So I started an experiment a couple of months ago, and it's made me actually look forward to something a little bit more than normal, but last spring I did the unimaginable and I took Facebook off of my phone. Just some people like that. Well, I like those. I have a certain time now.
I can sit down at my computer at the house and I'll do the random Facebooking and just see all the silly stuff that comes across the internet. And I can show you all my new favorite silly thing. I love the internet. It shows us how amazing humanity, like all the amazing things that we can do.
Let me show you a picture that I found that was amazing, and I'm going to tell you about what's even more amazing about it. It's kind of awesome. I've never seen this yet. Do you all know about this?
Does anybody have any idea where I'm going right now? Awesome. Okay, like that's crazy, right? Like that guy has abs and not like me.
I mean, does anybody have yet? See, this also went legendary. The guy hanging his child off of this. Okay, who here would hang their kid off of the rock ledge like this?
Nobody? Okay, let's show the next picture. Who here would hang their kid off the same? Let's go back and forth to Pinatou.
Look at the background. Somebody found a very well-placed rock. Y'all see what's going on here? So if you're just the right angle and you're zoomed in just right enough, it looks like this is crazy.
And then you kind of change your angle and you zoom out and you realize this is just a normal rock with a beautiful background. See, when we just zoom out on stuff, it changes a little bit, right? When we just zoom out on our perspective, it can change things. You know, we've been reading Revelation this summer, and one of the things I talked about last week was realizing that in so many ways, and I could not have anticipated this.
My prayer when we started this series was Jesus was, let's help us see this in exactly the way that we need to right now to see you more clearly. And what's so funny, I could not have anticipated this. After a few weeks I realized what's going on is we're seeing just the normal book of the Bible. And we're seeing what it's like to read this as a book where Jesus is showing us how much he loves us and who we are to him.
And I'm kind of laughing. It's like I found myself this last couple months just reading it like a normal book and finding ourselves in it. In a way that's not scary, that's not creepy, that's not weird. Some of us avoid Revelation at all costs because we don't know what to do with it.
We can't find ourselves in it. It seems confusing. And I would just much rather read the random verse from Ephesians I saw on Pinterest last night. And when we zoom out of Revelation is where we're finding just the honesty behind it.
And this chapter today is one of the ones where typically people have liked to zoom in really far to take the good ab picture off of a scary looking cliff. When reality, we have just a vacation destination with a great background. We're going to read that today. So let's jump in Revelation chapter 7 verse 9 through 17.
This is what it says. After this I looked. There was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation from all tribes and peoples and languages standing before the throne and before the lamb. Robed and white with palm branches in their hands.
And they cried out with a loud voice saying salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne and to the lamb. And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four even creatures and they fell in their faces before the throne and worshipped God singing. Amen. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever.
Amen. Then one of the elders addressed me saying who are these? Roben white and where they come from. I said to him, sir, here's the only one that knows.
Then he said to me, these are they who have come out of the great ordeal. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. For this reason they're before the throne of God and worshipped him day and night within his temple and the one who sees them the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more and thirst no more.
The sun will not strike them nor any scorching heat. For the lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd and he will guide them to springs of the water of life and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. So this picture we're in the same place we've been in the last few weeks, that same location. John's sitting here in the throne room.
He's seen the exact same kind of characters. He's living creatures and the 24 elders and somebody new kind of gets introduced this week. He starts, he tells about a great multitude that beyond it nobody could count and they were from every single place on earth. They're from all over.
Not just one kind of person, but every kind of person. Not just from one place, but every place. We also read that in this conversation that he has with this, that one of the elders comes up to him and asks him, who do you think these people are? I love this passage this week when I was reading.
I was like did John roll his eyes or get angry? Does anybody ever ask you a question that you know that you do not know the answer to, but they know the answer to? I don't think this elder was trying to prove that he was smarter than John. Because he's asking to realize who these people are.
You see who these people are. So it's the same story. It's a different chapter in the same story. We read back this multitude that John sees that he's being asked about.
And we didn't read the whole chapter this week this week at the sake of time. But one of the questions I've got asked about a couple of people this summer, I'm already like, hey, explain this whole 144,000 to me. I kind of know about this. Am I in there?
So when places we get really kind of turned over, well, earlier in the chapter John sees them and then it explains that there's 12,000 from this tribe of Israel, 12,000 from this tribe of Israel. But this whole passage starts off kind of like a hint that we know something different is going on when it says after this. Every time we see this, see revelation works like in cycles. In many ways, the exact same story is being told over and over and over again.
That story is that no matter what, God is in charge and he's got the whole thing under control. And every single time John, I'm thinking of the idea of talking about it as a lap. And every single time John makes a lap, instead of like going into the pit crew and like changing his tires and making sure it's more gas, every single time he makes a lap, what we see is a scene of worship. We've been reading a lot of those pit crew stops this summer.
Every single time he makes a lap, he comes in and he sees a worship taking place. And John's in one of those and that last scene with 144,000 was like the very last corner and he was coming in for this. But after this, I saw it's time for a new vision, a new cycle that starts in worship. And we read this and says this, there's more people than he can count and they're from everywhere.
And they're from all different kinds of people and they're all standing in front of the throne. There before them, since the first time we've seen somebody new in this scene, if we think about what I told you all, that we really can't like lay these details out in bullet points, we can't have to draw a picture. Somehow this group of people that's too big for John to count is managed to squeeze themselves in right in front of God. Seeing something really, really different.
What we realize is that this is just the multiplication of those 144,000. Instead of being just a specific group of people that he's seeing every person. Every person that God has claimed, every person has put themselves in a relationship with God. Every single person has put Jesus at the center of things.
Every person that's been willing to lay down their crown and not just from one particular place, but from all particular places, not just in one particular time, but across all times. Because remember when we started doing this a few weeks ago, I said, let's assume this book matters to everybody who's ever lived, not just to one group of people in one place and time. Remember that? Because far too often we remove this book, you know what?
Hopefully I'm not going to have to worry about this, so I'm not going to have to read it right now. What John is seeing is every single person that belongs to God across all time and all space. And they say salvation belongs to our God. Salvation is our God.
Salvation is what he does. It's what comes out of him. It's not a hobby. It's not the job he hates.
It's the essence of who our God is, is salvation. Now, when John's asked this question by the elder, he's not trying to trick him or make him seem silly. Are you realizing that something else is going on right now? He says that these are the people who've come out of the great ordeal.
Your translation of the Bible might say they're great tribulation. That word right there for years would make me want to run out of the room. It was really funny. I was the person, like I told you all, from an academic perspective, was fascinated with this book.
With the second somebody brought that kind of stuff up, I'd find a way to get out of the conversation and leave the room. And so today we're going to just kind of zoom out a little bit. Because we've been zoomed into it. We don't know what to do with it.
We don't know where it belongs in Scripture. We don't know how it belongs or applies to us. I remember at one point in time when I was in college and I was at some place and it came up and I was having a really tough time in life. We're pretty cruddy at that moment.
And I literally had somebody in well meaning to say, well, maybe it's not going to be anything like the tribulation, so just relax. You're not going to have to go through that. That's how we treat this. If we're looking at Scripture, so that's what Scripture tells us about this.
This word tribulation, this word ordeal, it means pressure. You're feeling pressure in life. You're feeling pressure to do something. You've ever had a hard time sleeping at night?
Because of pressure. That's what it's talking about. It's talking about trouble that inflicts distress. You ever had distress in life?
That's like inward experience of distress. What's so funny is that for the most part, every single time we find this word in Scripture, all Testament and New Testament, across the board, it's always about personal experience. You run the searches and you get really battle nerdy. It's about personal experience, except here.
Or is it though? Now, this idea of tribulation that we've kind of created in our head or we've watched movies, is anybody, did you ever had to watch the scary end of world movies in youth group when you were in junior high on a lock-in? If you have kids here at Foundry, I promise I will never do that to them. You all saw the video about me in my underwear when I was a kid.
Don't want to go to heaven in my underwear so I kept to change the clothes of my bed because I was seeing one of those scary movies. Where we get this idea of this sort of tribulation scripture, it kind of traces across the Old Testament and the New Testament, but what's odd is it's always applied to a very specific place. The first time that we see this, we see that in the book of Daniel, which there's a lot of revelation imagery in Daniel, it's there but it's talking about the temple. We find it through stories of the exile, when God's people are sent out of Israel and they're exiled and they go to Babylon for 70 years, and Ezekiel prophesies the destruction of the temple, and then through Holy Spirit, I, so much like John has right now, and it sees the Spirit leaving the temple, sees God's presence exiting the temple.
That scene is a tribulation, it's a tribulation, it's a before and after, it's a season of distress, where there's a before and there's an after, it's applied to the temple. Fast forward in the New Testament, Jesus says some things along the street, there's the book of Matthew, and you all have read some of these weird prophecies, like the words of Jesus I don't like, like I hope you're not pregnant when this happens, like that's kind of not the exact words in there. Like you have to go run to the hills, just as you know there's iron maiden in the gospels. Okay, nobody got that.
And so, that Jesus talks about this thing and we have stayed zoomed in on it for a long time and we apply it to this idea, what you see is every single time that this is talked about as a physical event in scripture, it's always tied to the temple, it's always tied to God's presence, because remember the Israelites believed that God's presence was in the temple. Now Matthew is a very, very Jewish gospel, so much of what Matthew is trying to communicate is the fact that Jesus will no longer be at one place and the Jewish people need to expand their minds with the presence of God, it's like remember the gospel of Matthew is also at the moment of crucifixion of Jesus' death, and the veil between the holy of holies, like the special place in the temple, was torn and too, was broken. Where God's presence was no longer secret. So this action that we get a lot of our really scary language from has always been applied to the temple.
And what happens with the temple, and we've instead taken it and kind of applied to this thing in Revelation, whereas every single time you see this happen, it's a personal experience of distress that has the ability to change your life, that's what we find in scripture. So it's, remember this, we've catch up. And the only thing that's happening in this is it's a normal book of the Bible, which means that we can assume that scripture is timeless, and the scripture is speaking directly to us. Right?
So John meets the entirety of the redeemed. Every single person God will ever call his and they're standing before God declaring what his salvation is like. So this changes our idea of tribulation. And it doesn't make it, make it this singular thing that may or may not happen in the future, that may or may not involve us, and we can admit that we secretly hope it doesn't.
This makes tribulation personal. And I'll tell you what, I know every single person here has experienced distress. Every single person in here has experienced pressure. If we believe in a God that's deeply personal, as we talked about a few weeks ago, that he does not shame us when our problems are not big enough.
And he does not weigh out what we're experiencing versus what somebody else is experiencing. But he honors the fact that our lowest sometimes will be our lowest. That the moments where we need him or not weighed out against the moments where somebody else, there's no way that somebody else in this room needs Jesus more than we need Jesus more both of these moments of distress. This changes things, it makes it so, so personal.
John is being given a peak into the future. So many times we read Revelation is a John, the only thing John is seeing is future. But for the most part, John is seeing present. He's seeing present in reality of what God is doing in the world.
In this chapter, he is seeing a little bit of future. He, and we can tell that because the entirety of the redeemed is right there in front of him. And this isn't just some random group of people. There's us.
So in a few moments, I actually think we can read Revelation and completely attach ourselves into that reality. If we zoom out far enough on that scene, we might just find ourselves. If we zoom out far enough with what John is seeing, you might have your favorite t-shirt on and you can recognize where you are in there. We can play a little bit of where's Waldo.
But if we zoom out, we can find ourselves. And we realize this is a narrative device that's speaking about what happens when people move from one place to another. When they move from death to life, when they move from pain to joy, when they move from bad to good. It means Jesus is not shaming us that our worst isn't worst enough.
But him saying, regardless of whatever you go through, I am right there alongside of who you are. So how do we apply this to our lives? Where does this come from? Chad, what does this mean?
What's so funny is there's something in here that if you've been around Founders for any length of time, you will find extremely familiar to us. In 715, it says this, that's why they stand in front of God's throne and serve Him day and night in his temple. He who sits on their throne, will, he will give them shelter. He will give them shelter.
This idea of shelter is what it means for God to wrap himself over us. And John 1 14, I said, the word became flesh and made his home among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of fathers, one and only son. This is the exact same word, exact same concept.
This is God saying, I am coming to your neighborhood. I'm coming to your place. I'm coming to your house. I'm coming to wrap my presence completely around where you are.
So whatever is coming at you, I have the ability to stop for you. I will provide you an experience of my presence that will be like none other. Remember, so much of these previous experiences of tribulation have been about the absence of God's presence being somewhere. And here's God coming now and saying, I'm going to fix this once and for all.
I'm fixing this once and for all by giving you every single bit of myself right where you are. I'm not saying you can't have it because you can't come here where I am. He's saying, I'm coming down to you permanently and giving you every single thing I have. He also says that he's going to wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Tears are a really funny thing in scripture. We go back in the Old Testament. What we read about tears, because we have to read Revelation in line of Old Testament. Part of our zooming out is seeing what all the scripture says about this.
And what's so funny is the majority of time in Old Testament, tears happen out of someone red. It's like, I'm not going to happen out of someone recognizing what they have done. Does anybody here have a really guilty conscience? I do.
Like, really bad. Like my niece, when she gets in trouble, tears just start instantly. Like, I feel really bad. She went to her room and cried for like two hours when on vacation, because I stopped her from like messing with electricity.
I was like, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that again. Tears goes away. Because she knows she's done something wrong. Old Testament, we see tears flowing out of someone's recognition of their sin and a recognition of the salvation that God has offered them.
See, when we zoom out at this chapter and look past these tiny little things, we see a God who will shelter us from every single thing, from the worst we will ever see. And we zoom out for it if we see ourselves in there, but when we see ourselves in there, we realize we see how he has saved us. We see what he has rescued us from, how he has redeemed us, and we can talk about where exactly it happened. You know, the magic word of this chapter is awareness.
It's awareness of what God has done for us. But it's also our own awareness of our sin. And the two go hand in hand. We're going to really struggle with knowing and seeing God and what he's done for us.
And we're not able to really identify what he has saved us from. That awareness piece. With those tears that he wipes from our eyes are not our tears at what we have seen and had to deal with in life. Our tears are where our wrongful actions and our false mechanisms of coping and fixing have taken us far away from God.
Salvation belongs to our God. It comes out of him. It possesses from his being, salvation is not an action that God performs, but salvation is an action of who he is. So the question that we ask ourselves and think about and work from is simply this, what have we been saved from?
What have we been saved from? To ask ourselves that question means that we start doing some serious introspection on our relationship with Jesus on where he has been in our life, where he has taken us out of. It makes us identify what those tribulations have been like. We've all gone through some pretty gnarly seasons sometimes.
And that's okay. He's been there for us. It means us asking where has God's power worked uniquely in my life? What has Jesus done for me that I could not have done for myself?
What's Jesus rescued me from? I know very well one of the things that Jesus rescued me from. We joke about this sometimes, but until I was about 22, 23 years old, my life in goal was, it kind of got rough. My life's goal was to work for guns and roses.
And when they broke up, I realized I was kind of fine with the band. It was just as bad as they were. We laugh about this now, but if you met 19, 20 year old Chad, I was trying to embody every single thing I could. I would be dead right now if Jesus did not some sense in my life.
Because there is no natural way a man of my size can fit in other pants that tight. It was going to take chemical reasons to make that happen. It sounds silly, but I think about the things that motivated me from like I was like 15 to about 22. I would be dead right now if I had not found new words in Jesus Christ.
And thankfully the only scar I care for that season, I joke, I kid you not, is like a homemade tattoo on my ankle that barely has a line left that said G&R. But how has Jesus redeemed our life and gave it back to us? How am I consistently growing in my awareness of the presence of Jesus in my life? And where is that presence leading me to now that I could not have come to in the past?
It's awareness of what he's doing in our life and where we cannot do it on our own. It's our participation in this song right now. There will be a point in time in the future where we will sing this song and even more fullness. But for right now it's us understanding awareness of what Jesus is saving us, where he saved us from, where he's saving us to, in our own awareness of how in the past we participated in arguing with him about that.
But the character of the redeemed church, the character of this multitude that John sees singing today, the character of that church is a character of awareness. Awareness of the fullness of who God is and where their salvation comes from and awareness of their own sin. And where that sin has falsely led them. And if we zoom out enough we see that God's world is bigger than our world.
But we fit into that story and we have a place in that story. And we're necessary participants in that story. There's a spot in there for each one of us. And his sheltering presence which we can experience right now can protect us from every single thing that's going to come up against us.
But it protects us in the way that God protects us. Jesus, we thank you for pictures of a different world and of a different life. And for this story today, God, I know that some of us in this room right now are kind of going through our own personal tribulations in our head. And what we might be struggling to see you right there.
Lord, if that's where we're at, that your hand touches our hearts in a way that only you can. Jesus, other people might think that, you know, I'm aware of what I've done in the past, Jesus. That's going to stop me from doing anything good in the future. I've messed things up too much to ever do anything for you.
I'm just trying to do damage control right now. Jesus, you clean up a room a lot better than we can clean up a room. I pray for the folks that are experiencing that for that to happen. What are those other people in here that they know where you have taken them from?
We're trying to find that next spot that you're asking them to move towards. It's got a parae for clarity. And Jesus, there's other people in this room that might say, you know what? I've never even given you a chance.
I've only engaged with you at the head level and never at the heart level. And what I pray for you to speak into those hearts, to speak into those emotions, and those places we're at today for the people who are searching to experience you for the very first true time in life. Let's hear me pray.