Sermon Tone Analysis
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Here we are the week after Christmas.
Maybe you’ve still got decorations up at home, maybe everything is already packed away.
Either way, we are now in that time of year when we start to turn our thoughts away from the Christmas season and into what comes next.
That’s a good question for us today—what does come next?
Now that we have passed that season of Advent expectation for the Messiah to come, where do we go next?
Jesus has come.
God dwells among his people.
Two thousand years ago Jesus literally came to dwell among his people by being born in Bethlehem.
And now for those of us who live after Pentecost, God still literally comes to dwell among his people through his Holy Spirit in our hearts.
Born in Bethlehem or born again in us, God is here.
And the question is still here: What comes next?
Today we are looking at a passage that comes from the very end of the bible.
This is from the final chapter of the final book of scripture.
There are the last words from Jesus shared by an angel to the apostle John to write down and share with the churches.
These are the final instructions from Jesus to his church.
Revelation is a complicated book in the Bible.
We don’t have time here today to crack all of that open and explain all the mysteries of Revelation.
Today we want to just pull a few ideas from these few short verses that help us consider what it is we do together as a church now that Christmas is over—now that we live in a time when we affirm that Jesus has appeared.
Let’s catch a few themes from this passage.
Like so many other passages in scripture, these verses are organized in a reflecting outline.
John begins with one idea, moves along to another, and then turns around and goes back to where he began.
It looks like this.
A – Jesus comes with invitation to receive life from him (v 12)
B – Jesus is all glorious, the eternal God (v 13)
C – Jesus invites broken sinners to be made clean through his grace (v 14-15)
B’ – Jesus is all glorious, the eternal God (v 16)
A’ – Jesus comes with invitation to receive life from him (v 17)
There are three major themes progressing though these few verses.
Jesus comes to his people.
Jesus is the all glorious eternal God.
Jesus extends grace to broken sinners.
Already Not Yet
At Christmas we celebrate that Jesus has come.
The gift of God’s redemption and salvation for his world has already arrived.
There is a new life in Christ that is already ours—it has already been given.
The cross has already happened.
The tomb is already empty.
All throughout the New Testament the apostle Paul speaks about salvation in the present tense.
He teaches the churches—he teaches us—that salvation and new life in Jesus is not a future event.
We are already saved.
Our new life in Jesus has already begun.
But this passage today from Revelation reminds us that there is more to the story.
Jesus has already come, and he is coming again.
God’s redemption of his world has already begun, and Jesus will return to make that redemption complete.
The church today lives in an in-between time.
That’s you and me.
We live in this period between the first Christmas and what will be a sort of second Christmas.
We celebrate the season of Advent with all the expectation of God’s Messiah to come because we still live today in a season of Advent expecting God’s Messiah to return again.
And just as Jesus came two thousand years ago as a gift to his people.
He will come again with the gift of living water.
Jesus already came and he comes again with an invitation for his people to come to him and receive his gift of new life.
This is how we live today within his church.
We live as people who have been given the invitation to come to Jesus.
We live as a community of faith anticipating the complete fulfilment of his grace.
John says in Revelation that Jesus is coming soon.
Nowhere in Revelation does God give a calendar or a timeline for these events.
The word “soon” is not meant to tell us a date.
Rather, the word “soon” is meant to tell us his return is imminent.
It is meant to reassure us that it is a promise of God and it will not fail.
The return of Jesus is not a question of maybe-or-maybe-not.
So, John uses the word “soon” to remind the church to live as people who are ready for Jesus.
We live as those who expect his redemption and his salvation to reach its fulfilment.
Luminous
Verse 13 and verse 16 remind us that Jesus is all glorious, that he is the eternal God.
Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet.
Jesus is affirmed along with the Father and the Holy Spirit to be the eternal triune God who has always been and always will be.
Jesus refers to himself as the morning star.
He is the rising sun. he is the source of light shining into a dark world.
We have a word for things that are sources of light.
We call them luminous.
The sun and the stars are luminous objects because they create light.
The reaction of nuclear fusion between hydrogen and helium results in waves of heat and light.
Combustion is also luminous.
As long as a fire has fuel to keep it going, it will produce heat and light.
Thomas Edison discovered that electricity flowing through a wire filament inside of a glass vacuum tube is also luminous; the incandescent light bulb creates light.
It is not the first time the apostle John has used light to describe Jesus.
In fact, all the way back in the first chapter of John’s gospel he refers to Jesus as the light of the world.
In some cases the Bible tells us it is literally true.
When Jesus took three of his disciples up the mountain and they witnessed the transfiguration, the gospels tells us that Jesus shone like the sun.
In Acts 9 when Jesus called and converted Paul on the road to Damascus, Jesus appeared before Paul in a blinding flash of light.
Revelation tells us that in the new heaven and the new earth there will no longer be a sun.
It will no longer be needed because God himself will shine as the source of light and there will never be darkness.
For those who recognize that Jesus is the source of light by which our souls are brought from darkness, the first and best response is always a response of worship.
As Scripture gives us various descriptions of the throne room in heaven, there is always a picture of continual worship before God.
Illuminate
This is where our part comes in.
The center of this passage in Revelation is about our response to God.
Verse 14 says that those who have washed their robes will be blessed with the tree of life.
In other words, those who have been made clean by Jesus.
The contrast is in verse 15.
Those who refuse to accept the gift of God’s grace and continue to center their lives on their own sinful brokenness will be left out.
But for those of us who acknowledge that our sinful brokenness can only be made clean through the sacrifice of Jesus, there is the gift of new life in Christ.
Once I accept that free gift of God’s grace given through Jesus, I become a new person.
I am now a child of God.
The Spirit of God now lives within me.
That changes who I am.
To say it another way, we illuminate.
You and I are not luminous.
We do not create any spiritual sort of light.
There is nothing in our broken and fallen lives that can create a spark of light on its own.
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