Sermon Tone Analysis

Awakening Prayer

Tonight and this week as a Student Ministry we are going to be praying for:

Your City and Nation

Specifically, we are praying that our nation and our town would praise God and not curse Him.

Psalm

Father,

Your image that you created us with and formed in us, at one point in history, in the garden of Eden, when Adam and Even walked in innocence, has been severely damaged due to the fall.

Not only do experience the hardship of a fallen world, but we also have an intimate knowledge of sin.

We have inherited Adam’s sinful corruption and his guilt and now we even live after sin.

Father we know ourselves - even after you’ve rescued us from sin.

We know how fragile our devotion is to you, how our passion for you wanes, how we love the things of this world - comfort, pleasure, power, fame - more than a life spent tethered to you.

And so, we begin here, in the household of God - give us hearts that long after you.

Forgive us for wandering away, for pursuing dead idols, and loving ourselves more than you.

Recapture our hearts for your fame and glory.

Let us again fall in love with your gospel and let us live in your gospel - let the good news of Jesus transform our youth group and church.

So that we can be the fragrance of life and death to those around us.

God we finally pray for our lost town and nation.

We pray, just like we’ve received, that they would come to know your mercy in Jesus Christ.

We don’t want lost people to curse you.

We desire to see the lost in Iowa Park and beyond lay down their weapons and raise up the white flag and surrender to King Jesus.

I pray for those who claim “Atheism” and those who claim are “Pragmatic Naturalists”.

For all who curse you I pray you’d break them and create in them new hearts like you’ve done in us.

We want to see Iowa Park praise you for your goodness and love and might and wisdom.

Let us be the hands and feet to reach out to our dying world.

We pray all of this in the mighty name of Jesus, and all of God’s people say “Amen”.

Introduction

Well, for those who are playing catch up - meaning you haven’t been here for two weeks - we are in Part 3 of 6 in our series entitled “Heaven Bound”.

The first week we talked about Heaven’s Door and we answered this question, “What is the doorway to Heaven?”

And what was the answer we found?

The Gospel of Jesus Christ!

We looked at the fact that God is Great and God is good, that we’ve, all of collected humanity, rebelled against God and as a consequence we inherited a sinful nature from Adam and that is really bad news because the penalty for our sin is spiritual death in Hell, but the Scriptures testify that God was merciful and sent Christ:

And what we found is that it’s not enough just to see the beauty of the cross - God commands us to run from our sin and to run to Christ by faith.

We must respond to God putting forth Christ as our substitute.

That was week one.

Last week we talked about the Present Heaven.

The two main things we discussed is that The Present Heaven is temporary, it is where those who’ve placed their faith in Christ go when they die, but it is not our eternal home.

I think this illustration was helpful:

Panama Illustration through Dallas

So in the same way the Present Heaven is like Dallas and Panama is like our true destination - the New Earth.

That is the key to understanding the doctrine of Heaven.

The secondly we learned that in the Present Heaven, like where your granddad is at, it is most likely physical in some way - which helps us hope and long for the Present Heaven.

Transition: tonight we turn the corner to introduce the New Earth - our eternal home.

We are going to talk about the main guiding principle for understanding the New Earth how we see it apply to Earth and the Resurrection - and I’ll give you a taste of our next week sermon.

(1) New Earth’s Guiding Principle

If you want to understand what life on the New Earth, our eternal home is like, then you must understand the principle of Renewal & Similarity.

Theologians call this principle the Redemptive Continuity Principle.

I think it’s easier to understand by the words: Renewal & Similarity.

So to be renewed means: to give fresh life; to revive; to bring back to life or to restore.

Then we have the word similarity, it means: alike or almost identical.

So this principle says when we try to understand the New Earth it is revived, restored and similar to what we know and experience.

There are things about the New Earth we can know and understand.

Now, I hope you understand that this principle actually flows from Scripture - it isn’t something that is man made and laid upon Scripture.

So let’s look at it in light of our Earth that we know.

(2) Earth’s Redemption

Play the first minute of “This World is not my home.”

The first line says “this world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through.”

This old gospel song, as beautiful as it is, only tells a half truth.

See what we must recognize is yes, we are passing through this Earth, but eventually, after the Present Heaven passes away with the return of Christ, believers in Christ will be back here on a renewed and restored Earth that is similar to what we now know.

Think about Earth in the beginning:

So, from the beginning God’s world was very good - but it didn’t stay that way.

Adam and Eve rebelled against God by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and in that moment sin entered the world.

And God told them of the consequences that would result if they broke His good command:

Because God is a good and just God He couldn’t let their sin go unpunished so He cursed man and the world.

We read of this in :

The Earth as we experience it is under the curse of God - it is not the home we were originally made for.

Husbands and wives experience hardship in the home “your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”

That means women will try to lead and men will unmercifully lead.

It’ll be a fight.

This was not God’s intention.

Also, part of the curse is the hardship of work, it’s toil between the Garden of Eden and the New Earth to work.

Death was another curse of God “you are dust and to dust you shall return” and so was the curse of the ground - that it wouldn’t produce bountifully any longer.

That’s why we feel homesick for our Eternal Home on the New Earth.

People seem to think that “there’s nothing in our present experience that can help us to know what Heaven is like”.

That may sound great, but it’s not what we see pictured in the Bible.

Genesis

The Earth as we know it and experience it is under the curse of God - it is not our home, we are homesick, but the world as it was in the beginning, and as it will be in the end, is our home.

See the key to understanding the New Earth, the place believers will live forever after the Present Heaven is this:

One of the main reason’s people have a hard time with the Eternal Heaven or what the Bible calls the New Earth is because they think like this: “there’s nothing in our present experience that can suggest to us what Heaven is like.”

Now that sounds great, but that’s not the picture the Bible gives us.

See the key to understanding the New Earth, the place believers will live forever after the Present Heaven is this:

“The biblical doctrine of the New Earth implies something startling: that if we want to know what the ultimate Heaven, our eternal home, will be like, the best place to start is by looking around us.” -Randy Alcorn.

We don’t close our eyes and try to imagine the unimaginable, no, rather we open our eyes and use the present Earth as a valid starting point for understanding the New Earth.

The New Earth will be a Renewed Old Earth.

How?

By the lifting of the curse of God.

It started with the cross.

Listen to :

It started with the cross.

Listen to :

So the price of going to the cross was Jesus becoming a curse.

He became the curse to commence the beginning of the end of the curse of God on our world.

So Jesus began the work of undoing the curse - it’s what we call the “Already, but Not Yet” aspect of the kingdom of God.

So think of the life of Jesus when he healed a blind person or brought a dead child back to life - it was only momentary.

They all ended up dying.

Though their bodies were momentarily “renewed” the wear and tear of this world broke in again ultimately.

See, the miracles worked primarily to prove Jesus to be the Son of God, but secondarily they worked to give us appetizers of the eternal heaven or life on the New Earth.

This is what it will be like.

No death.

No blindness.

No sickness.