects off of our God-shaped lives, and what is coming for us is better than even our best longings.

The wonders of our great inheritance in Jesus Christ are so majestic and incomprehensible that we need divine help to grasp them.

The vision of the 1000 year reign highlights God's ultimate and effortless defeat of the devil. The vision of the great white throne is the culmination of our personal relationship with God. It is each soul's face to face encournter with God, who has complete and pure knowledge about each of us and still loves us. This life is a training ground where we learn to recognize our sin and look to Him, so that we may find our names in the Book of Life.

This is the purpose of God: to cast down injustice and cruelty and put an end to them; and to prepare us a feast. He invites us as guests, he washes us, and he clothes us in costly garments of righteousness not our own to give us renewed identities as image-bearers.

The Lord announces to all who have ears to hear: fallen fallen is Babylon the great. The cup of her abominations is not for you — come instead to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and drink the wine of true celebration. Yes, blood, but not blood stolen in violence, blood poured out in love as a gift to wash us of our own impurity.

Wrong worship isn't a small thing, it's the main thing. It's profanity, the defiling and desecration of creation. And so when John tells us the story again, this time he shows us that it's about restoring the cosmos to the right worship of the true God.

Revelation teaches us about faithfullness and calls us to endure to the end. The stakes of our life are higher than they seem, and our worship joins in the songs sung by Moses and the Saints and the messengers of Revelation.

Babylon is John’s name for every empire that stands in opposition to the rule of King Jesus. All the concentrated powers of the world that harm the innocent oppress the weak and distort the image of God in us will be cast down by the good ruler of the world.

This is the war of the dragon against the followers of Christ — to gather up the economic, political, and religious systems of the world and to clothe them in images and symbols that appear to point to Jesus and look like God’s rightful authority. But this false lamb speaks with the voice of the dragon, and his intention is not to make worshippers of God, but instead to turn the hearts of all people away from God and toward himself.

Revelation can be seen as a series of symbolic images retelling the same story from different perspectives. The dragon and the woman reflect and remind us of many points throughout the Old and New Testament: the dragon is the image of the serpent, the devil, and all the broken human government systems in the Old Testament, and a false imitation of the real God. The woman is Mary, Rebecca, Eve, the bride of Christ, and all of humanity glorified by God.

The church of God has a prophetic witness to proclaim, like Moses, like Elijah. And that witness is itself a part of the trumpet blast warning to the world. What we’ve already seen is recast here as the prophetic witness of the faithful church, who stand both in the presence of God and in the rebellious city of the world.

The answer to the tension of chapter 9 is that God does not write off rebellious humanity but instead sends out his people to proclaim the mystery of Christ: to invite the repentance of all and to show forth the nature of God's love by living lives like Jesus’ life.

The consistent Biblical picture of God's judgement is this: God patiently warns and waits. And the warning is to allow humanity to see and experience more and more of what they are asking for. To demonstrate by example and by experience the fruits of destruction that come from worshiping destruction — to show us the emptiness of following empty gods.

Each day, as we read and hear the word of God, each day as we work in the world and encounter his creation — as we experience the suffering of brokenness in the world, see war and famine and injustice and futility — we are called to hear the trumpets of God which proclaim his kingship and his judgement upon this system of this world, and we are called to respond in repentance and in following him in his ways into his good promise to us.

This is our promise: that the broken things of this world are not the last word, and that the tears we shed are not shed apart from hope, because God himself will shelter us, will clothe us, will draw us into his presence, and will, finally, with his own hand wipe every tear from our eyes.

As Christ unseals the scrolls of God's plan, we find evil run rampant. Those with authority use it to oppress. Those with might use it to make war. Those with wealth use it gather up luxury for themselves at the expense of the weakest and poorest. But in the midst of it all, the Lamb stands triumphant and calls us to trust him with justice.

In this chapter of John’s Revelation of Jesus, we see the purpose of the Son — to restore all of creation to the right worship of God and to reconcile all things with God. Ultimately, he has accomplished our daily prayer: a re-creation of the world in which the Father's name is hallowed, his will is done, and his kingdom extends throughout all of heaven and earth.

Jesus reveals to us God's throne. This the farthest place from sin and our earthly understanding, yet this is where we will all be going, this is our goal, our end, the purpose for which we have been created: to see God, to love Him, and to worship Him.

We called to witness and worship — to witness BY worship— and we are tempted always toward self-reliance, self-deceit, and compromise with the powers of the world that offer us peace, security, acceptance, and comfort if only we will be willing to accommodate the status quo.

The one whose mouth is a sword speaks and cuts away all the coverings and reveals what is at stake: conquer or be conquered. Conform or be transformed. Follow the Lord of all, or follow the pretender who seeks to subjugate God's people to himself. In this book, there's a lot of mystery, but there's no moral ambiguity — there are only two ways: the way that leads to life and the way that leads to death.

What is visible on earth is not the angelic victory choirs, nor the sunshine face and sword mouth of the glorious son of man, nor the burning lights of the angels of the churches. All we see is this lone pastor praying alone on his prison isle. And yet… when the Lord speaks, reality itself is uncovered and we realized that things were not as they appeared.

If the question of apocalyptic literature is to ask "what's really going on? who is really in charge of the world?" then the definitive answer of John's Revelation is clear: the God who led Israel out of Egypt, the God who created the world, the God who sent Jesus Christ to redeem his people, is the absolute king of heaven and earth.

The promise of God to his people is that although our sin makes his life-giving face destruction for us, he shows mercy. He comes to restore us—to remake us—so that by his Spirit we might be made capable of receiving the life that only comes from his face and the glory that shines out from his presence.

The Psalmist calls all people to the joy of flourishing in the presence and knowledge of God. He calls all to come into the pasture of the one good shepherd — calls us to dwell in joy by expressing a rightful thanksgiving — and the joy is found and the thanksgiving flows from this knowing. Knowing that the God who made the world also made us, and he didn’t then turn away, but instead thinks of us as his people, and even walks with us as our protector, and provider.

The God of the Cosmos turns our “awake and save us” back toward us. He says, “I am awake. Now you wake up and be saved.” We cry out for his help, and the grace and goodness of God is that he reaches out in power to give it.

The uncomfortable message of Jesus is that the Son of Man — the glorious King, the promised Messiah — has not come to primarily to save his people from their difficult circumstances… from Rome, from powerful men with evil in their hearts, from the broken systems of injustice… not yet. First, he comes to save his people from themselves.

If we understand what Paul is saying here, we actually will have the internal delight and quiet confidence that we think of when we use the words “joy” and “peace”, but it’s important to understand that we’re not called to have that state in spite of our circumstances but because of them. Because Jesus really is that good and kind and lovely, because the deepest powers of the universe really are at work on our behalf… that’s where our peace and joy come from.

We are citizens of Jesus’ kingdom, called to live here on earth like people whose whole identity is caught up in our King. As a result, we live as people whose law, values, rights, and obligations are defined by a totally different standard than the people around us.

We don’t earn our status before God, we don’t obtain it through our own strivings, rather we come to Jesus, the center of all things, and at his feet we kneel, cast all things aside, and trust ourselves completely to him.

Paul is full of joy because he can see that his service to the gospel is bringing glory to the Messiah, and so he can be confident that his life is going exactly how it’s supposed to go. Whether he lives or dies, he proclaims Jesus either way.

The transfiguration is one of the major revelatory events of Jesus' life. The Father gives us the command to listen to Jesus. This is the command we take with us, as Jesus walks with us down from the mountain top experience and back into the valley of normal and sometimes dark days of regular life.

Jesus shows us love that dignifies, that speaks truth, and that treats even his enemies as people—as image bearers, as those created by God and called by God to good purposes, even if they refuse to treat him in that way. He came to show the Father’s love, and made himself low to raise us up.