Never Alone

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Date: All Saint’s Day Text: Matthew 5:1-12 www.kongsvingerchurch.org

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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 in salvation by grace through faith alone.
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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, the fifth chapter.
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Seeing the crowds, Jesus went up on the mountain, and when He sat down, His disciples came to Him.
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He opened His mouth and He taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
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Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
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Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.
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Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. And blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.
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And blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
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And blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
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Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
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This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. Amen. Alright, what an amazing text we have from the book of Revelation.
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After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the
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Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.
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Now in order to kind of understand just the absolute magnitude of this beatific vision that we have here in the book of Revelation, we have to go back and kind of think through a few things.
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And if you would, think about it in terms of the book of Revelation. There was Adam and Eve, and they only had one commandment by the way, one.
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And they blew that. And if you remember how the crime went down,
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Satan knows full well that God never lies. You know that about God, right? God is not going to say, you know,
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I'm going to go to the grocery store and I'll pick up a few things and then forget to do it. He's not like that.
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I'm like that, but he's not like that. But all of that being said, God never lies, and so Satan knew full well that God always keeping his word and that his word performs the very things for which he sends it.
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When he hears that Adam and Eve are forbidden by God to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
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Jesus reveals to us in the gospel of John chapter 8 that the devil was a liar and a murderer from the beginning, which gives us the motivation for what went down in the garden.
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Basically think of it this way. Have y 'all noticed that when you have kids, your kids look like you?
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Notice that? I remember when I was raising our children, and my son, you know, he would sometimes do things that were disobedient, just being a sinner like me.
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But every now and then, my wife would get really upset and say, you look just like your father, all right?
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This was a bad thing when she was angry. You get the idea. We look like our parents.
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Well, keep in mind, Adam and Eve, God created them male and female in the image of God.
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And let's just say that Satan, after his rebellion against God, wasn't really keen at looking at anybody that even resembled the deity that he hated and despised so much that he wanted to overthrow and take his place.
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And so the devil, his decision was murder. He's going to murder humanity made in the image of God, and God's going to be the murder weapon because God said to Adam and Eve, on the day that you eat of that tree, you will surely die.
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Terrible, if you think about it. Well, our parents went for it. They went for it. They disobeyed
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God. They succumbed to the temptation of the devil. And then we read in the book of Genesis chapter 3 that God hands out punishments.
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We hear God, well, cursing the serpent, you know, taking away his legs, sending him onto his belly.
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The other thing is that, well, women, they bear children painfully now. And then always and again, that joyous thing that we experience in marriage, and that is that God took the will of the woman and made it so that as part of the curse, she would have an opposing will to her husband.
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It's a little bit of a challenge if you think about it because scripture is very clear that a man will leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
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One flesh with divided wills. That's lovely, all right? And then, of course, we all know that Adam was cursed with the, well, having to toil and work by the sweat of his brow in order to put food on the table, and that eventually every one of us, we would return to the dust from which we were taken.
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It's terrible when you think about it. But in the aftermath of all of this, in Genesis chapter 3 verse 20, we hear a few things that I think are important for us as we consider what we saw there in the book of Revelation.
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The man called his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living, and the
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Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skin, and he clothed them. If you remember,
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Adam and Eve, after biting into the forbidden fruit, they realized very straight away that they were both naked, and nakedness now becomes kind of a, if you would, something that needs to be covered.
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It's a sign of sin and shame and guilt. And so God himself, he makes for Adam and Eve garments of skin, which means some animal had to die for this to happen.
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We don't know if it was a lamb or a sheep, it doesn't say. We just kind of assume it was probably a sheep.
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It sounds like it would fit the bill, but somebody has to die in their place, and so these animals die in their place so that they can be clothed.
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And if you remember in the book of Revelation, we saw that all of these saints who are before the throne of God, they are clothed in white robes.
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God's still continuing to clothe all of his saints. But then it says this, the Lord God, Yahweh Elohim said, behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
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And what follows here then is, if you would, a conversation between the three members of the
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Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If you remember in the earlier chapters of Genesis, God said, let us make man in our image, right?
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And so this is the Trinity discussing now amongst themselves. Now that humanity has fallen into sin, well, he's become like one of us, knowing good and evil.
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And then what follows here at the tail end of verse 22 is an incomplete sentence.
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In Hebrew, you translate it and you go, there's something missing here, right?
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Have you ever thought of something so terrible that you can't quite finish your sentence?
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Or maybe you're falling asleep. My wife says I do this from time to time. My wife and I will be in bed and we'll be having a conversation.
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And next thing you know, she's shaking me going, what are you saying? You were in the middle of a sentence and you started snoring.
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Oh, I don't know, what was I saying? So this is kind of one of those things.
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God's not falling asleep, but the idea here is that we have an incomplete sentence. And listen to the sentence. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.
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And then it trails off. It's as if the thought is just too terrible. It's so awful.
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I mean, could you imagine how devastatingly awful that would be if humanity lived forever in a sinful fallen state?
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I mean, I've been on the planet now for 53 years and I am just done with sin, but apparently it's not done with me.
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I am, you know, I don't want to sin another day, but could you imagine where there is no hope of ever being rid of your sinful nature?
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No thank you. That just, and so that's why I think God didn't complete his thought here.
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And so to prevent that from happening, Yahweh Elohim sent him out from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.
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He drove out the man and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned everywhere to guard the way to the tree of life.
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Angels standing guard with lightsabers, okay, it's quite the vision if you think about it.
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But that's to prevent us from eating of the tree of life and living forever in a sinful state. Now if you fast forward to the in -between time between what we saw in the book of Revelation and this, the in -between time, there we have
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Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of David, born of the
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Virgin Mary, sinless, never once committing a single sin, fulfilling
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God's law for you and for me so that we can be forgiven. And he then bearing in his body your sins, my sins.
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God lays on him the iniquity of us all. And you'll note then that the cross, which is a tree of death and there's just no way around it, that the cross then becomes the new tree of life.
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In fact, we're here today in part to eat of that tree. The fruit of the tree is the body and blood of Christ given and shed for the forgiveness of our sins.
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And we'll note that in eating the fruit of the tree of life, the new one, the cross, that each and every one of us are assured of the eternal life that we've been given as a gift because of what
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Christ has done for us. So fast forward then, you'll note that humanity from the garden all the way to today is struggling, languishing, dealing with, well, pressed down and destroyed by sin.
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Have you noticed that sin is kind of a lonely thing? Not only does sin alienate us from God, it alienates us from each other.
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It's just terrible. I just marvel at our, notice
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I'm putting myself into this category, our ability to be heartless and ruthless, to care about nobody except for ourselves and to treat other human beings with such contempt and loathing as if their lives have no meaning or they don't matter.
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We do not love them, we use them. It is absolutely horrifyingly reprehensible.
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And so as a result of this, well, our lives now in the valley of the shadow of death, it seems like a pretty lonely sojourn.
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But we remember these things then in light of All Saints Day. Number one, Christ has made it very clear,
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I will never leave you or forsake you. No matter how isolated or alone you are because of your sin or somebody else's,
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Christ has not forsaken you and you are never alone. In fact, Jesus says,
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I am with you always, even to the end of the age. And then it's also here then in this reading of the book of Revelation that we come across something else.
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Have you ever heard the phrase, the communion of the saints? Didn't we say something about that during the creed?
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The communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, right? We say these things, but what does it mean when we talk about the communion of the saints?
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And it's in this regard, I'd like to read out something that Lutheran theologian
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Herman Sassa wrote decades ago before his death, kind of musing and thinking and meditating on All Saints Day.
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One of the things that was common in his day is that there was a particular hymn that was sung as part of All Saints Day that was a funeral hymn.
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Seems like an odd thing to stick in there, but it's not if you understand life everlasting. So in Sassa's writing on this particular hymn and also on the occasion of All Saints, here's one of the stanzas he notes.
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Patriarchs of sacred story and the prophets there are found. The apostles too in glory on 12 seats there are enthroned.
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All the saints that have ascended age on age through time extended. There in blissful concert sing hallelujahs to their king.
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Great hymn, right? Great hymn. Good stanza. And so Sassa writing on this, he says, thus the old funeral hymn.
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It speaks of the church and of all the perfected who are in heaven.
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And this thought of the fathers of the church, and here he's talking about fathers in the sense of everybody who's preceded us, not the church fathers.
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He says, in this thought of the fathers of the church who have preceded us into heaven, this then rings to the centuries and all the saints from the beginning of the world who have died believing in the
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Redeemer, whether he was yet to come or had come in the flesh. All members of the people of God of all times to the present day in this sense, all then are the fathers of the church.
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And whether Christians have found themselves in the loneliness of a Siberian prison camp or the isolation of the diaspora, or they're suffering the inner alienation within the great secularized churches of our time, it has become ever more the consolation of those who have suffered for the sake of the church and whom
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God has led on a lonely path to know that they are not alone in the one church of God.
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And this is where we recognize that when we confess the communion of the saints, we are confessing that not only is
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Christ with us, but that we are never alone, that the saints in heaven, they preceded us, and as the book of Hebrews chapter 12 says, that they are now the great cloud of witnesses.
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And so because they are the great cloud of witnesses, the church has always historically believed that when we gather together to worship, to receive the word of God, and to hear and receive the sacrament, that when we gather together for these holy things, that the company of heaven joins us.
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You can hear it in our liturgy. We can hear it in the liturgy, that when we pray these things about the saints, therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we laud and we magnify your glorious name, evermore praising you and saying, right?
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What are we confessing here? We're confessing that we're not alone. No matter how isolated, difficult, lonely your path is because of your sin or others, because of the unfaithfulness of pastors who refuse to preach
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Christ and Him crucified, or because you are being persecuted for your faith in Jesus, no matter how lonely your path may be, you are never alone.
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I remember when I was being confirmed as a Lutheran, I grew up, I was baptized Roman Catholic, grew up in the
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Nazarene church, which really isn't all that better than Catholicism when it comes to works righteousness.
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But I remember when I was being confirmed at St. John's Lutheran Church in Orange, they at that time,
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I don't know if they still have it, they had this beautiful old like urban cathedral, you know, made of bricks, but high
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Gothic style. We had wonderful stained glass windows and this ginormous A -frame.
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And I remember when we were learning about the communion of the saints, the pastor took us into the sanctuary and he said, look up there, look up there, looking up high into the
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A -frame. Do you see him? No, pastor, maybe it's time to call somebody, you know, and he said,
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I like to think that's where they sit, that that's where they gather, that when we gather together in the name of the
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Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, the communion of the saints, therefore with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven,
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I like to think of them joining us and they're up here. It was a good, good thing to think about.
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But note then, that even when you are in a situation where the only one you are able to worship with is yourself, that you are never alone.
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And it's in that idea then that Sossus says, again, whether Christians have found themselves in the loneliness of a
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Siberian prison camp or the isolation of the Diaspora, the suffering of the inner alienation within the great secularized churches of our time, it has become ever more the consolation of those who have suffered for the sake of the church and whom
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God has led on the lonely path to know that they are not alone in the one church of God.
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They who have been removed from every error and sin of the earthly church, they now stand with us in the seamless fellowship of the body of Christ.
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Think of it this way. Have you ever had that profound sense that, you know, it's like I don't belong here.
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I just don't fit in. I remember when I was a kid, there was a movie I loved that Disney put out called
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Escape to Which Mountain. Do you guys remember this movie? Terrible cheesy special effects, but still a good story, right?
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Nothing like seeing an old Winnebago flying through the air. But all of that being said, the story is about two kids who happen to not be from here.
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And they're actually aliens. I know it sounds weird, okay, he's talking about aliens. But the whole goal is for them to get to a place where they can be reunited with their family, reunited with their people.
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And it's in this sense then, knowing that we are not alone, consider again these words. I looked and behold, there was a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, all tribes and peoples and languages.
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And they were standing before the throne, before the lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud voice, salvation belongs to our
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God who sits on the throne and to the lamb. Brothers and sisters, our epistle text makes this very clear.
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These are our people. This is your family. This is where you belong.
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In fact, listen to our epistle text, 1 John 3. See what kind of love the
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Father that he's given to us, that we should be called the children of God. It sounds so scandalous.
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I know it is. That we, that we, you and I, sinners as we are, that we should be called the children of God and so we are.
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The text says we are that now. And the reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know
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Christ. Beloved, we are God's children now and what we will be has not yet appeared.
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But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is.
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And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure. So those are our people worshipping before the throne of God.
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Our people. And here's the thing. The ones who preceded us in the faith that we know who are our family members, our friends or church members who were here decades ago and are now long gone.
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They will be there to meet you when you join them. They are waiting for us now.
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They are the great cloud of witnesses that Hebrews talks about, literally standing in the bleachers cheering you on as you finish your course.
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And there will be a time as awful as this world is, as lonely and isolating as it is and completely out of step that we are with it.
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We're out of step with it because the people here who refuse to believe in Christ are not our people.
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They're not even our family. They're children of the devil and we are the adopted children of God by grace because of God's mercy for us.
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So listen to our people. They cry out now before the throne of Jesus and they proclaim in bold, unified voice, salvation belongs to our
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God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. And to this proclamation now the angels respond.
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And you'll note humanity leads the way proclaiming that salvation belongs to our God. And now the angels who were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, upon hearing this proclamation of our people, they fall on their faces before the throne and they worship
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God and they say, amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our
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God forever and ever, amen. And then one of the elders addressed me saying, well, who are these who are clothed in white robes, no longer clothed in skins, but God has clothed us nonetheless, nakedness covered up.
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And you'll note that what began in the garden as a failed murder attempt, for the last millennia, how many
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I don't know, six, seven, eight, I don't know how many millennia we've been around, Christ has been slowly, methodically, carefully, dutifully making a kingdom.
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Our people, our family, they make up the citizens of this kingdom.
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And you'll note this kingdom is so ginormous, so huge, this multitude, forget even doing a census, it doesn't make any sense, you wouldn't be able to number them anyway.
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That's kind of the point. And so one of the elders asked the apostle John, who are these clothed in white?
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Where have they come? And he said, sir, you know, these are ones coming out of the great tribulation.
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They've washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the lamb. Therefore, they are before the throne of God. They serve him day and night in his temple.
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And he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They will hunger no more, neither thirst anymore.
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The sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat. The lamb that is in the midst of the throne, he will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God himself will wipe away every tear from their eyes.
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Why does scripture tell us this? The Christian faith is built on three pillars.
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Three, faith, hope, love. Faith in Christ for reconciliation, pardon, and peace with God because of what
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Christ has done on the cross. Love towards neighbor in good works, but also hope.
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In the midst of the darkness and the loneliness that we have to go through because of sin, although we are not alone,
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God allows us to see the end of our course so we can keep that end in mind.
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So that we can suffer, well, the way we're supposed to suffer in this lifetime. Not losing hope, but keeping our eyes on the hope of the world to come.
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Knowing that there is a day when, well, what seems to be a nightmare that never ends, and that's what this life can be at times.
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A nightmare that never ends, but the nightmare will come to an end. The night will go away.
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The sun himself will dawn, and the light of the new world and that day that never ends will finally arrive, and we will see
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Christ face to face and be reunited with all of those who are our people. And God himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes.
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So today we can bear up. Today we can suffer. Is it any wonder that Christ, in his opening sermon, the
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Sermon on the Mount, he proclaims not judgments. Instead, he proclaims the blessings that exist for those who are in him.
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Blessed are the poor in spirit, Jesus says. Those are the ones who recognize they have nothing to give to God for their salvation.
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They're bankrupt spiritually. But Jesus says theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, and this is not the mourning of losing a loved one.
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This is the mourning that comes as a result of recognizing the magnitude of your sin and rebellion against God and lamenting that you have disobeyed your good, kind, loving creator.
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But Jesus says to those who mourn in this way, they will be comforted, and we are comforted today with the good news of the forgiveness of our sins.
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Blessed are the meek. This is the opposite of the devil. The devil's the one who's the opposite of meek.
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Nothing but a tyrannical, arrogant, conceited, self -absorbed bleh.
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The meek are the opposite, the humble. Jesus says they will inherit the earth.
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Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. They will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful.
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They shall receive mercy. Is it any wonder that 2 Corinthians says that we are ambassadors for Christ and that God himself is making his appeal to others through us that they be reconciled to God for the sake of Christ?
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Blessed are the pure in heart. They will see God, and that you've been given. Your heart has been made pure by the blood of Christ.
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You are forgiven. Blessed are the peacemakers. They shall be called the sons of God. And now back to reality, the valley of the shadow of death.
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Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake. Theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.
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Rejoice and be glad. Your reward is great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
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So in this vision, and also in the Beatitudes, we recognize that our hope is in the world to come.
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And that hope gives us strength, knowing that we are not alone, that Christ is with us, and that we are not alone as Christians, a great crowd of witnesses.
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That communion of the saints reveals to us our true heritage and our true future and our true hope and gives us the strength to bear up in the lonely road of sin and death today.
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And so we thank God this All Saints Day that we can be remembered, that the most important word in today's observance is all.
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You, me, them, us together. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
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And again, that address is Kungsvinger Lutheran Church, 15950 470th
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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 We thank you for your support.
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