Christ our Hope Anglican Church Valparaiso

God's people grumbled in the wilderness, and still he opened the doors of heaven and rained down bread. In Jesus that same compassion walks out in flesh and blood, saying of his needy people: they need not go away. The table is set, and we are gathered to him.

We groan in the in-between, where the priceless kingdom looks like a tiny seed and our nets sit still in dark water. But Jesus gives us his Spirit to intercede in our weakness, and to hold us in hope until what is hidden is drawn up at last into the light.

Jesus knows that the world is full of bad seeds, and he tells us that he will not act until the time is right. Not because he’s doesn’t care, but because he's careful — because he delights in us and because cleansing his field at the wrong time would do more harm to us than good.

We could spend our lives chasing a harvest on the world's terms — control, riches, pleasure — that never quite arrives at the thriving we want. But Jesus tells us there is one seed that makes us truly rich: the word of the kingdom, taking root in us until we bear fruit beyond anything the barren ground could promise.

Jesus’ yoke is the way of the cross — humility, service, and sacrificial love. And he's not lying when he says his burden is lighter than ours, because the path with the Cross on it also has Jesus on it — he walks with us on the way, and the way leads to the Father.

The hope of the gospel is not a Jesus we keep among our other loves, but a Jesus who lays claim to all of it, because he himself is the life and peace we long for. He came near, walked the path of the cross before us, and now says: lose your life for my sake and find it.

Jesus does not promise us comfort or ease, but something far better: that the God who numbers the sparrows and our very hairs will speak through us, suffer with us, and lose none of his wandering sheep. He counted our rescue worth the cross, and his fiercely protective love will not let us go.

The hope of the gospel is not that we'd find our own way out of being harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Instead, God says, "I myself will seek my sheep" — and in Jesus the true shepherd comes with compassion that acts: to rescue, to gather, and to feed us with himself.

Hosea's entire message was about the covenant faithfulness of God, and when Jesus quotes Hosea here, what he's saying is: what I'm doing is not a departure from God's character. It is a demonstration of God's character. God is the husband who pursues his unfaithful bride. He is the physician who seeks and heals the wounded. And God desires that his people would love the way that he loves.

We are designed to be spokespeople of the Kingdom of God. How is god calling us to live out the Gospel with our whole lives?

We're commanded to ask for the Holy Spirit and to desire more of the gifts of the Spirit. Part of what is means to be a child of God is to continually long for more of the Holy Spirit in us, for Him to transform us further, for Him to speak to us clearer, and for Him to shape us to be more like Jesus.

Our salvation is accomplished by and fulfilled in the revelation of Jesus Christ, and as Jesus left us an example to follow, we find he reveals himself to us and to others through our obedient pursuit of him and his ways.

The old words in our mouths tore down others, but the God’s word grows us up into maturity in newness of life. And all the while, God himself is building us into a temple for himself.

Peter claims that the story that God is telling in all of history—from Moses through the prophets and most astonishingly in Jesus Christ himself—is the story of his powerful love that comes to us, for our sake, in order to rescue us from our sin, our alienation, and from every sad and broken part of our stories. The story of the world, he claims, is about Jesus, but it's for us.

The hope of the gospel is not that we'd take our fresh start and do it better this time: now I've got a chance to pay more attention, be more kind, somehow dredge up in my heart a deeper devotion to God. Instead, our hope is living because it's secured in and by and through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. He is himself the hope, and the direction towards which this new life is pointed.

The church is called out of the world, called out of the ongoing cycle of weeks and months and years, to dwell in and upon the eternal truth: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. And we do it in hope and expectation that that truth will not just be something that we say and "remember" in our minds, but that the truth of it would come to life inside us, that it would fill us and make our lives into something new.

There is no moment of human grief, no loneliness, no sorrow, no isolation that God himself has not tasted; there is no suffering in which we suffer alone, for God through Christ has come near. And because he is near, there is no longer any person that can rightly call themselves forsaken by God, because he has come for us, to rescue and to heal us

Jesus wept for Lazarus, and then he raised him from the dead. The Lord is near to us, and he wants us to know that Jesus who descended into the grave did not remain there, and when he rose, he led many captives free.

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.