Revelation 19:4-10
Listen Link: http://www.firstcovenantcadillac.org/#!this-weeks-sermon/c20mw
We have come to the end of our project to read the whole NT in 40 days. How many of you managed to keep up and get it all done? Go ahead raise your hands so we can celebrate!
I love weddings! Didn’t we just celebrate a wedding about a month ago right here? I want to do more of those! But the wedding I am really looking forward to is the one in which I am not the pastor or the officiant. I am really looking forward to the one in which I am a member of the bride!
But why do we call the church the bride of Christ? It is because Jesus said so. It was in Mark 2:19; Luke 5:34-35; and Matthew 9:14-15 that Jesus first called himself the bridegroom. All three of these gospel passages are recounting the same conversation. It says there that “John’s disciples came and asked him, “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?”
Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.”
As for the gospel of John, he quoted John the Baptist saying, “The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.” John the Baptist was calling himself the friend of the bridegroom. So Jesus is the bridegroom and the church is his bride.
Then in Ephesians 5:25-32 Paul says this about the same idea. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
By these words the Bible says that the whole church taken all together is the bride of Christ and I am so glad to know that I am part of that. Imagine being loved by God so deeply that he would propose a wedding and ask you to marry him! Imagine that he was prepared to pay a dowry, a bride price in order to have you and the price he paid was his own life!
The history that God gives us in the Bible reveals that God is in love with the human race and has been working to win us back ever since Adam and Eve stood him up at the altar. After being shunned the way Adam and Eve turned their backs on God in defiance of his created order and the test to see if they would respect his will, you would think the wedding is off. But it was only delayed. God set to work to repair the relationships and set things right so that he could have his bride after all, pure and spotless.
And the price he paid, oh that price! What a love story! Here is the story of a person in love, so deeply in love that he made the ultimate sacrifice. He gave his life! How many movies have the hero laying down his life for his friends, or her life for her friends? They take those stories right up to the point of death, or apparent death, because there are so many scenes where the hero is lying still as though dead, or has disappeared into an impossible to scape blaze of glory, but then somehow revives or reappears and is restored to all the friends. Yay! Happy ending! That is the way we always want the story to end. And many of them also end with the hero getting married to the one he or she saved and they all live happily ever after.
Well, all those beautiful stories and happy endings are actually copying the drama and stealing the storyline from the greatest story ever told. And it is much more than a nice idea or a religious myth of wishful thinking. Jesus’ enactment of loving sacrifice is true history, he really and literally did allow himself to be arrested. He actually suffered and really died a cruel and horrible death, all for the love of us, his bride.
And what a worthy groom he is! Revelation 5:11-12 says, “Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they were saying: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”
But we have not yet gotten to the happy ending. For now, we still live in a world of suffering and heartbreak. The gospel in us means that now we get to be the heroes in other people’s lives as we love them and seek to introduce them to their savior. Jesus Christ bids us go and enter into the lives of others who are suffering.
Marriage teaches us a lesson here. Entering into the life of another under good circumstances (such as marriage) is a challenging cross-cultural experience in many ways. We cannot, if we want a good marriage, be the center of our own lives. There are now two, and learning that duet requires a good deal of listening, understanding, patience, and laying aside our preferences, our family-of-origin ways, our little “must haves” so that we learn to know the other so well that we can love them generously and meaningfully. It is, if done well, a thing of beauty and a great sanctifier!
And sometimes it is hard to love. We know and believe that God loves us anyway, even when we don’t behave the way he wants us to He still loves us. And similarly, God doesn’t always behave the way we want him to. He doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want them answered. That is when the challenge is to love God anyway. As the prophet said in the OT, “Though the fig tree does not blossom and there be no fruit on the vine, yet will I rejoice in The Lord.” And as I heard yesterday in the movie called, Miracles from Heaven. The pastor was counselling a mom who had lost her faith because of her little girl’s suffering and he says, “I’ve been that road too. And I’ve taken both paths. Either walk away from God because he let you down, or cling to him with all you’ve got and make every effort to connect with him again anyway.” Those are your choices and I’ve made both. Neither one is easy. But I know which one feels better.
Entering into the lives of others who are suffering and who have suffered trauma is similar. Think of walking alongside a tormented vet or an abuse survivor. They have pictures in their head we would not want to see on television, let alone live through. They are afraid, they do not trust, they cannot think clearly, and they will not be better next month or even likely by next year. Human beings cannot suffer things we were never meant for and just bounce back.
It requires a long, steady obedience to our God to walk with traumatized lives. And really we are all traumatized, some much more than others, but all of us touched by suffering. Doing such work is not so we will feel good about ourselves or have compelling stories to tell. It is simply humble service to the victims for the sake of our Lord whose humble service was for those crushed by sin and death. When God’s people refuse to go into suffering, they are more in line with the perpetrators who saw their victims as insignificant and unworthy. When God’s people refuse to go, they also abandon God, for that is the way He went.[i]
We must be willing to do something like what Jesus did for us. In his strength and in his spirit we can, and only in his strength are we able. We were not saved by Jesus Christ’s amazing grace so that we could go on sinning. We already know that. But we also were not saved by God’s amazing grace so that could feel blessed to mind our own business and pursue the American Dream. We were saved by God’s amazing grace so that we could learn “to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.”
Not that we have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at the goal, but we press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of us. That is how we accept the invitation to the glorious wedding that is coming!
So here is the invitation: His Majesty, the King of the Universe, requests the honor of your presence at the Royal Wedding of the Ages (Rev. 19:7) between Jesus, His only begotten Son, and His Bride, the called-out ones.
You are cordially invited to partake in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb by being cleansed in His blood (Heb. 9:14), which He shed for your salvation (Heb. 2:14). By pledging your heart (Rom. 10:9–10) to His plans and purposes for your life, He promises to lead (Rom. 8:14) and guide you in the ways of truth (John 16:13), provide for all your needs, physically and spiritually (Matt. 6:32–34), shower you with gifts (1 Cor. 12:1–10; Romans 12:6–8) by Holy Spirit, with whom He will fill you (Joel 2:28–29; Eph. 5:18), and wash you in the water of His Word (Eph. 5:25–26) so that you may be used (2 Tim. 3:16) to tell others about this glorious feast.
As a token of His love for you, you will be given a ring to seal you as His own (Eph.1:13) as He rejoices over you, His bride (Isa. 62:5), and clothes you in the wedding garments of salvation and righteousness (Isa. 61:10).
The seal is the promised Holy Spirit. “You also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.”
Our response is first to believe all of this and entrust our lives to his care, then to worship this glorious God who loves us so much, to rejoice in the small taste of the coming love feast by celebrating the Holy Communion together often, and by betrothing ourselves to live in obedience to his call.
Listen Link: http://www.firstcovenantcadillac.org/#!this-weeks-sermon/c20mw
We have come to the end of our project to read the whole NT in 40 days. How many of you managed to keep up and get it all done? Go ahead raise your hands so we can celebrate!
I love weddings! Didn’t we just celebrate a wedding about a month ago right here? I want to do more of those! But the wedding I am really looking forward to is the one in which I am not the pastor or the officiant. I am really looking forward to the one in which I am a member of the bride!
But why do we call the church the bride of Christ? It is because Jesus said so. It was in Mark 2:19; Luke 5:34-35; and Matthew 9:14-15 that Jesus first called himself the bridegroom. All three of these gospel passages are recounting the same conversation. It says there that “John’s disciples came and asked him, “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?”
Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.”
As for the gospel of John, he quoted John the Baptist saying, “The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him, and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom’s voice. That joy is mine, and it is now complete. He must become greater; I must become less.” John the Baptist was calling himself the friend of the bridegroom. So Jesus is the bridegroom and the church is his bride.
Then in Ephesians 5:25-32 Paul says this about the same idea. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.”
By these words the Bible says that the whole church taken all together is the bride of Christ and I am so glad to know that I am part of that. Imagine being loved by God so deeply that he would propose a wedding and ask you to marry him! Imagine that he was prepared to pay a dowry, a bride price in order to have you and the price he paid was his own life!
The history that God gives us in the Bible reveals that God is in love with the human race and has been working to win us back ever since Adam and Eve stood him up at the altar. After being shunned the way Adam and Eve turned their backs on God in defiance of his created order and the test to see if they would respect his will, you would think the wedding is off. But it was only delayed. God set to work to repair the relationships and set things right so that he could have his bride after all, pure and spotless.
And the price he paid, oh that price! What a love story! Here is the story of a person in love, so deeply in love that he made the ultimate sacrifice. He gave his life! How many movies have the hero laying down his life for his friends, or her life for her friends? They take those stories right up to the point of death, or apparent death, because there are so many scenes where the hero is lying still as though dead, or has disappeared into an impossible to scape blaze of glory, but then somehow revives or reappears and is restored to all the friends. Yay! Happy ending! That is the way we always want the story to end. And many of them also end with the hero getting married to the one he or she saved and they all live happily ever after.
Well, all those beautiful stories and happy endings are actually copying the drama and stealing the storyline from the greatest story ever told. And it is much more than a nice idea or a religious myth of wishful thinking. Jesus’ enactment of loving sacrifice is true history, he really and literally did allow himself to be arrested. He actually suffered and really died a cruel and horrible death, all for the love of us, his bride.
And what a worthy groom he is! Revelation 5:11-12 says, “Then I looked and heard the voice of many angels, numbering thousands upon thousands, and ten thousand times ten thousand. They encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders. In a loud voice they were saying: “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”
But we have not yet gotten to the happy ending. For now, we still live in a world of suffering and heartbreak. The gospel in us means that now we get to be the heroes in other people’s lives as we love them and seek to introduce them to their savior. Jesus Christ bids us go and enter into the lives of others who are suffering.
Marriage teaches us a lesson here. Entering into the life of another under good circumstances (such as marriage) is a challenging cross-cultural experience in many ways. We cannot, if we want a good marriage, be the center of our own lives. There are now two, and learning that duet requires a good deal of listening, understanding, patience, and laying aside our preferences, our family-of-origin ways, our little “must haves” so that we learn to know the other so well that we can love them generously and meaningfully. It is, if done well, a thing of beauty and a great sanctifier!
And sometimes it is hard to love. We know and believe that God loves us anyway, even when we don’t behave the way he wants us to He still loves us. And similarly, God doesn’t always behave the way we want him to. He doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want them answered. That is when the challenge is to love God anyway. As the prophet said in the OT, “Though the fig tree does not blossom and there be no fruit on the vine, yet will I rejoice in The Lord.” And as I heard yesterday in the movie called, Miracles from Heaven. The pastor was counselling a mom who had lost her faith because of her little girl’s suffering and he says, “I’ve been that road too. And I’ve taken both paths. Either walk away from God because he let you down, or cling to him with all you’ve got and make every effort to connect with him again anyway.” Those are your choices and I’ve made both. Neither one is easy. But I know which one feels better.
Entering into the lives of others who are suffering and who have suffered trauma is similar. Think of walking alongside a tormented vet or an abuse survivor. They have pictures in their head we would not want to see on television, let alone live through. They are afraid, they do not trust, they cannot think clearly, and they will not be better next month or even likely by next year. Human beings cannot suffer things we were never meant for and just bounce back.
It requires a long, steady obedience to our God to walk with traumatized lives. And really we are all traumatized, some much more than others, but all of us touched by suffering. Doing such work is not so we will feel good about ourselves or have compelling stories to tell. It is simply humble service to the victims for the sake of our Lord whose humble service was for those crushed by sin and death. When God’s people refuse to go into suffering, they are more in line with the perpetrators who saw their victims as insignificant and unworthy. When God’s people refuse to go, they also abandon God, for that is the way He went.[i]
We must be willing to do something like what Jesus did for us. In his strength and in his spirit we can, and only in his strength are we able. We were not saved by Jesus Christ’s amazing grace so that we could go on sinning. We already know that. But we also were not saved by God’s amazing grace so that could feel blessed to mind our own business and pursue the American Dream. We were saved by God’s amazing grace so that we could learn “to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.”
Not that we have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at the goal, but we press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of us. That is how we accept the invitation to the glorious wedding that is coming!
So here is the invitation: His Majesty, the King of the Universe, requests the honor of your presence at the Royal Wedding of the Ages (Rev. 19:7) between Jesus, His only begotten Son, and His Bride, the called-out ones.
You are cordially invited to partake in the Marriage Supper of the Lamb by being cleansed in His blood (Heb. 9:14), which He shed for your salvation (Heb. 2:14). By pledging your heart (Rom. 10:9–10) to His plans and purposes for your life, He promises to lead (Rom. 8:14) and guide you in the ways of truth (John 16:13), provide for all your needs, physically and spiritually (Matt. 6:32–34), shower you with gifts (1 Cor. 12:1–10; Romans 12:6–8) by Holy Spirit, with whom He will fill you (Joel 2:28–29; Eph. 5:18), and wash you in the water of His Word (Eph. 5:25–26) so that you may be used (2 Tim. 3:16) to tell others about this glorious feast.
As a token of His love for you, you will be given a ring to seal you as His own (Eph.1:13) as He rejoices over you, His bride (Isa. 62:5), and clothes you in the wedding garments of salvation and righteousness (Isa. 61:10).
The seal is the promised Holy Spirit. “You also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.”
Our response is first to believe all of this and entrust our lives to his care, then to worship this glorious God who loves us so much, to rejoice in the small taste of the coming love feast by celebrating the Holy Communion together often, and by betrothing ourselves to live in obedience to his call.
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