My name's...I already said my name, Kyle Hernandez.
I serve in security and I'm gonna do the small groups.
And sometimes I'll barbecue at the park too.
That's kinda my favorite thing.
Today's scripture reading is from Matthew 5,
one versus one through four, page 55, one.
And the Bibles and back of the pews.
So they're right in front of you guys.
There's some Bibles.
All right.
Here we go.
When he saw all the crowds, he went on the mountain side.
And after he sat down, his disciples came to him.
Then he began to teach them saying,
"'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs,
"'for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
"'Blessed are those who mourn, for they would be comforted.'"
This is the word of God.
Well, as I said, we have quite a few people out,
so we're winging it today.
And it might feel that way, but we're making it work.
All right, we're getting back into Matthew chapter five
in our series, Kingdom Life.
And we're looking at the gospel according to Matthew
as he wrote down and recorded the life
and ministry of Jesus.
There's a quote that I came across from Oswald Chambers.
We'll have it up here on the board.
It says,
The Sermon on the Mount is a statement
of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit
is having his way with us.
I'll read that one part, the second half, one more time.
He came to make us what he teaches we should be.
The Sermon on the Mount is a statement
of the life we will live when the Holy Spirit
is having his way with us.
And that's from Oswald Chambers.
Our text today brings us to what is undoubtedly
the most well-known famous sermon of all time,
the Sermon on the Mount.
And that extends from chapter five through chapter seven.
And specifically, we'll be looking at the beginning portion
of that, which is the Beatitudes.
And if you do have your Bibles in front of you,
then you'll probably notice something about the Beatitudes
that's different than the text before it and after it.
And that is, it stands and is arranged as if it's a poem.
It looks like it's a poetic utterance.
And that's because it is written in that poetic style,
the style that we see in the Psalms or Ecclesiastes.
That particular section, those first few verses of chapter five
are written in such a way that we would call them
like wisdom literature.
And the thing about wisdom literature
is they're not promises as in, if you do this, you get this.
But they're statements about reality
to help us understand what is, not if you,
then this will come to be.
And that's an important distinction to make
and we'll look a little bit further into that
as we go forward.
But we're looking particularly at this,
and we're exploring what does it mean fundamentally
to live the kingdom life?
And it is here that we see Jesus's ministry
actually begin up till now.
We've been surveying Jesus's life as a young person,
as he being brought into the world.
And then in the last chapter, as he makes a move
from his hometown Nazareth to Capernaum
on the Sea of Galilee, and he launches his ministry there.
And chapter four concluded with him launching this ministry
and healing and delivering and proclaiming
the kingdom of God in the vein of John the Baptist.
And this gained him quite a big following.
He started to have people show up out of nowhere.
In fact, it's said at the end of chapter four
that a great crowds from Galilee and the Decapolis
and from Jerusalem and Judea and from beyond the Jordan
began to come to Jesus as they heard about these healings
and these miracles and this teacher, Jesus,
and what he was doing on the Sea of Galilee.
So before we work our way through this text in Matthew five,
there are a few things we need to talk about.
So much of this section of Matthew is influenced
by the prophecies of particularly one prophet, Isaiah.
Isaiah's prophecies speak heavily
into what we're about to read.
And in fact, we had just read Isaiah 61
at the beginning of the service
and Jesus had just read it in the narrative
at the synagogue about Isaiah 61.
And now we're going to see other prophecies in Isaiah
that Matthew is drawing on to complete this picture
of what Jesus is doing right here in this time.
We've already seen how Matthew,
he selects Old Testament prophecies as he's constructed.
So you imagine, I don't know how you grew up
or how you imagined the Bible being written,
but when I was younger, I imagined someone walking along
with Jesus and writing Matthew down
as he's walking with Jesus.
And by the time Jesus dies, Matthew's written.
And that's not the case at all.
These books were written many, many years later.
And some people see that as a problem
because, well, testimony over time.
But we have to think of that particular day and time
in the first century, these written down testimonies,
first of all, were very expensive to write.
They required scrolls and they required scribes to do it.
And it was a very expensive undertaking
to have anything like this done.
And so you wouldn't do it just haphazardly.
It wasn't until later in their life
when witnesses began to get old and they realized
that these people were going to die
who witnessed this firsthand,
we need to get them on record.
We need to get them on record
that they began to write the gospels.
And so Matthew, later as he's writing the gospel,
he gets some freedom inspired by the Holy Spirit
to look at it and go,
what is the Holy Spirit through me writing about Jesus?
And the reason we have four gospels is each one of them
were moved by the Holy Spirit to write
and highlight particular areas of Jesus' life
in connection to other things.
And Matthew specifically writes about Jesus
who is the Messiah that was promised in the Old Testament.
And this is why we see the repetition of,
and so it was done to fulfill the prophecy
that was spoken through so and so
because Matthew's purpose is to show the connection
between the prophecies of the Old Testament,
the utterances of the Old Testament,
the writings of the Old Testament
and how they directly connect to this man, this God man,
Jesus Christ, he is the Messiah that was spoken about.
He is the coming Messiah
and he shows how Jesus fulfills that.
In Isaiah chapter two,
speaking of the messianic age,
as Isaiah receives a vision from the Lord
of nations and peoples streaming into the land
and streaming to the mountain of the Lord
to receive God's teaching.
Isaiah chapter two says,
come, let's go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us about his ways
so that we may walk in his paths.
Or Isaiah chapter 40 says,
Zion, herald of good news,
go up on a high mountain.
Jerusalem, herald of good news,
raise your voice loudly.
Raise it, do not be afraid.
Say to the cities of Judah,
here is your God.
If you really want a deeper, more robust understanding
of what Matthew's talking about,
then an exploration of the book of Isaiah
is very, very helpful.
And in fact, if you're not already,
just hop onto our Bible reading plan.
We have some of the notes out there
in the lobby at the welcome center
because it just so happens in a couple of days
we're gonna be in Isaiah.
And it'd be a great time for you to track along
through Isaiah and begin to make
some of those hyperlinks yourself.
It's a great companion read.
So last week we witnessed that the Messiah, King Jesus,
he called his first disciples.
You guys remember that?
We had Peter and Andrew,
and we had James and John who were called to follow Jesus.
And it wasn't so much an invitation as it was a command.
Come follow me.
And I'm going to do this in your life.
Well, Isaiah tells us that the Messiah who will come,
and remember Isaiah,
when we talk about the prophecies of Isaiah,
Isaiah has written 700 years before Jesus.
So the Isaiah prophecies tell of this Messiah who will come
and this Messiah will have a teaching
and a proclamation ministry.
His ministry will be one of teaching.
He will teach us his ways, it said.
Go to the mountain, he will teach us his way
so that we may walk in his path.
Messiah will be a teacher.
And what Jesus is about to begin to do is just that.
He's going to lay out for us
God's ideal design for humanity.
And whereas humanity did what was right
in their own eyes in the Garden of Eden,
and as a result of our suffering under this constant weight
of the destructive power of sin,
Jesus will show us what is good
and what is right in the eye of God.
And we need that.
We have so many competing messages
telling us what is good and right for us.
We need someone to set for us the stage.
What does it mean to be a citizen of the kingdom?
Part of Matthew's approach too is to draw these parallels
between Jesus and the prophet who came before named Moses.
And Moses, you know much of his story about the Red Sea
and the deliverance of the people of God,
and after that as they came in,
they came to the Mount Sinai and what did Moses do?
He went up on the hill, right?
He went up the hill and he received what?
The Ten Commandments and the law, right?
He received the law from God.
He received God's utterance.
Another way of putting it, he received God's way.
And then he came to bring it to the people.
Well, like Moses who ascended a mountain
to receive the word of God for the people of Israel,
so Jesus is taking his place of top of Mount Sinai
to the top of mountain to deliver a word.
But unlike Moses who was acting as a human mediator
between God and man, Jesus is the God-man.
The eternally existent second person in the Trinity,
God himself in the flesh,
and he is now going to declare what it means
to be his people.
I think it's a message we ought to listen to.
So when he saw the crowds, the crowds had heard his ministry,
they heard of all the miracles and signs and wonders.
And when he saw the crowds, he went up on the mountain
and after he sat down, his disciples came to him.
You can imagine on the rising hills to the west
of the Sea of Galilee that began to make their way
up toward Jerusalem down in the south.
On those rising hills, Jesus sits down
and his disciples gather around him.
And to sit down for a teacher of his time
was actually the assumed position
of an authoritative teacher.
We don't do that so much now.
Typically we stand higher than everyone as I am right now.
But authoritative teachers in that time would sit down
and people would gather around them
to receive the word from the teacher.
And so Jesus sits down.
And the good news of the kingdom of God
is always spread through a message.
It's always spread through a message.
Still today, the good news, the gospel is a message.
It's an announcement, it's a story.
It's one of those reasons why you and I as believers,
if you have put your hope and faith in Christ
and you've received the commission to come and follow him,
we cannot, we cannot get away from the reality
that the gospel is not me living a good life
so everyone sees it.
It's not, that's incomplete.
That's good, that's incomplete.
The gospel is a message, always.
The gospel is an announcement of the king, always.
The gospel is a proclamation of this story.
And if you can hear the word story without thinking fiction,
it's this proclamation of a story
of how God entered the world and changed things forever
and began to reveal and announce a new kingdom
and a new humanity that we all get to participate in.
That's what it means to share the gospel.
It's not simply about I do good things,
people see those good things and they're really happy for me.
Having settled in, the disciples around him
and the crowds just beyond the disciples,
Jesus speaks again.
The most powerful and potent message ever spoken
and he begins with, blessed are the poor in spirit
for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
Blessed are the poor in spirit
for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
I'll just take a little sidebar here
just for a moment if I could have it.
Sidebar, if you hear those words and you go, okay.
And remember, Jesus on a hilltop,
the most earth-shattering profound message ever preached
begins with blessed are the poor in spirit
for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Let even your apathy to it.
If you're indifferent to something like that,
if that doesn't cause you to go either, huh, or yes.
Sit in that for a moment and go, why?
It's powerful statements.
It's upside down.
It's backward, it doesn't make sense.
If you've lived in this world for any amount of time
and you've been swayed by this world,
the way of this world, that doesn't make sense.
That's not blessed. And this section that we're entering
into is called the Beatitudes.
And it's not just a fun way, I don't know,
maybe you've heard a preacher do this before,
apologies to that preacher.
But it's not just a fun way of saying,
these are the attitudes you should be, be attitudes.
No, no, no, Beatitudes is from the Latin
and it basically just means blessed.
The attitude means blessed.
And these are the blessed or the blessed statements.
If you look at Matthew 5, chapter 5, verse 3 through 11,
you will see nine of these blessed statements, blessed R.
And there's a technical term for them,
they're called macarisms.
Macarisms are this blessed R, da, da, da,
four, da, da, da, whatever that is, is a macarism.
And you'll see some of those in the Psalms,
Ecclesiastes and elsewhere.
There are nine of them here in chapter five.
And this word blessed or blessed, this is a loaded word.
It's a loaded word for us because there are really two
dangers that we might have when we hear the word blessed.
The first one is when we hear it,
in the context of this scripture, for instance,
we're tempted to hear it as a sort of description
of God bestowing some special extraordinary favor on us.
Blessed, like a, wow, God blessed you really good there, man.
Or like, wow, God gave you something really special
or treated you with favor there.
Man, man, I'm blessed because I had parking favor.
I got the front parking spot, you know, at big lots.
Does anyone shop at big lots?
Man, I'm blessed because God gave me that money
to pay that bill, I'm blessed.
And God does show favor.
God does bestow provision.
Me and Adrian can tell you countless testimonies
over the time that God provided when we were in desperate need.
God provides grace at times.
The Bible says so, but that's not particularly
what this word means, blessed or blessed,
at least not in this particular context.
And the second danger flows out of that first one,
and namely that we're in danger if we read the beatitudes
as a sort of new law for us to obey.
We get beatitudes as some sort of tit for tat
kind of arrangement.
And what do I mean?
Oh, I'll receive God's blessing
if I make myself poor in spirit.
I just gotta really try to be poor in spirit.
Or, oh, I'll receive God's blessing, you know,
if I'm a peacemaker, so I'm gonna go make peace
because I wanna receive God's blessing.
Or if I'm pure and hard or if I hunger and thirst or,
or, you know, I want God's blessing so bad
so I have to, you know, I need to mourn.
I need to mourn.
Do something bad to me so I can mourn.
Hit me in the face with a two by four.
I need to mourn.
You know, I'd say if you do these things,
then God will bless you.
And actually that's not what's happening here
in the beatitudes at all.
And that's because blessed, or to be the blessed ones,
or blessed are, is the state of inner satisfaction,
joy and peace that is only the result
of a covenantal relationship with God.
To be blessed is the inner satisfaction, joy and peace
that is the result of a covenantal relationship with God.
It cannot be experienced apart from relationship
with Creator God.
It is not in the money you have received
or the parking favor bestowed on you.
It is in the relationship, the covenantal relationship
you have with your Creator.
And blessed is about human flourishing, human flourishing.
It's life according to God's perfect design.
What does life according to God's perfect design look like?
Humanity is supposed to have the life-giving,
life-sustaining, flourishing connection
with their good Creator.
We're all supposed to have that.
And we know that when you're in Christ,
that connection is made through Christ to our Creator,
God, in Christ.
And when you're outside of that,
you're distant or separated from that good,
life-sustaining, life-giving, flourishing connection
with your good Creator.
Blessed does not have anything to do
with your external circumstances whatsoever.
You can be blessed
and have terrible external circumstances.
Blessed, are you wealthy?
Are you poor?
Doesn't matter.
It's immaterial to blessed.
Are you in a world of pain and suffering
because life has come down on you so hard?
Or are you living on top of the world?
Doesn't matter.
That has nothing to do with blessed.
Or are you popular?
Lots of accolades, people look to you.
Or are you invisible?
Doesn't matter.
See, we tend to think of these things,
we tend to think that these things,
whether it's popularity or money
or being free from pain and suffering,
those things are what matter.
And if we get the formula just right,
if we tweak it just right in our lives,
we can get it so we can have the right amount of money we want,
we can mitigate the suffering in our life,
and we can have just the amount of popularity
and being liked that we like.
And if I achieve those things, I'm blessed.
And that has nothing to do
with what the Bible's talking about, nothing at all.
There is a difference between what is descriptive
and what is prescriptive in the Bible.
The Bible sometimes will describe what is.
And sometimes it'll prescribe what to do.
The Beatitudes are descriptive.
They're telling us what is.
And you may work your life away.
You may work every day, you may wake up
with all of that motivation.
Look at all the TikToks or the Instagrams
or the Facebook stories you can
to get your daily motivation so you can get out there
and kick some butt and earn the amount of money you want
so you can have the happy life.
You can do all of those things and try your hardest
to change your status from poor to rich
and yet die not in a bit blessed state,
but maybe in a far worse state than you ever have been.
Blessed is a new way to be human.
What Jesus is doing in his teaching here
is not giving us a list of spiritual giants
or heroes of the faith that we're supposed to imitate
or just another list of moral behaviors
that describe what true piety looks like
and how we can obey him and get what we want
out of this situation.
But what Jesus is doing in the Beatitudes
is he's redefining who the people of God are.
He's drawing a box and he's saying,
this is who the people of God are.
They are ones whose lives look like this way of being.
God's people are ones whose lives look like this way of being.
And so the Beatitudes, we have to approach them
not as an entrance exam to the kingdom.
I've heard it preached before where the Beatitudes
are like your citizenship exam.
Am I poor in spirit?
Yeah, am I mourning?
Yeah, am I pure in heart?
Not yet.
Gotta go work on that before I can get my citizenship.
It's not what it is.
It is an announcement of citizenship.
This is what it is.
It's descriptive and that's key.
To be blessed is not about getting the good stuff.
It's about having the good one.
It is not about getting the good stuff.
It's about having the good one
and truly needing nothing else.
One of the features of the attitude
is how upside down they are to the way of living
that accords with this way of this world.
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The kingdom of heaven is theirs.
And that does not sound blessed,
not to our earthly ears.
So what does it mean to be poor in spirit?
Jesus begins his sermon with this
and again, it doesn't mean to be materially poor.
It doesn't mean divest yourself of all your possessions
so that you can be poor.
And suddenly that being poor is a virtue in and of itself.
Some people get that wrong as well.
They act as if material poverty alone
puts you into this special class of people
that God is all about you because you're materially poor
no matter how you live or who you are or what you believe.
And that's at least not what's being said here.
Poor in spirit means this.
It means that you recognize you are spiritually bankrupt.
You are spiritually bankrupt.
Poor in spirit means that your debt of sin,
your self-righteousness and your rebellion against God
is so enormous that you could never satisfy that debt.
Ever, never ever.
It is recognizing that your good works,
even your good works and your goodness is worthless
to paying back the debt of that sin.
Worthless.
In view of Isaiah 64-6, again,
drawing in these themes from Isaiah,
all of us have become like something unclean
and all our righteous acts are like a polluted garment.
All of our righteous, polluted garment, by the way,
that's a super nice way of putting it.
The real word is gross and we're not gonna talk about it.
It's bad.
It's polluted.
It's disgusting.
It's unclean.
Unclean.
All your righteous acts are like a polluted garment
because of sin.
Being poor in spirit means because of sin,
you are spiritually destitute and can do nothing,
absolutely nothing to save yourself.
Before a perfect and holy and righteous God,
your sinful heart and all the sins you have done
have made you utterly unacceptable.
He is pure, you are unclean.
You are dirty, wretched, poor, blind.
That's what poor in spirit means.
Spiritually bankrupt.
But it's more than just seeing that.
It's more than just acknowledging that
because it is accompanied with that knowledge
front and center, my spiritual bankrupt,
see, it also is accompanied with an end of the line trust
that God is the only one who is able to save you
from this miserable sin condition.
I know who I am in and of myself,
wretched, poor, blind, in debt over my head,
spiritually bankrupt, unable to save myself.
My righteous acts are as if dirty and evil
and righteous acts are as if dirty, unclean garments.
My goodness, my inherent goodness.
Most people are good, most people are good.
Most people are inherently good.
That's not biblical, period.
If you believe that, that's not biblical.
We can sit down, we can have a couple counseling sessions.
That's not biblical at all.
Most people are not inherently good. We need to see our condition.
As it is, but in light of the fact
that God is the only one who can save us.
And in acknowledging the bad news,
we acknowledge the bad news
and then we believe what Isaiah chapter 57, 15 says.
The good news.
For the high and exalted one who lives forever,
whose name as holy says this,
I live in a high and holy place
and I live with the oppressed and the lowly in spirit.
And with the oppressed and the lowly in spirit,
I will revive the spirit of the lowly
and I will revive the heart of the oppressed.
God is your only hope.
And he lives with the lowly in spirit.
Jesus says the flourishing way to live,
the flourishing way of living
is whoever has that understanding,
the one who has come to see
that they are living the good life in the kingdom of God
because they know who they are and they know who their God is.
The good news of the kingdom begins here.
And you don't have a gospel if you don't see this.
You don't have a gospel.
If you believe anything other than that,
you don't believe the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And it is gospel, it's good news. That's good news.
That's good news. It is no gospel at all.
If the good news that you preach to yourself
on a daily basis is that you're an inherently good person.
And that you simply make mistakes and oopsie daisy,
I just hope everyone can get along with me throughout life.
You know, I'm sorry, I just make lots of mistakes.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, but I'm good.
That's not gospel.
The gospel is knowing who you are
and knowing how everyone else sees you.
And more than that, knowing how you were in view of God,
the Holy Perfect One, who you are.
And then saying, but I trust him,
he's the only one who could save me.
There's no other gospel. There's no other one.
The good news of the kingdom of God
is that you are not good enough,
but that God makes his dwelling.
God makes his home with the lowly in spirit.
The citizens of the kingdom,
the citizens of the kingdom of God,
they have this totally unworldly view.
Because sometimes people accuse you,
you have a worldly view, you have a worldly life.
Citizens, they have an unworldly view
and they have an unworldly hope.
Each of the Beatitudes states or begins with a state,
blessed are the poor in spirit
and ends with a reason for their blessedness.
What is the reason for the blessedness of the poor in spirit?
Because they receive the king and the kingdom.
And that's why they're blessed.
Not because they have riches,
not because their life goes well
and they have no suffering, they have no sickness,
they have no troubles in this world.
That's not the reason they're blessed.
They're blessed because they receive the king
and they receive the kingdom.
There's is the riches, there's is the glory,
there's is the hope, there's is the life.
Rich is that never rust, glory that never fades,
hope that never disappoints and life that never ends.
Another way that you could say this
is that the kingdom of heaven consists
of those blessed, poor in spirit
and that all of the kingdom's benefits are theirs.
And if you notice in that scripture,
it's all present tense.
The kingdom of heaven is theirs.
It's theirs now.
We hear kingdom of heaven and some of us
will probably immediately think of our forever cloud home
in the future where we get to float around
and do weird things, I don't know.
Like in Christ, we've received that deposit
already here now.
We already have access to all those benefits.
Ephesians says so, it says,
blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Blessed again, that same word,
blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing
in the heavens in Christ.
There are ours right now.
All of them are ours.
You're blessed if you are poor in spirit.
The kingdom and the kingdom resources are yours.
And that leads us to blessed are those who mourn
for they will be comforted.
Next Jesus says that the flourishing citizens
of the kingdom are ones who mourn.
And again, we have a paradox here.
It's almost like someone is saying,
happy are the unhappy ones.
And that doesn't sound right.
Christians, citizens of the kingdom though,
we are told live with a mournfulness to their life.
And I'm sure some of you who've been in the faith
for many years,
know this, you live with a mournfulness in this life.
Christians are not utopians
to see reality through some rose colored glasses.
This mournfulness begins with our own sin in view.
The presence of sins, destructive power
at work within our own hearts
brings us to contrition as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Especially mournful over the part we play in this sin mess
and the part that we perpetuate in society.
And it was the people around us, the ones we love most.
We mourn over the fact that we hurt people out of our sin.
We mourn.
Disciples of Jesus see that this world is in a fallen state.
They see the destruction that humans inflict on one another.
They see the news and they're mournful over the endless trail
of senseless death, senseless oppression
and hostility in this world.
They experience this world not as a happy go lucky
perverted ignorance,
but with a brokenness over the brokenness of all things.
They mourn for the brokenness as sickness tears them
or the loved one apart as cancer slowly wins in their body.
As miscarriage sucks the air of joyful expectancy out of life.
As their marriage grows colder and colder and colder
and they begin to feel the numbing effect on their own heart.
They mourn over the immigrant who has no place to call home,
who is wandering the streets of a foreign land
and is looked by fellow human beings
as if they're a disease and a parasite.
They mourn as everything around them changes.
Why does everything have to change?
They mourn.
But they also wait.
They mourn, but they wait.
For what?
For a kingdom.
For a kingdom and for a city whose foundations are
the unchanging immutable God.
We're told that in Hebrews.
We wait for a city whose very foundations are God.
Won't change.
All of those tragedies, all of those suffering,
all of that is change.
We want a city that won't change.
They wait with hope for a coming king
who will finally once for all bring justice to this world.
A coming king where every justice will be reversed
and every untrue word ever spoken about you
will be demolished and every tear that was cried
over the brokenness of this world
or the pain in your heart or the pain of your family
or your children or your children's children.
Every tear cried in this broken world will be vindicated.
They live in the tension of the in between,
the median between what is and what will be.
And they do something that everything in this world
screams against.
Everything in this world says that does not make sense
to do in your state.
A believer, the Christian, the disciple,
they wait on the Lord.
They wait.
They hope.
They mourn and they wait and they trust.
We mourn, we wait and we trust
and we will be comforted.
We will be comforted.
Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
Blessed are those who mourn,
as my brother Brad told me yesterday,
we do all our mourning here.
We do all of our mourning here.
And we leave an eternity with none.
So get it in.
There's plenty to go around, we do it all here.
But a day is coming, where it'll be gone.
Nothing in this sermon, amen, amen.
Nothing in this sermon is about how we become a Christian.
This is important to hear as we close up.
Nothing in this sermon is about how you become a Christian.
This sermon is about the faith and the works and the fruits
that no one can have or do
unless they already are a Christian.
But hearing the blessed state of what it means
to be a child of God, to believe, I call to you,
if you have never before put your trust or hope
in Jesus Christ alone for your salvation, now.
Now is the time.
Today is the day.
And I say to you, if you are mourning,
but you are mourning with hope today,
remember this about the kingdom of God,
that day is coming.
That day is coming, it is nearer today than yesterday.
And what day is that?
What day do we hope for?
The child of God, yours is the kingdom,
both now and forevermore.
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away
and the sea was no more.
And I also saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem,
coming down out of heaven from God,
prepared like a bride adorned for her husband.
And then I heard a loud voice from the throne,
look, God's dwelling is with humanity,
and he will live with them,
and they will be his people,
and God himself will be with them,
and will be their God,
and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more.
Grief, crying, and pain will be no more,
because the previous things, the former things have passed away.
And then one seated on a throne said, look,
the word look is behold, behold,
I am making everything new.
And he also said, write, write this down,
because these words are faithful and true.
Then he said to me, it is done.
I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.
I will freely give to the thirsty
from the spring of the waters of life,
the one who conquers will inherit all of these things,
and I will be his God,
and he will be my son and my daughter.
We mourn and we wait.
We mourn and we wait,
and one day our waiting will be joy.
We look into the eyes of the suffering,
we watch as bodies waste away,
we see the pain as families go through turmoil
and trouble and we weep and we mourn,
and we see as our marriages fall apart,
and we weep and we mourn,
and we pray out for God for a time in the kingdom,
and a place where all will be made right.
And we believe with faith this will be, it is coming,
and it is closer than ever before.
And we say, whole Lord, haste the day.