What are you looking forward to? No, I don’t mean the prospect of foreign holidays or post covid hugs. I mean, really looking forward to?
A promise
Jesus promises everlasting life beginning now and blooming in eternity to all who place their faith in him. But there is even more! His death and resurrection have achieved the restoration of the whole creation.
Christians, despite the deterioration of God’s wonderful world, have hope of a new heaven and earth. The death and resurrection of Jesus promises that a new world of justice, harmony, joy, and purpose in the full presence of God the Father is coming. What he so wonderfully created will yet be even more wonderfully restored.
So how does the hope of such a great salvation affect us now, how does it inform our living in this world? Of course, it does not mean we just trash this earth because God will fix it as if we were reckless teenagers wrecking their parents’ house when they were away. It means we need to live and care for the planet and people as our father in heaven does.
Everything new
This week we complete our series, “God so loved” and we are looking forward to catching a glimpse of the horizon of God’s plan. We are in Revelation 21:1-5 and God’s amazing promise:” look I am making everything new!”
- What are you looking forward to? How does God’s promise motivate you?
- How can we who know that one day he will dry very tear not work to bring healing now?
- How can we who know that the “leaves of the trees” are for the healing of the nations not work to bring racial reconciliation and dignity now?
- How can we who know that Christ will be all in all not call our fellow humans to believe in him and joyfully bow the knee to him now?
This future is our lighthouse marking the path by which we live right now. Life is a great adventure with Jesus on the way to the new creation. Today we can only glimpse something of what God has promised.
Certainly, what God has in store in eternity is far greater than we can ever imagine.
Something to look forward to
The last book of C S Lewis’ “The Chronicles of Narnia” series wraps up with this majestic description of a world beyond our wildest dreams, the world of everlasting life.
The things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us, this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page. Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read, which goes on forever, in which every chapter is better than the one before.
Now that is something to look forward to.
Iain