The Beginning and End

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. Our reading tonight is taken from the epistle to the

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Ephesians, chapter 1, verses 3 -14. And it reads thus.

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In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses.

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According to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon us in all wisdom and insight, making known to us the mystery of His will, according to His purpose, which

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He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth.

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In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, so that we who were first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory.

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In Him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in Him, you were sealed with the promised

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Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of His glory.

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In the name of Jesus. Hear the words of our Lord from Revelation chapter 21, verse 6.

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I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Now, you're thinking, well, okay, well,

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Jesus is kind of the bookend of history, if you would. He's the beginning, He's the end, He's the Alpha and the Omega. Alpha is the very beginning letter of the

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Greek alphabet, and Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet.

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Jesus is the A and Z, if you would. And how is that helpful to us?

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You're thinking, well, I mean, okay, Jesus is like at the beginning, He's there at the end. What's the big deal?

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Well, the big deal is that each and every one of us has, well, a not -so -great beginning.

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And if you think about it, we kind of work with this idea. You know, things have always been the same from the time of our fathers and their fathers and their fathers and their fathers.

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And so human history seems to us, from our experience, this unbroken chain of misery, this unbroken chain of children being born, of difficulty paying the bills, putting food on the table, of kids growing up getting earaches, vomiting on the carpet.

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Before there was carpet, there was dirt. That might have been easier to clean, now that I think about it. And then there's sickness and disease and fevers and death.

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And the whole cycle just keeps continuing. Sometimes I wonder how any of us make it out of childhood after having raised three kids myself.

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And so for us, our beginnings, and you think of our earliest memories, we have no memory of a sinless, good creation.

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We only have a memory of what is evil and the consequences of our sin.

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And we long for and desire for something different. We hope for something different.

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All of our movies, all of our stories seem to have the one thing in common, and they lived happily ever after.

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I'd like to see that. I'd kind of like to experience it. How come

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I haven't lived happily ever after? And so we hear in our sermon hymn, our only hymn today,

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Fast bound in Satan's chains I lay, Death brooded darkly over me. Sin was my torment night and day,

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In sin my mother bore me. But daily, deeper still I fell, My life became a living hell,

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So firmly sin possessed me. And so when we hear that Jesus is the beginning and the end,

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He's the Alpha and the Omega, in our experience, our beginnings are anchored still in this creation after the fall as a result of the curse.

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And so the idea that Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega has a bigger implication for us as Christians because it harkens back to the

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Garden of Eden. It harkens back to before our fall. It harkens back to when God created everything and said, it is very good.

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It harkens back to the day when we were created in God's image and we perfectly reflected that image.

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And there's this wonderful prayer in the old liturgies, as it was in the beginning, Everything is now and will be forever.

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Amen. That's an interesting prayer. And every time I hear it, it helps me understand that our hope is anchored in a beginning that I have no memory of.

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And I would know nothing about if it were not for the fact that God's Word so clearly teaches it.

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And for the person who thinks that Genesis is nothing but a mythological story, or, well, the beginning of Genesis can't possibly be true because,

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I mean, after all, we all know that we came from apes. You kind of missed the point. That beginning is so important because it gives us a frame, a place to anchor our hope so that when we see that Jesus is coming, for us who are in Christ, we are not looking forward to terror and judgment.

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Instead, we are looking forward to being reunited with God face to face, to see the

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One whom we have faith in, and for the beginning of a new creation, a new heavens and a new earth.

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Alpha and omega, beginning and end, is important because it doesn't go back to my beginning.

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It goes back to the beginning of the earth. And so we read again, just for our memory, to remind us the opening verses of the

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Gospel of John. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God.

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The Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. And all things were made through Him.

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And without Him was not anything made that was made. And in Him was life. And the life was the light of men in the beginning.

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And yet our world is so filled with death, decay, disease, suffering.

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And so when you say these words, you almost say them in defiance.

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You say them almost with a whisper so that you don't lose the implication of the depth and magnitude that in Jesus is life.

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In Him is life. And it's better than that. So we're going to hear on Sunday, He is the life.

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But we'll get there on Sunday. So we return to our Epistle text. We return to our

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Epistle text. And we're going to see if we can unpack something here as it relates to beginning and end.

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And this is where you have to understand that time and space where we live has a beginning.

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God does not. God created time and space. He is outside of time and space.

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He transcends time and space. He is in eternity. How does that work?

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I have no idea. When people start talking in this way, my brain starts to get in a cramp.

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Have you ever been on a walk and you haven't walked in a while? All of a sudden your ankle seizes up and you get a charley horse?

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My brain does that when we start to comprehend this concept of eternity.

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I have no other way to think of it except for this way. And it's a little bit of a metaphor, so excuse it.

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But have you all seen Pringles cans? Worst potato chips known to mankind.

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And the reason why is because once you eat one, you end up eating the whole can. It's terrible. I've never done that though.

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All right, maybe a few times. So if you think of the creation as like a

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Pringles can. It has a beginning. It has an end. That's the creation.

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Now outside of it, there is no time. There's only time inside the Pringles can.

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Outside of the Pringles can, it's timeless. There is no minutes, seconds, whatever.

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It's totally different. It's a completely different way of experiencing whatever it is that you experience in eternity.

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God dwells there. And so for God, who creates everything, He literally, outside of time, is capable of looking down the

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Pringles can. Of looking at it, cutting it up, and looking at a particular point. And the insides of it at a particular spot.

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You have to kind of think of the creation as this way. It'll help us a little bit because then we talk about beginning and end.

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We understand that the end is just the beginning of the new creation. What I'm getting ahead of myself.

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So our epistle text says this. Blessed be the God and Father of our

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Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in eternity.

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Think of it that way. Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before Him.

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Wow! What is that saying? Well, before there was ever time.

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And before doesn't seem to make sense in the concept of eternity because before means that things kind of succeed each other.

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You do this and that and this and that. But somehow in here, we've got to understand this.

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That in the before that is eternity, before the foundations of the very universe were laid, the world itself, the cosmos, that we were chosen, predestined in Him that we should be holy and blameless before.

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These are words of comfort and they're quite radical. Now we're touching on the concept of predestination.

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And if anyone tells you they know how this works, they're not really telling you the truth. Nobody knows how this works.

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In love, important words, in love God predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious name with which

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He has blessed us in the Beloved. How do you unpack such a sentence?

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I don't even begin to know how to do it. Except for I would just point out the fact that look at our relationship now to God.

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Because before the foundation of the world was laid, He chose us in Him to be holy and blameless before Him.

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And He has done this all because of His great love for us. And in His great love for us,

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He has predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.

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Have any of you ever had that profound feeling that somehow you were an orphan in the universe?

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I want you to think about that. We all have parents. We can look to our parents. I know my mom,

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I know my dad. You know your mom, you know your dad. But still, there's those times in your life when you feel profoundly like you are utterly isolated and on your own.

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It's akin to that feeling of the child who is in the orphanage, who every time somebody comes to adopt a child, they put their best clothes on, comb their hair, put on a smile, and somebody else gets picked.

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But see, that's not us. Before the foundations of the earth, the world, before there was day or night or vegetation or cattle or creepy crawly things, yes, those were created good in the beginning too.

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I can't wait to get back to good creepy crawly things because the current version of them are really creepy and I don't like seeing them crawling in my home.

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But all of those things were good. And before the foundation of the world, before there was a beginning, before there was a second ticking on a clock,

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God chose us in His great love to be adopted. In other words, God knew exactly what was going to happen.

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And in His love for us, He said, not you, you will not be fatherless.

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I will be your father. And although you begin in sin and under the dominion of the devil,

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I will free you. And I will adopt you. And you will be my son and you will be my daughter and you will literally be treated not as one who has come from outside of our family, but you will be considered my own flesh and blood with all of the privileges that go with that.

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And this is God talking to us. And you think, what on earth?

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Have I won the lottery? Somebody please pinch me. This sounds too good to be true.

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And it isn't. It is true. And all of this He has done to the praise of His glorious grace with which

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He has blessed us in the Beloved. In Him, we have redemption through His blood.

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That's a slave term. We have the forgiveness of our trespasses. This is a pardon term of the courts.

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According to the riches of His grace. And riches, I don't even think that begins to cover it.

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But this kind of richness makes Trump look like a pauper.

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In which He lavished on us. These words do not speak of a stingy, greedy, miserly

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God. These words speak of a God who is rich in love, rich in grace, rich in mercy, rich in forgiveness.

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And He lavishes all of that upon us. In other words, if you think that you can outstrip

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God's grace and mercy and forgiveness, I beg to differ. I don't even think we've begun to make a dent in His bank account with all of our sins.

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And all of this He's lavished on us. Which speaks of His great love for us.

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Because those whom we love, we lavish with our love.

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And with our treasure and our time. All of this in wisdom and insight

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He has made known to us the mystery of His will. According to His purpose which He set forth in Christ.

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As a plan for the fullness of time to unite all things in Him, things in heaven, and things on earth.

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And so in the midst of this wonderful beginning of this epistle, we see reference to even before the foundations of the earth are laid, and in the same breath we now are hearing hints and whispers of the very end of time itself.

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All of this coming to a head into the fullness of time. And in Him, we have obtained an inheritance.

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What a great concept. Again, have you stopped to consider the magnitude and the depth of God's grace and mercy and gift that He has given to such undeserving sinners as myself and you.

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We've all heard the stories of the person who had the rich uncle who died and spent the rest of their lives cruising in the

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Bahamas. And yet, we have this exact inheritance and even better.

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In Him, we have obtained an inheritance. And we have been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory.

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And in Him, you also, when you heard the Word of Truth, the

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Gospel of your salvation, and you believed in Him, you were sealed with the promised

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Holy Spirit who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it to the praise of His glory.

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Let me give you a metaphor here. Remember the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? I'm not talking about the new one.

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I'm talking about the old one with the golden tickets. Think of it this way. When Charlie finally found that last golden ticket, he held on to that thing like it was worth the whole world.

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And that was the deposit, the guarantee that he was going to be able to go into Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory and see all the secrets and the wonders of how

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Wonka chocolates and candies were made. And that, in a sense, is a little bit of a picture of what it's like for us as Christians.

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You see, when we heard the good news, the Gospel, that Christ died for our sins.

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The virgin -born Son of Mary, Son of God, goes to Calvary and all of our sins are placed upon Him and He bleeds and dies for our sins.

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And He raises again bodily on the third day for our justification. When we heard this

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Word and through the working of the Spirit and the Word were brought to penitent faith in Christ and we receive the

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Holy Spirit, which is the seal and guarantee of our inheritancy, it's the

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Holy Spirit Himself who is our golden ticket. And so when the

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Spirit is inside of you working and convicting you of your sin and your unbelief and pointing you to Christ, there again is your golden ticket guaranteeing you of your inheritance until that day when we acquire possession of it to the praise of His glory.

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And see, here in Ephesians, if you weren't looking for it, you now will always see it. In these two brief paragraphs, in these few verses, we see

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Jesus beginning and end. Alpha and omega. We see hints of the beginning of time even before time existed, there was

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Christ. And now we see glimpses of the great hope that we have because of the great love and mercy and grace that He has lavished on us.

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And all of this makes it sound like we are the wealthiest people in the whole world.

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Brothers and sisters, we are. There are no people on this planet more blessed than those who are in Christ, who have

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His Spirit, who have been brought to penitent faith and have the great hope of what is to come, the end that will restore the beginning.

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We get glimpses of it, a slight picture, in Revelation 21, verse 1.

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Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

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I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, adorned for her husband.

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I cry every time I see the bride coming. I seriously doubt

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I'm going to keep from weeping when I see this bride coming.

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I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

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He will dwell with them, and they will be His people. God Himself will be with them as their

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God. That's how it was in the beginning. Remember, Adam had a face -to -face relationship with God.

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God walked with them in the cool of the garden in the day. No more the hidden face of God, but we see

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God face -to -face. And He will be their God. They will be

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His people. And He Himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

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What a tender picture of God. This is the picture of God as a loving Father who's there and attentive, meeting every need.

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And if you should ever find yourself in this new creation, having one of those moments when you need a good cry, you will never be alone.

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God Himself will be there with you with a Kleenex. What a picture.

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Death will be no more. I can't wait.

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There's so many people that have been torn away from me and from you by death.

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And death is no friend. Death is an enemy. And He will be no more.

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Neither will there be mourning or crying or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

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There will be no more sciatic nerves aggravated in your back. There will be no more limping.

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There will be no broken hips. There will be no broken bones or car wrecks or any of the things like that.

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There will be no emotional scars from battles long ago fought.

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And He who was seated on the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.

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He's making all things new. And so He said, Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.

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He said to me, It is done. It is finished. I am the

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Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life, without payment.

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The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God, and he will be my son.

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But lest you think that the grace of God is a licensed sin, we have this very stern warning.

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As for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, the murderers, the sexually immoral, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and the liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.

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There is no life apart from Christ. And the

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Gospel is not a license for us to pursue sexual immorality, and idolatry, and lying, and all of that nonsense.

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That is foolishness. Those are the ways of darkness. Those are the things that we have been set free from, because we have been set free from the dominion of darkness.

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And as for the cowardly, notice that it tops the list. Cowardly in what way?

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The guy who runs from battle? Or the one who fears men rather than God, and tells nobody about Jesus?

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I think that is what is meant there. Skipping ahead just a little bit, verse 22.

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I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the

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Lord God, the Almighty, and the Lamb. The city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the

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Lamb. I sometimes think that maybe the glory of God is something akin to the northern lights, beautiful and mysterious.

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By its light will the nations walk. The kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day.

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There will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.

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Nothing unclean will ever enter it, or anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the

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Lamb's book of life. And if you're thinking, well, Pastor Roseborough, sounds to me like I'm not qualified to be there.

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You're not, and I'm not. But Christ has qualified you.

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Christ has bled and died for you. He is the one who has made you holy in His sight.

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And as the Apostle Paul reminds all of us, as were some of you.

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Some of you were cowardly, faithless, detestable murderers, sexually immoral idolaters and liars.

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But you are washed. You are forgiven. You are united with Christ. You have been adopted.

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You have heard the words that your name is written on the will. And now we await our

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Savior to return from heaven and to bring with it, with Him, the new earth, the new

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Jerusalem, so that as it was in the beginning, a beginning that we do not remember, a beginning that we do not comprehend, a beginning that we can only dream of, a beginning that we know exists because Scripture tells us it was so.

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But as it was in the beginning, is now and will be forever.

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In the name of Jesus, Amen. If you would like to support the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, you can do so by sending a tax -free donation to Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, Minnesota 56744. And again that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, Minnesota 56744. We thank you for your support.

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