Faithbase

Well, Christmas has come and gone, and usually at our church, I'll have a sermon or maybe a couple, three sermons that kick off the new year, kind of sum up the year previous. And in this case, what I want to do is really, I guess you say sum up maybe the Christmas season that we've just concluded, or the Advent season, I guess truth is we're now in the Christmas season that extends to Epiphany, but earlier I had read from Revelation 12, and I'm going to read a portion of that again. Then I witnessed in heaven another significant event. I saw a large red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns with seven crowns on his head. His tail swept away one third of the stars in the sky, and he threw them to the earth. He stood in front of the woman as she was about to give birth, ready to devour her baby as soon as it was born. She gave birth to a son who was to rule all nations with an iron rod, and her child was snatched away from the dragon and was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled into the wilderness and so forth. So I'm going to be brief here. There's a lot of doctrine, obviously, a lot of things we could talk about, and we're not going to talk about the eschatology. We're going to talk about the covenantal event, and you note here that the dragon was there, was waiting for the baby to be born, and in this account here in Revelation, the child was born and was snatched away from the dragon and was caught up to God and to his throne. One of the things we need to understand is that the birth, life, death, and ascension of Jesus Christ was one covenantal event in God's economy of things. It was the accomplishment of all that God had promised his people. That's what Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 1.20, and indeed, that's what the whole of the New Testament is telling us, is that Jesus Christ is the accomplishment. He's the one who accomplished all that God intended. And so the birth, life, ministry, I didn't say that, I guess, the first time, the birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and ascension of Jesus is a single event covenantally, and that's why it's portrayed like this. Now it's not unfolded right here necessarily, but what that tells us in the rest of the New Testament is that we have, as we've talked about before, this responsibility to work hard to show the results of our salvation. Jesus Christ, with this covenantal event of his birth, life, ministry, death, and resurrection, and ascension, with that covenantal event, it was all necessary. Every part of it was necessary in order for him to effect salvation for his people. So we can't take any one part out and say, well, it would have worked without this. It's not true. Every bit of it is part of who Jesus is and what he did for his people. So all of that brought about the conditions wherein we are saved, we become slaves of Jesus the Christ, as Paul calls himself over and over, a slave of Jesus, and we have the responsibility to express the salvation that he has purchased for us, that he has given us, and to do so with world-changing behavior. Like the New Testament church, the early church, turned the world upside down. That's the challenge that I give you for the new year coming up here. So that's what I have you think about today, if you will, please. Think about changing the world for Jesus.