Sermon Tone Analysis

How many of you have already taken down all your Christmas decor?

I took advantage of the nice weather and took our outside decorations down this week.

Samantha packed up the house yesterday.

The packages have been opened, the returns have begun, Q99 is back to playing bad 80s music, and life is returning to normal.

However, we want to look at Christmas one more time this morning.

We spent the last few weeks talking about what Christmas is all about.

We saw that it was about a broken world, where our sin destroyed our relationship with God.

We saw that Christmas is about God promising to set that right and send a Savior.

He used faithful people like Zechariah and humble people like Mary to bring that promise to reality.

Last week, we looked at the manger and realized that all of this led to God taking on human flesh, living among us.

We saw that Christmas is about giving him glory and finding true peace with God through what Jesus would do through his life, work, death, and resurrection.

However, all of that has left us with a hole, hasn’t it?

We hear the angels declaring peace on earth, and we hear Isaiah saying that the government would be on this child’s shoulders, and that he will be the prince of peace.

We have peace with God, which is amazing, but is that all?

Is that where it stops, or does Christmas mean more?

What does Christmas say about the wars in the world and the war in our own mind and soul?

If Jesus is the one who God had promised to set everything right, then why is so much still wrong?

That’s what we want to look at this morning, and it is a great way for us to wrap up a year and look forward to the new one.

Adding one more word to our thought of what Christmas is all about, we will see clearly that ultimately, Christmas is about hope.

Let’s redefine hope for our context this morning.

Usually, when we say hope, we mean “wish”.

We hope our team wins the game, or we hope it doesn’t rain, or we hope next year will be better than this one was.

Ultimately, we don’t have any real certainty about what will happen, so a hope like that is a wish.

However, for us, the hope we are talking about today is the certainty that something will occur that hasn’t yet.

What is going to occur?

Fast forward to the end of your Bible this morning and join me in Revelation 21:1-8.

Over the last few weeks, we have seen a broken world in need of a savior.

Last week, we celebrated the time when Jesus was born into the world as that promised savior.

He lived, taught, and ministered, and as he did, he was beginning the work of reestablishing the kingdom of God on earth.

God never lost control of creation, nor did he take his hands off the wheel.

However, Jesus came and started showing God’s power and leading people to follow him.

Eventually, Jesus opened the doors of the kingdom to anyone who would follow him by dying in our place, rising from the dead, and offering us his life in exchange for the sin that kept us from God.

As we have already said, we have peace with God now through his work.

However, we are waiting expectantly for the conclusion of the story; we are waiting for Jesus to return.

There are good, godly, incredibly smart people who disagree on the specifics of how all that will happen.

However, all those who trust the authority of God’s word believe that when all the events of history and judgment are complete, whatever they look like, that we will see the statements of come to pass fully.

Then, God’s promise will be completely and totally fulfilled.

As we look at four different aspects of that promise this morning, I pray that God uses this to fill you with hope going into 2020.

Hear me clearly: I sincerely hope that each and every single one of you have the greatest year of your life next year.

I pray God blesses you richly in amazing ways, and that you see him move.

May I say something, though, that you may not want to hear?

We have no real guarantee that next year is going to be better or easier or smoother.

That’s why our hope isn’t in our New Year’s Resolutions, it isn’t in the election, or in anything else.

Our hope is in truths found in the words we are going to read together today.

In fact, let’s read them together now...

Let’s take a closer look at four different aspects of what we just read, and may God use this to fill you with hope.

1) God will restore everything.

We see that the old earth has passed away, and now everything has been made new.

He will make everything new, just like He has done with us.

“Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.”

(, NASB95)

The God who created everything from nothing will one day recreate everything and remove the stain of sin.

We’re not sure exactly what this will look like.

There are some passages that point to a complete destruction:

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.” (, NASB95)

Others look at those passages and say they are simply describing the process of restoration, where God will purge the current earth from the stain of sin and the fall and renew everything to a state like the Garden of Eden.

Just like when God saved you and made you new in Christ, you were still “you”, the new earth may very well still be like earth as we know it.

John Piper explains it this way:

“When and say that the present earth and heavens will ‘pass away,’ it does not have to mean that they go out of existence, but may mean that there will be such a change in them that their present condition passes away.

We might say, ‘The caterpillar passes away, and the butterfly emerges.’

There is a real passing away, and there is a real continuity, a real connection.’[i]

Every trace of sin will be removed, but the earth will still exist in a purified form.

Think about when we talked about and the Judgment Seat of Christ where are works are tried with fire.

What is burnt up are the things we have done for ourselves, which would make them sinful.

What we do for Christ remains.

Couldn’t the earth’s “trial by fire”, if you will, be similar?

That backs up what Paul teaches about creation in :

“For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God.

For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.”

(, NASB95)

Creation is waiting for the day that it all gets set right again, not for the day that it all gets destroyed.

That day is described for us here, as the stain of sin is removed.

Christmas was the first hint at that, since Jesus was the first person since Adam and Eve who didn’t have a sinful nature from the moment he was conceived.

His sinlessness hinted at the fact that God would one day take sin away from even creation itself.

That sin is what drove a wedge between us and God, and it is what broke creation.

With a renewed heaven and earth, then, there will be no more stain of sin to separate us from God.

Once the barrier of sin is removed, we see the next aspect of this:

2) He will live with us.

Go back and look at verse 3...

Isn’t this what we have been missing all along?

We drove God away in the garden; it was our fault!

They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

(, NASB95)

It seems that God would walk with Adam and Eve.

They enjoyed uninterrupted access to the God who loved them enough to make them.

And, as we saw last week, Jesus’ birth was the first real step in God coming and living with us again.

Sin broke all that.

However, because of our sin, Jesus still couldn’t fully reveal his glory to us, and after he finished what he needed to accomplish to save us, he went back to heaven.

Ever since then, we have been trying to get back to God.

Have you ever wondered why the first thing Adam and Eve noticed was their nakedness?

A writer named Donald Miller put it this way: Do you ever remember getting away from your parents in a crowded store?

Maybe you were hiding in a clothes rack and when you came out, you couldn’t find them?

When Adam and Eve sinned, it was like coming out of the clothes rack and not finding your mom.

Suddenly, they were scared and alone.

Throughout history, we have tried to fix that and get right with God on our own terms.

Sometimes we try to ignore Him and act like He doesn’t exist, but He loves us too much to leave us alone.

That’s why He came to die on the cross for us…His death makes the way for us to come to Him; not because we do the right thing, but because He has offered us His righteousness

However, God didn’t completely abandon us.

Those of us who have surrendered to him here on this earth have a trace of his presence on earth, because the Bible tells us that the Holy Spirit lives inside us right now, giving us a hint of what’s to come.