A Better Beginning

You know, before we go any further, we're gonna, we are gonna land this greatest story ever told plain today. We are. This is the end of the line and we're, we're gonna get there. But before we get there, I need to stop and just say a huge thank you. Many of you know my wife Allison had breast cancer surgery this past Wednesday.

She's now recovering nicely at home. But over the last few weeks, this church has taught a masterclass on how to care for a family dealing with cancer. It has been amazing. We have just been incredibly blessed and encouraged by all of your prayers and cards and texts and emails and gifts and meals. We have just been ridiculously well supported.

So thank you for loving and supporting our family so faithfully. We love our church family. We're deeply grateful for all of you. Thank you. Love all of you.

Yeah, that applause is for you. You've been tremendous. Well, Cody talked last week about that now and not yet. Sometimes there are things that we have to wait for. And many of the best things in life I think we've experienced are worth waiting for.

Just last night, I can attest to this. Cousin Willie's buttery explosion. Microwave popcorn is well worth the two minutes that it takes to make it really, really good stuff. But on a much grander scale, many of us know that graduating is worth the hard work of earning that degree, right? Finishing a marathon is worth the months of training, or so I've heard.

Having a loving, loyal dog is worth the headaches of house training and chewing. Buying a home is worth the years spent in saving. Being married is worth the work of building a relationship and planning a wedding and buying a lot of hair products.

And I've been told that holding your baby is worth the discomfort of pregnancy. Can any of you moms give me an amen to that? Yes. Okay. We fellas wouldn't know, but so I've been told.

You know, over the last seven weeks, we've done this high speed flyover of the Bible's first 43 books. And we've seen God's creation and sin's corruption and Israel's rise and fall and prophecies about a coming Messiah. And we've seen Jesus arrive as that Messiah. We saw a lot of people became Jesus disciples, meaning they became his followers. But we saw that Jesus called and he trained a specific group of those followers as his apostles.

Twelve of them to be exact. An apostle is someone who is sent. So after Jesus death and resurrection, he returned to God the Father. He poured out the gift of his Holy Spirit that he had promised that he would. And he released his apostles to continue his ministry.

So as Jesus apostles preached the message of his resurrection, they, the Christian faith just continued to expand rapidly. In the book of Acts, God used two of those apostles in particular, Peter and Paul were their names to declare the gospel and to plant churches in multiple cities. And after launching these churches, the apostles would often write letters back to those people. These letters are sometimes called epistles, and they make up the bulk of the New Testament. Most of these letters are actually named for the places to which they were sent.

So the book of Romans was written by the Apostle Paul to the church in the city of Rome. Yeah, it's not really difficult, but there are some of them that are a little trickier. Like Galatians was written to multiple churches in the region called Galatia. That is right here in kind of modern day, you know, Asia Minor, north of the Mediterranean Sea. But typically, when you pick up a New Testament letter, the name of the letter is going to tell you who it was written to.

So each of these letters was written to address specific issues that were going on in that place at that time. And they were also used to teach some big picture principles that have applicability to all Christians in all places at all times. So there are certain common themes that we see across all of these New Testament letters, beginning with this one, who Jesus is now. Our view of what defines reality has a profound impact on the way we live. The movie Gladiator portrays the real life Roman emperor.

His name was Marcus Aurelius. And the movie portrays Marcus Aurelius as a wise and noble leader. And he may very well have been. But we know from history that persecution of Christians intensified during his reign. In his famous work called Meditations, Marcus Aurelius wrote these words.

He said, nature, all things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you. I think Marcus Aurelius was what today we would call a naturalist. If the physical world is the highest reality, then ultimate meaning is found in whatever we can taste or see or smell or feel. And there are a lot of people who think that way, people who spend their lives just chasing one new experience or one new pleasure after another. But what we see in the New Testament letters is that Christians have historically, from the very beginning, had a different view.

The Apostle Paul wrote in the book of Colossians, fasten your seat, bells, because there's a mouthful here. Paul says, the Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him, in Jesus, The Son. All things were created. Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible.

Whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities or. All things have been created through him and for Him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Jesus and through him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shed on the cross. Now, Colossians Chapter one covers a lot of ground, but it teaches a number of foundational truths about Jesus. Let's just quickly review those. Jesus is the image of God. Paul says, you and I, according to Scripture, are made in God's image.

But Jesus is God's image. He is the uncreated, without beginning, exact representation of God. Jesus is the firstborn over all creation. In this context, the word firstborn is not so much talking about sequence as it is rank. As God's uncreated image, Jesus is first and foremost in position and authority.

Paul said that Jesus created everything. He has always existed and He. He made all that exists. Our universe, our bodies, every form of life we observe. That means that Jesus created Mary, who became his mother when he put on flesh.

That means that Jesus created the trees that were later hewn into the cross he was nailed to. Jesus is the reason for everything. All things exist to glorify Him. Sunrises and crashing waves and starry skies and flocking birds and coral reefs and wildflowers are all reflections of his power and his creativity that reveal his goodness to us. Jesus holds everything together.

He sustains our universe. He woke us up this morning. He causes our bodies to breathe. He governs the changing of seasons we're experiencing right now. And Jesus rules the church.

The church's head is not a pastor or a pope. It is Jesus himself. And Jesus is supreme over life. He owns creation and he conquered death because Jesus is God. Everything that is true of God, his holiness, his righteousness, his power, his love, his mercy, his kindness, all of that lives in Jesus.

And for all of these reasons, Jesus desires and deserves to be first in our lives as the ruler of both creation and the church. Jesus will not settle for being our occasional hobby. He doesn't want to just be a phase that we go through. He doesn't want to be something that we hope to one day get around to. He doesn't want to be just a part of our lives or an addition that's wedged into our already overcrowded schedules.

He doesn't want to be a consultant that we turn to when we're in crisis. He is the king, which means he insists on first place. And because he's a kind and loving king, our greatest good is always found in choosing him over every inferior alternative. Who Jesus is is a major theme of the New Testament. Now, A second major theme of these New Testament letters is what Jesus did.

The Bible teaches that all of Scripture is God's inspired and authoritative word. But there are certain texts that explain what Jesus has done for us in an especially beautiful way. Paul wrote, for example, in Romans, chapter eight, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit, who gives life, has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do because he was weakened by the flesh, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us who do not live according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.

What Paul is saying is if we are in Christ Jesus, if we belong to him, there is zero condemnation for us. Now, condemnation is a legal term. It addresses both the guilt of breaking the law and the punishment that that crime deserves. So if you're pulled over for driving 80 miles an hour in a 45 zone, you're not only guilty of speeding, you're going to have to pay a fine for that offense. And if someone who's ridden with you recently just looked in your direction when I said that, you might want to slow down a little bit.

Just a word to the wise. Well, Scripture declares that all people are sinners. The book of Romans emphasizes that. And that because we are all sinners, we have all earned God's condemnation. But Jesus put on flesh, and he personally bore the condemnation that our sins deserve so that we don't have to, and so that through our trust in him, we can experience God's love and his mercy instead.

Now, legally speaking, the. The opposite of condemnation is justification. A condemned person deserves to be punished, but a justified person is right in the eyes of the law because their offense has already been paid for. If you get pulled over for driving 80 miles an hour in a 45 zone and you go to court and someone else pays your ticket, that doesn't make you a good driver, but it does let you off the hook, you no longer owe that penalty. In the same way, when we trust Jesus, his righteousness is credited to our account and God declares us righteous.

Jesus frees us from condemnation both by taking our punishment for us and by giving us His Holy Spirit, who changes us from the inside out and enables us to live in the God honoring way that we did not before. We saw earlier in the series that the Old Testament law that God gave to Israel was not a bad law. It was just powerless to change anyone. It was capable of pointing out that people were guilty. It was capable of demonstrating how desperately we need a Savior.

But it could not save us. And that's why Jesus, God in flesh, became a sin offering for us. Unlike all of those Old Testament sacrifices that continually, year after year, generation after generation, reminded people of their guilt but never took it away, Jesus came and he took the punishment for our sins on Himself. And because he was condemned for us in our place, none of us who trust him face that condemnation any longer. See, Jesus didn't just take our punishment.

When we trust him, his perfect will, righteousness is applied to us if we belong to Jesus. If you belong to Jesus, God looks at you as righteous as if we had always perfectly obeyed Him. That's what Paul meant when he wrote that God made him Jesus, who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. And that's a great segue into a third really important New Testament concept, which is the theme of who we are in Jesus. Marcus Aurelius was not the only Roman ruler who mistreated Christians.

When Rome burned to the ground in the year AD 64, the Roman Emperor Nero needed someone to hold responsible. So Christians got blamed and persecution against them escalated and many Christians fled from Rome to escape that. That's why the letter that we call one Peter in our New Testaments, which was addressed like this, Peter said to God's elect, his chosen exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia. First, Peter was written to Christians who were living as refugees. They had fled their homes and they were living in a hostile world that ultimately was not their home.

So Peter reminded them, and he reminded us that of the identity that Jesus gives to everyone who follows him. Listen to these words that Peter used to describe followers of Jesus. In that letter. Peter said, but you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's special possession that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness. Into his wonderful light.

Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. See, in those verses, Peter described followers of Jesus in several ways. He called us a chosen people. We saw earlier in the series the way that God chose Israel in the Old Testament.

In that very same way, God has set his love, his affection on all of us who belong to Jesus. That has nothing to do with our goodness. It has everything to do with. With his goodness and his faithfulness to that promise he made to Abraham way back in the book of Genesis. Peter calls followers of Jesus a royal priesthood.

We've seen in this series that in the Old Testament system, only one person, the high priest, was allowed to enter the most holy place of the tabernacle or later the temple, and stand in God's presence. But when Jesus died on the cross, when he gave up his spirit, the. The curtain, the veil that separated the inner part of the temple from everything outside. Scripture says it was torn in two. Jesus opened up what the book of Hebrews calls a new and living way for us to experience God's presence anytime, anywhere, not just at a temple, and not just because we're the high priest.

Anyone. Peter calls followers of Jesus a holy nation. God chose Israel to work through, and he commanded them to live holy lives that made him welcome in their midst. And when we follow Jesus, God sets us apart and he declares that we are holy and he calls us to live holy lives that are fully dedicated to him. Peter calls followers of Jesus God's special possession because there was a time when we were slaves to sin.

There was a time when our lives were held captive by selfishness and everything that that brings. But. But Jesus gave his life at the cross to purchase our freedom. Paul said it like this. You are not your own.

You were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. And Peter was clear in this letter in First Peter, Chapter 2, about why it is that Jesus gives us this new identity anyway. He says it's that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Peter learned that as a follower of Jesus, Peter would have been there when Jesus spoke these words.

He said, let your light shine before others that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven. And our church's mission reflects that very same principle. We strive to love God through a life of worship and to grow together as disciples of Christ so that we inspire others to follow Jesus. God rescues us. God transforms us so that our lives will point others to his goodness.

God gives us a new identity so we can reveal him to the world. We are called to live such surrendered, obedient lives that those who are far from God will see what he's doing in us and, and by his grace, be drawn to him too. And that reality speaks to a fourth key theme of the New Testament, which is how we should live as followers of Jesus. If you're a parent, I'll bet you've wrestled with how to motivate your kids to behave in certain ways. Anybody been there?

Absolutely. I mean, sometimes you promise them a reward, you scold them for doing the wrong thing, sometimes you threaten punishment, or you play the because I said so authority card. You remind your kids of all that you've done for them and how they owe their very existence to you. Well, in the New Testament, we find a number of similarities between church leadership and parenting. The apostles wrote these letters to people that they cared about.

They wrote these letters to people, many of whom they had been instrumental in leading to Christ. So these were people that they saw as their children in the faith, and they wanted to help motivate them to live out of that new identity that Jesus had given them. And how did they do that? Well, in their letters, the apostles included both imperatives. These are commands about what to do.

And there are also indicatives. These are statements about what Jesus has already done. And the indicatives about what Jesus has done are always the foundation of for the imperatives about what we should do. See, our hearts have to be captured by what Jesus has done for us before we really learn to obey Him. Our awe of God's grace is what motivates us to follow his commands.

And we see this played out time and time again, but especially pointedly in some of the letters of Paul. For example, Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, since you excel in everything in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness, and in the love we have kindled in you, see that you also excel in this grace of giving. And then he says, for you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that you, through his poverty, might become rich. The Christian imperative to give is grounded in the indicative that Jesus gave up everything for us. His generosity is what motivates us to give.

Paul wrote in Ephesians, be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ, God forgave you the imperative to forgive other people, grounded in the indicative that In Jesus, God forgave us. His forgiveness motivates us to forgive others. Now, if we view Scripture as mainly just a book of rules, God's commands will often tend to feel like a burden to us. But when we step back and we consider everything that Jesus has done for us, he's given us life. He's shown us with his words and his actions what truth and what compassion look like.

He loved us even when we rejected Him. He died in our place for our sins at the cross. He rose from the grave to offer us new life. He adopted us into his family. He gives us His Word and His Spirit and His people to guide us.

He's preparing a place where we could live with him forever. When we realize how good Jesus has been and continues to be and will be to us in the future, our hearts ought to be amazed by that. We ought to recognize that he is infinitely greater than anything this world has to offer. And that ought to motivate us to obey Him. The Apostle Paul described it in this way in his words to the Philippian Church.

Paul began with an imperative. He said, do nothing out of selfish ambition or. Or vain conceit. Rather in humility. Value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of the others in your relationships with one another.

Have the same mindset as Christ Jesus. And then he shifts into indicative mode, who, being in very nature, God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage. Rather, he made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant. Being made in human likeness and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

And every tongue acknowledged that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. See, that imperative to put others first, which is one of the things that Scripture teaches repeatedly, is grounded in the indicative that Jesus put our salvation ahead of his own comfort. Jesus put our needs ahead of his own privilege. Jesus put our rescue above his own glory. His selflessness is what motivates us to.

To be selfless. And the essence of the Gospel, the essence of the message of Jesus is that he chose humility. He chose suffering. He chose death for us. And then he came back from the grave.

And he now sits enthroned and exalted over all things. But even that even that is not the end of the story. Because all of Scripture points to the ultimate reality that Jesus is coming back to gather from every nation and people and culture those who trust him, those who belong to him, those he has rescued from sin. Jesus is coming back to restore everything that sin has damaged and broken. Jesus is coming back to crush Satan and destroy evil once and for all.

And Scripture says Jesus is coming back to live with his people forever. In his book, the Story of God that was initially some of the inspiration for this series, Eric Geiger summarizes the Bible's climax in four short sentences. The nations are gathered, the curse is reversed, Evil is destroyed. Christ is enjoyed. And that sounds awesome.

But as a matter of full disclosure, I need you to know that the Bible is a choose your own ending story. You ever read one of those books as a kid? We're at the bottom of page 37. If you turn to page 78, you're going to get a very different ending than if you turn to page 63. The Bible is like that.

Near the end of the Bible's final book, Revelation, the AAPostle John describes two radically, drastically different eternal outcomes. All of us who love and trust and follow Jesus, the book of Revelation says we have this to look forward to. John writes, then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, look, God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them.

They will be his people and God himself will be with them and be their God. This is my favorite part. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. And that promise of Scripture means that no matter what this world brings, no matter what life dishes up, financial struggles or heartbreak or conflict or cancer or loss, we can confidently look forward to an eternity with God where nothing that causes pain or sadness or chemo in this life will even exist.

A new world with a better beginning. And we forge ahead in this messy middle that we now live in, because we know God's story has a glorious ending. As Jesus followers, our hope today is anchored in the certain ending of God's story. And that ending is one that we believe is worth waiting for. Now, that new heaven and that new earth is a beautiful picture.

And that is absolutely where my Hope is anchored. But, and I cannot stress this but strongly enough, it is only for those who belong to Jesus. God's holiness and God's justice require him to judge sin. They require him to destroy evil. God could not be fully good if he allowed sin and evil and wickedness and rebellion to go on forever and ever unanswered.

So if we reject or if we are simply indifferent to what Jesus has done to rescue us from our sin, we will be caught up in that judgment. There is no third option. Right before his vision of the new heaven and new earth, John described a very different scene than the one we just read about. In Revelation 20, John said, then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence and there was no place for them.

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne. And books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. The dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and Death and Hades, the place of the dead, gave up the dead that were in them.

And each person was judged according to what they had done. No one slipped through the cracks and escaped. Notice here. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the Lake of Fire. The Lake of Fire is the second death.

Anyone whose name was not found written in the Book of Life was thrown into the Lake of Fire. What Revelation chapter 20 is saying is that despite popular impressions and things that we often hear people say, not everyone goes to a better place. I don't know if all dogs go to heaven, but I know for a fact that all people do not. God provides us an advanced look at how his story ends, and he lets us choose the ending we experience. So our choice about Jesus is the most important decision any of us will ever make.

You think choosing a college is a big deal? Deciding where to live or what career field to go into, or who to marry or how many kids to have, or how to prepare for retirement. All of those decisions pale in comparison to the one we make about Jesus. The Bible is God's story, and he wrote it so that we can find lasting life in Him. This greatest story ever told.

That is the point of it. God created us. He loves us. He put on flesh to save us from the destruction that our sin inevitably brings. And he invites us by faith, by our trust in what he's done for us.

To be adopted into his family, where we help each other continually choose Jesus.

So here's the challenge of this entire series. Please choose Jesus. Trust him. Surrender to him. Live for him.

He's worth it. And the alternative? Eternity separated from him is something I would not wish on anyone. I don't think you would either. So we would love in any way we can to help you discover and embrace and experience the life that Jesus offers to all of us through his life and his death and his resurrection.

There's no greater story than the story of Jesus, and it's a story that he invites us to be a part of. And it's a story we choose the ending to. So I want to encourage you to choose wisely. And we're here to help you in any way we can as you do that. Would you pray with me?

Lord Jesus, we're grateful for your story. We're grateful that this is not a fairy tale. These are not things that just happened a long time ago in someplace far away. But this is the story of our world. It's the story of our lives.

And we're grateful that even though we have all, to a person, in a variety of different ways, told you to take a hike, that you have continued to love us and pursue us. We're grateful that you went to the length of putting on flesh, coming here to our world and suffering and dying in our place on a cross to take the guilt and the condemnation of our sin for us, so that through our trust in you, we could be reborn, we could be liberated from all of that. We praise you for the resurrection that followed that death, proving that once and for all you are Lord of all things. And we praise you, God. We thank you for the gift of your church, your Word and your Holy Spirit, and your people who guide us in this life and help us to become more and more like Jesus, to live the life that you created us for in the very beginning.

Father, we're so deeply indebted to you for the love and the mercy that you've shown us. We ask that you would help us, God, to see you so clearly and to be so floored by what you've done for us that our only logical response is to fall down on our knees before you, surrender our lives to you, and follow you as our king, as our Lord and our Savior. We thank you for all you've done for us. We love you and it's your holy name. We pray.

Amen.