A Foretaste of Glory

 August 15 2021

Hebrews 3:12-4:11

         Last year’s pandemic had a lot of unexpected consequences and the church like all the rest of society was impacted in surprising ways. With the coming of Covid-19 and the subsequent quarantine there was a sudden push for churches to find ways of reaching their members with the Word of God. Many churches began utilizing technology like never before, creating worship videos and putting them out on social media. Now people who had never been on social media were finding their churches services on places like YouTube. It was really hard to tell just what impact this sudden switch to an online presence was going to have on church goers now that one could worship in their pajamas from the comfort of their couch. Well, when churches could at last go back to worshipping in person it really came as no surprise that a lot of people got pretty comfy being a Christian version of a couch potato.

         Now, I don’t think that technology is totally to blame about people enjoying their extended stay apart from their church family. No, what the pandemic did was to reveal that a lot of people didn’t really understand just what it means to be the church. When salvation became nothing more than saying the right words to get in to heaven and a personal relationship with Jesus turned into a me and Jesus mindset then it just followed that church could end up being some Christianized version of a self help seminar. So, what people were looking for was all the ways that Jesus could make life better, a better marriage, a better relationship with my kids and my boss, perhaps better finances, totally forgetting that Jesus never promised to make life better but rather he promised to make life new, which is something all together different.

         So, in this eleventh segment of our summer series called Confident, we are going to take a look at just what does it mean for us to be the church. Right there in saying that we are the church is a good place to start because for many people church is something we go to, not a designation of the people that are set apart for God’s holy purpose. What we go to on Sunday morning is just a meeting place, a place where we are the people of God gathered together as opposed to the rest of the week when we are God’s people scattered. So, knowing this about ourselves who make up the church, we have to ask just why is it so important that we gather together? Is our gathering together just some relic from the past that we do just out of habit or does our gathering together have an important purpose in God’s salvation of the world?

         To answer those questions, let’s look at the eleventh article of faith from the Manual of the Church of the Nazarene.Article 11: The Church. We believe in the church, the community that confesses Jesus Christ as Lord, the covenant people of God made new in Christ, the Body of Christ called together by the Holy Spirit through the Word.

         God calls the Church to express its life in the unity and fellowship of the Spirit; in worship through the preaching of the Word, observance of the sacraments, and ministry in His name; by obedience to Christ, holy living, and mutual accountability.

         The mission of the Church in the world is to share in the redemptive and reconciling ministry of Christ in the power of the Spirit. The Church fulfills its mission by making disciples through evangelism, education, showing compassion, working for justice, and bearing witness to the kingdom of God.

         The Church is a historical reality that organizes itself in culturally conditioned forms, exists both as local congregations and as a universal body, and also sets apart persons called of God for specific ministries, God calls the Church to live under his rule in anticipation at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,

         Well, there you have it, who we are as the church, what our mission is and how we organize ourselves. Yet to understand just who we are as a church we have to begin like we have done quite often in this series, with what we have learned before. What we discussed last week was this idea of entire sanctification or holiness and we said that Jesus through being obedient to do the will of his Heavenly Father, offering himself up upon the cross as a once for all offering has made us to be holy people. He took on our sinful and corrupt flesh yet was with out sin because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Thus when he died upon the cross the power of sin died with him. Therefore, in the tenth chapter of Hebrews we are told that now because of what Jesus has done for us, we have been declared to be holy. Now, why this is so important to us is that because we are now holy we can have confidence to enter into the holy presence of God. Are you beginning to see where the title of our series has its source? This welcome into the presence of God is what is called in the Bible, grace. Grace is the favor of God welcoming us, allowing us to draw near to him. This grace is what we are to place our faith in because we are are told in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews that without faith it is impossible to please God for whoever would draw near to God, accept his grace, must believe that God exists and that God rewards those who seek him. The reward God has for us has several names such as eternal life, and the kingdom of God.

         So, when we know of this grace of God, this gift of being able to enter into his presence then we are to live as people who have already died to this world and are living in this grace, this welcome of God; as people who are certain of the reward of eternal life that God is going to give to us. This means that when we enter in the holy presence of God we enter there as his servants, servants of righteousness as Paul refers to us in the sixth chapter of Romans. At the end of that sixth chapter Paul writes, “For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.  But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things that you are now ashamed? For the end of these things is death. But now that you have been set free from sin and have become servants of God, the fruit you get leads to your holiness and its end, eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  What is interesting about Paul’s writing about eternal life is that it is found only here in the book of Romans, and only here does Paul bring up the subject of holiness. So, its pretty easy to see that holiness is connected to the reward that God has to give to us.

         Now, what is also interesting is that holiness has a connection with persecution or suffering that comes with our unity with Christ.  The whole book of Hebrews concerns a group of Christians who under severe persecution and suffering thought that they should instead become Jews because at that time the Jews were protected from persecution by Rome. The writer of Hebrews tells these Christians who are on the verge of giving up on their faith that they were to remember the time when they were enlightened , that they endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to reproach and affliction and sometimes being partners to those so treated. They had compassion on those in prison and they joyfully accepted the plundering of their property. I want to pause here for a moment and really consider what it must have been like to watch as people plundered what you own, your home, your car and to do so joyfully. Here is why they did so, the writer of Hebrews continues, “because you knew that you had a better possession and an abiding one. Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward.” The confidence spoken of here is the confidence that we are holy because of what Jesus has done for us and because of this holiness we have confidence to enter into the holy presence of God. Not even the High Priest of the people of Israel had such confidence because once every year he was to enter the Holy of Holies and he would only do so with a rope tied to his ankle so that if he perished in the Holy presence of God he could be pulled out. So, even the most holiest of people in the people of Israel had no confidence that they were good enough. This same sense of not knowing just what does it take to enter into the holy presence of God is found in the modern sentiments about people who think about heaven apart from Christ who say that there pretty good but in the same breath they concede that nobodies perfect. In other words, they have no confidence in their own goodness to get them into heaven, the holy presence of God because they really don’t know just how good is good enough. You see, the only one good enough was Jesus who perfectly accomplished the will of his Heavenly Father, faithfully loving to the very end of his life, praying that his Father forgive those who had crucified him. Jesus was and is holy and because he has forever bound himself to us we too are holy and we have confidence because of Jesus.This confidence comes with a great reward. This great reward that those who are faithful will receive is a kingdom which cannot be shaken and because of this we offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe. Here we begin to see how what we do as the church follows what is the ground of our faith. It is our knowledge that God is going to reward those who are faithful servants of God, this is why God is worthy of our reverence and our awe. We have a healthy fear of the Lord because we are the ones that know that there will be severe consequences for those who spurn the Son of God, for those who hold in contempt the blood of the covenant by which we have been made holy, to those who have outraged the Spirit of grace.

         Yet we not only worship God with a healthy fear of God we also worship God in reverence, this word translated as “reverence” actually means to aggressively hold fast to that which is good. That’s a great image for our worship that we grab a hold of our good God with both hands clasping upon him so tight that our fingers are turning white. You see, the question of our faith is just what value do we place upon it? Do we place a greater value upon our future reward that God has for us than the pleasures of our sins today? Is this gift of an eternal life with God worth more to us than anything we treasure in our world? Can we say with Paul that anything we face here on earth as far as persecutions and sufferings are merely momentary afflictions in comparison to the eternal weight of glory that is beyond compare? You see, in our scripture for today, there were those in this church that was written to by the writer of Hebrews, who had had enough. They had suffered horribly, they watched as everything they had worked for all their lives was destroyed or robbed and they were hurting, troubled people. For them, the future reward of God was just not enough of an incentive for them to keep going. They were looking for a way out, a quiet easy life where one could eat, drink and be merry. You see, when we think of just what is an evil unbelieving heart we conjure up images of all kinds of horrific behavior yet I think that what is actually being spoken of is this choosing an easy life apart from God instead of accepting the difficult  hardships that are a part of being united with God. It is a denial of the truth that their among the afflictions and the pain, God and his grace are more present than any other time. This is evil because this is when one no longer is aggressively taking hold of the good, the good who is God. What is amazing is what we are told is the antidote to having an evil, unbelieving heart which leads others to fall away from the living God. We are told that we are to exhort, to encourage, one another every day as long as it is “Today”. The word translated as either exhort or encourage is the Greek word, “Paraclete”. It is a compound word, “para” to come along side such as parallel lines and “clete” which means to call. What you may also remember is that Paraclete is the name given to the Holy Spirit in the last chapters of the gospel of John. So, here is an image of the church, those who have faith in the grace, the favor or welcome of God, that this is our final reward and together with God, the Holy Spirit, we walk alongside each other calling out to each other to take hold of that which is good, to not let go of the glory that is to come.

         In the life of the believers there are three different but important ways that we speak and are spoken to. There is proclamation, where the good news of Jesus Christ is spoken as the very Word of God so that an awareness of God’s grace might be discovered and in the knowledge that Jesus is raised from the dead, fear might be conquered so that faith, at last might come. As Paul states in the tenth chapter of Romans, one doesn’t have to climb up to heaven in order to bring Christ down to us nor does one have to descend to the land of the dead to bring Christ up. No, the word is near to you, to your mouth and to your heart; it is right down the street where any church is gathered. So, there is the speech of proclamation but there is also the speech of teaching so that we might learn how to live out our faith for as James famously put it, faith without works is dead. To these two types of speaking in the church there is also a third which is often forgotten and that is the speaking of encouragement, this coming alongside one another, to call out to one another, to speak to one another of the worthiness of what we have placed our faith in, this God and his reward that awaits us. 

         Now, when we are told to encourage one another I believe that this encouragement is to be more than just words. In the first chapters of Second Corinthians and the book of Ephesians, Paul writes that the Holy Spirit can be thought of as a foretaste of our future bliss. We have to wonder just how the Holy Spirit accomplishes this giving to us a sample of what is to come? I believe that he does so through his work within the church, through those who have placed their faith in God’s grace and favor. The Greek word which we translate church is ecclesia which means those who are called out. Are you seeing the importance of God calling out to us to come together because there in the midst of the people God has called together he has made real in the here and now a sampler platter of the future great banquet. Right there among what look like common, ordinary people God is present and the white light of his love is turned into a rainbow of care and concern when it is shone through those very same lives. Here there is one serving and there is one teaching. Over there is one listening and there is one giving generously. Grace and mercy and the sharing of lives is ever present here in the common and everyday. It is this creation brought forth by the hovering of the Holy Spirit where there is found the encouragement that is needed because when one gets a small taste of what lies ahead then they become certain that what God desires to reward us with is worth everything, as Paul so well knew. You see, when the church, the people of God are gathered, on a Sunday, a Sabbath day, this is when we once again can experience the rest, the peace of knowing that that which lies ahead, the Promised land, is definitely greater than any treasure we cling to here on Earth. This reward God holds out is worth the loss of all things so that in the end we might know Christ especially in his sufferings. You see, we had to stop meeting last year because of the real dangers from the Covid virus yet the reason the church longed to come back together is that in the absence of each other they had become hungry. They longed to have that small sample of future glory so that their grip on what is good which had slacked a bit in difficult days might once again become firm. You can taste a good many things on your couch but what can’t be experienced there is the foretaste of our future glory which is only found in the midst of the people that God calls together. To his honor and glory! Amen.