[0:00] with our Presbyterian denominations campus ministry called Reformed University Fellowship. And so it's a real delight to serve on your behalf. I always like to tell people that RUF is your ministry.
[0:11] As members or as participants with Cheyenne Mountain Presbyterian Church, it's your involvement on a college campus. And so it's really a delight to work with you for the faith, long-term, short-term, and of our college students.
[0:26] I'll just give a quick update. RUF, we're having a great summer. We're studying defeaters this summer in our Tuesday evening, which are the feelings, the thoughts, the narratives that we feel like maybe would make Christianity feel unbelievable or implausible.
[0:40] And so we're looking at some of those and why are they not defeaters? Why does Christianity hold up to them? And then the more exciting thing is that we have in the last week, week and a half, formed our first student leadership team, which is really exciting because our goal in RUF is to not just me doing ministry to students, but equipping students to do ministry to students because then they go into churches when they graduate, hopefully, and they know they're gifting and they're ready to serve.
[1:06] And so that's the dream. So please pray that the Lord would bless that student leadership team as we start game planning for the fall, as we start looking to meet new students.
[1:18] My wife is going to be on maternity leave during the fall, which is like the college version of Christmas and Easter slammed together. So I will be also on paternity. And so that's not great timing, but we'll be ready for it.
[1:30] So please pray for those things. So turn, if you will, in your Bibles to John chapter 16. John chapter 16, or I think it's printed in your bulletin as well.
[1:42] We're just looking at one verse today. And this will be our starting place, our anchor, but we'll pivot around to a couple other places throughout the Bible. And I will read our text for us, and we will dig in.
[1:56] This is God speaking to us in John chapter 16, verse 7. Nevertheless, I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away.
[2:07] For if I do not go away, the helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. This is God's word. Would you pray with me? Father in heaven, we pray now that as after we have sung, asked you to be present with us, confessed, given, greeted one another, all these things that you give us for a worship of you, that you would now send your spirit to us in the only and special way that your spirit can come to us.
[2:38] That these words would be more than just a lecture, more than filling the air, but that they would be the spirit warming our hearts to you, each one of us in the unique way that we need on this day.
[2:50] You would be glorified, and your kingdom would be built. It's in Jesus' name that we pray. Amen. Amen. So most of us, if we've grown up in a church, we're comfortable or familiar with a little process, a little thing that we do most Sunday mornings where we confess our faith.
[3:06] We stand up in front, we stand or whatever. We just did it when we read the Catechism, and we say, hey, this is something that we believe as Christians. This is a part of the Christian faith.
[3:17] And one of the ways that we have, Christians have done this for years, thousands of years across the world, is the Apostles' Creed. It's what I'll call the lowest common denominator that every Christian everywhere believes.
[3:29] I believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth. I'm sure I've done it with you here at Shine Mountain Press. And it's the creed, the creedal statement, the confession of faith that all Christians across time, around the world, say, we believe this.
[3:44] And I say it myself, I believe it, but there's one line that stands out to me. As I'm going along, I say, yeah, this makes sense. This is great. I understand this. There's a line that says, he suffered under Pontius Pilate, talking about Christ, was crucified, dead, and was buried.
[4:01] He descended on the hell. On the third day, he rose again. And then it says this. It says, he ascended into heaven. And for a while, I've always stopped, and I've said, this made the cut. This was so important that it made it into the lowest common denominator of every Christian faith across time.
[4:19] He is this thing called the ascension that we don't talk about very much in the Christian tradition. We believe it. We say it's super important, but what does it mean? What is this ascension that we are talking about?
[4:32] And so today, what I hope to do is to sort of squeeze some meaning out of the ascension. See why is it good, and see why, in particular, it ministers to a particular hole or thin spot that I experience often in my faith, and that I bet you experience in your faith as well.
[4:49] And so we'll ask, what is the ascension? And what does it mean, and why does it matter? And my major claim, I would argue the Bible's major claim, is that Christ's ascension offers true comfort to the Christian and reason for trust in the non-Christian, for the non-Christian.
[5:07] If there are those of you who are questioning your faith, or maybe don't yet profess faith in Christ, the ascension offers true comfort for those of us who are Christians, and reason for trust for those of us who are undecided.
[5:19] And I hope that I can persuade you that the ascension is good news. It's not just an add-on. It's not just something that we wonder about in the Apostles' Creed. It's actually good news, and that it is inseparable from God's saving work in your life and in our world.
[5:34] And so we'll look at this in three main ways if you're a note-taker. First thing we'll look at is, is it really better that Jesus goes away? Is it really better? Second thing we'll look at is, it indeed is better.
[5:44] It is better that Christ goes away. And third, so what? Monday morning comes, so what does this mean? So first thing we'll look at, is it really better? And I want to try and create for us, at least in my heart, what often feels like a little problem when I start thinking about at least the ascension, maybe even my own Christian life.
[6:01] If you remember from Acts chapter one, or the end of the Gospels, Jesus has just been raised from the dead. He has appeared to the disciples. He has appeared to many of his other followers.
[6:13] First Corinthians tells us up to 500 other people, and he's shown himself for who he is, the risen Messiah, God himself, who has done this incredible act of power over death.
[6:25] And then in Acts one, he leaves. He leaves. And it tells us throughout the Gospels that the apostles are confused.
[6:37] They're sad. They're nervous. They're scared. And there's this moment where he ascends into heaven, and they're just standing, looking up into the sky saying, what just happened?
[6:49] We thought we had this Jesus figured out. He died. He came back to life. He's going to now bring his kingdom. He's God. He's the Messiah. It's going to happen. And then he leaves. And there's this incredible deflation that you can feel as Jesus goes into heaven.
[7:05] And these angels appear and say, yes, he's gone. He told you he was going to go. And I can imagine that first moment of them saying, uh, that's disappointing.
[7:16] We wish Jesus was here. And I think I'm often in that same position with the disciples. I wish Jesus was here. The problem, it's a problem that I think that most of us as Christians feel, and I'm pretty sure that if you're not a Christian or you're non-Christian neighbors, definitely feel it.
[7:35] I wish Jesus was here. First, for those of us who are Christians, how many times have you thought in your devotional life, I mean, this would be so much easier to connect with Jesus if he was just sitting on the couch with me, talking to me about the Bible, rather than me having to cut through my phone and my fatigue to try and have a quiet time?
[7:57] How many of us have experienced the real pains of life, the traumatic moments of life, and have felt, I wish Jesus was here to make sense of all of this? I think of Mary or Martha when Jesus' friend, their brother, dies, and they come to him and they say, Jesus, where were you?
[8:15] If you had been here, our brother would not have died. And then, well, Jesus does come three days later, but he comes and he raises him back. And I think of the painful moments in my life, perhaps in your life, why did my father have to die this way?
[8:31] Or why did my child have to leave the faith? Why did we have to have a miscarry? And if Jesus was here in this world, I could ask him this and maybe begin to make some sense of it.
[8:42] Or on a less acute level, just think about daily wisdom. Jesus, how should I navigate faith and my job when I have a difficult boss? Help me think through this. Or how should I raise my kids in 2023 when it's such a strange time to be a parent?
[8:58] How should I navigate this crazy world of faith and politics, Lord? I don't understand. Just simple confirmation of my faith. Often I feel like many of us are Thomas who would say it'd be so much easier for me to believe if Jesus was just here and I could touch him.
[9:16] We feel the absence of Jesus in our lives. Let me try and illustrate this way. A couple, about a year ago, a little over a year ago, my mom passed away. And one of the things that I miss particularly is that my mom was a really accomplished cook.
[9:29] If you ever knew her, you probably had some of her food. She was particularly good at cooking like Mediterranean cuisine. And I love cooking myself. That's something she passed on to me. And so I'll be often cooking.
[9:40] And when she was alive, I would call her and I'd say, hey, I'm doing this and I'm trying this. And what should I do? And she would go, oh, this is easy. Put this in, try this technique. And it always turned out really well. And so now as I'm cooking, there'll be moments where I will say, I miss mom.
[9:55] I wish I could call her and ask her what I should do in this moment because she's just, she was just more useful than YouTube, right? That life is harder in her absence.
[10:06] And I think that I feel the same way with Jesus. That when our confession of faith says he descended into heaven, or I mean, sorry, he ascended into heaven, it feels like a downgrade.
[10:18] How about for you, those of you who are still searching for in Christianity, or maybe your friends or neighbors, for this one, it seems like this is a real downgrade in faith. I often hear people say, man, Jesus seems like a compelling person.
[10:31] He was so moral. He was such a great teacher. But I just wish I was here. I wish he was here and I could ask him some of the questions I have. And not only that, it seems awfully convenient for you Christians to say that Jesus was God and then he died and then he left.
[10:48] That's awfully convenient for you. It's pretty far-fetched. It's nice for you to be able to say that he's God and he's not here. You can't prove it now. So maybe for some of you who are searching spiritually, it feels like believing Christianity just feels untenable because the founder of the whole thing's gone.
[11:04] He's not around, presumably. We can't see or touch him. And I would, frankly, I would challenge sort of your empirical need to touch Jesus because there were plenty of people who did touch Jesus and they still killed him.
[11:18] They still didn't believe him. But I empathize. I resonate. Christianity can feel hard to believe when our founder isn't around. Many of us, here's my overall for this, is that many of us operate under the desire, maybe unspoken, maybe even unacknowledged, until this moment that I wish Jesus was here.
[11:41] The ascension feels like a downgrade. It feels like a liability to the Christian faith. It's not that great. And if that's you, if that's resonating with you, if you're a Christian or not, I understand.
[11:57] I feel it myself. And I'd be happy to listen and think with you about that. But we'll move on here. The overwhelming message of the Bible, and this is what our text tells us, is that it is to our advantage that Jesus goes away.
[12:11] That we are better off that Jesus has left us. How can that be? Well, that's what we'll look into here. So our first point is, is it really better?
[12:23] Is it better that Jesus leaves? Second point, it is. The overwhelming weight, momentum, force of the Bible is that it is better that Jesus ascended into heaven.
[12:36] And the answer is the ascension. The doctrine and theology of the ascension. Because what we have to understand here is that the ascension is so much more than Jesus just leaving earth.
[12:48] The ascension is so much more than Jesus no longer being present to us. Because the ascension is the final and ultimate vindication of who Jesus is and what he has done for his people.
[13:01] It's the final proof that Jesus is our redeemer, as we confessed earlier today. In the ascension, the Bible does not just mean that Jesus was just reabsorbed into the divine, like a drop of water in the ocean.
[13:18] It's that when Jesus died, he came back to life with the same recognizable physical body that he had. And in that physical body, he went to a place that is somehow outside of our space and time physical reality, but is still present.
[13:33] And then he sat down physically on a throne as the risen and reigning king. That Jesus went physically and spatially into a place called heaven and physically and spatially sat on a throne.
[13:48] That means that Jesus is outside of our space and time dimension, and yet he's still involved in our space and time dimension. That's the ascension. And what does this mean?
[13:59] Well, a great theologian from years ago wrote this, a guy named Herman Bavinck. He says this. Listen carefully. Carried up into heaven, therefore, he, this is Jesus, withdrew his bodily presence from our sight, not to cease to be present with believers still on their earthly pilgrimage, but to rule heaven and earth with more immediate power.
[14:23] As his body was raised up into the heavens, so his power and energy were diffused and spread beyond all the bounds of heaven and earth. Let me try and illustrate it this way.
[14:34] How many of you have a floodlight over your garage? How many of you have a floodlight over your garage? If that floodlight was just a few inches off the ground and you flicked on that floodlight, how much of your garage and driveway would it illuminate?
[14:50] Not very much. And so it's not useful at all when you need the light to flood over the whole garage and the whole driveway. But when that floodlight is way up high, 15, 20 feet high, when you flick that light on, it casts light over your whole driveway and you can see what is in your front yard.
[15:10] That is what Christ's ascension is, but on a spiritual level. It is Jesus going to the highest place, not just in our world, but beyond our world and diffusing the whole universe and beyond with his power.
[15:25] Christ's ascension is not Christ abandoning us, but actually helping us from heaven in a bigger and broader way. And the Bible shows us that Christ has done this in three ways.
[15:36] We talked about this. This is funny, actually. Matthew and I didn't plan this. This is just God being good to us. We talked about Jesus as our Redeemer. And we say that Jesus is our Redeemer in that he has three hats or three offices that he wears.
[15:49] The prophet and the priest and the king. And Matthew said, hey, you can go read the confession or you can stay in here and I'm actually going to peel those back a little bit. So that Jesus redeems us from the guilt of our sin in our misery, sin-soaked world by wearing three hats by accomplishing three offices, prophet, priest, and king.
[16:07] So as prophet, Jesus guides us. He guides us. As priest, he brings us close to God and as king, he wins for us. As prophet, he guides us.
[16:18] As priest, he brings us close to God and as king, he wins for us. And the crucial point is that those three offices did not just happen while Christ was on earth. They are happening now.
[16:30] In his ascension, Christ is executing his office as redeemer as prophet, priest, and king right now in his ascended, sitting on the throne in the presence of God, ruling over all things as redeemer.
[16:44] So let's look at these three things. That it says, so first we'll look at king. Ephesians 4 says that when Jesus ascended on high, he led a host of captives and gave gifts to men.
[16:56] The way the Bible, one of the ways that Jesus is pictured is in his ascension is as a victory parade. As a king who is having a victorious rule over his enemies. And the image that Paul has in mind in Ephesians 4 when he talks about Christ's victory parade is the ancient Roman Caesar when he had conquered in military victory, in military war.
[17:17] So the Caesar marches through Rome and he's leading all of the people that he had triumphed in front of him. And he's coming behind him as all the loot that he had gotten in the battle.
[17:28] And then he goes up and he sits down on the throne and says, I am king over the known world. And he gives the loot and the bounty to his friends and says, thank you for helping me.
[17:39] Jesus' ascension, Paul says, is the same idea but on a cosmic all-time scale. That Jesus is the king who has ascended into heaven and is ruling and reigning over, as our confession says, all his and our enemies.
[17:56] And this is incredible because listen to what Herman Bovink says one more time about this. This blows my mind. He says this, the ascension is a bigger triumph than the resurrection. The ascension is a bigger triumph than the resurrection.
[18:11] It is Christ's triumph over the whole world, over the laws of nature, over the gravity of matter, triumph over hostile, diabolical, and human forces.
[18:22] Did you hear what Bovink just said? He said the ascension is the bigger triumph than the resurrection. We think the high point of the Christian faith is Jesus coming back to life.
[18:33] But no, Bovink says, it's Christ ascending into heaven to rule and reign. The ascension shows us that Jesus is king over everything. And it makes sense then as king over everything, he should go to the place where he can be and rule most effectively.
[18:51] When the president of the United States is elected, he does not say, I'm going to go down to Pueblo to be the president. No offense to those of you who are Pueblo, but long live the Pueblo Colorado Springs tension.
[19:04] He goes to Washington, D.C. He goes to the place where he can most effectively rule his domain. And in the same way, Christ as king goes to the place where he is most effective.
[19:17] Second, Jesus is our priest in heaven. He's our best priest in heaven. So Jesus, as our priest, he goes and atones for our sins on the cross. He is the one who dies so that his blood both covers over our sin and washes clean the pollution of our sin.
[19:35] And he intercedes then for us before the Father. And Romans 8 says that Jesus right now as the ascended priest is in the presence of the Father interceding his blood on our behalf.
[19:50] That he is constantly before the Father, the judge, saying, I have completed the work that you gave me to clean and cleanse my people. And it's the difference between if you have a lawyer, a lawyer zooming into your court appointment and showing up in person.
[20:08] Let's say you have a speeding ticket and you need to get a lawyer to defend you. And you show up on your court date at 10 o'clock and at 10.15 you get a text from your lawyer saying, I'm not going to make it.
[20:20] Here's a Zoom link. I hope that this is sufficient. Is that a good lawyer? No. You want your lawyer in the courtroom right there walking in saying, I am here to defend my client here and now.
[20:34] Jesus is the lawyer who shows up into the courtroom of heaven and is constantly interceding on his people's behalf. His work is complete but he is constantly pointing back to his complete work on our behalf.
[20:49] Jesus is the best lawyer who goes to the courtroom of heaven to intercede on our behalf. We want him there. Ascended as our lawyer. Lastly, Jesus is our best prophet from heaven.
[21:04] As prophet, Jesus guides us. He sends us, he sends out the good word and Jesus is our prophet because he sends out the good news of the gospel to, as our text says in just a few verses, convict the world concerning righteousness and concerning sin.
[21:20] He does this best from heaven. He tells us even in our text right here that when he goes to heaven, he sends out the Holy Spirit who can work more effectively on a far greater scale than even Jesus could because Jesus was, as our doctrine of Christ says, one man in one place but the Holy Spirit can send out the gospel to all of Christ's elect's hearts, to all places at all times and when Christ is the ascended prophet, he is diffusing and scattering the good news of God's saving work across the world.
[21:54] As prophet in heaven, he is sending out the good news that Jesus is redeeming and restoring all things in your life and in our world.
[22:07] Matthew 28, all authority on heaven and earth is mine. Go and make disciples. That's Jesus' prophet. It's the difference between digital advertising and telephone pull printouts.
[22:20] How many of you, maybe when you lost a dog as a kid, would print out a little flyer of the dog and go and nail it to a couple of telephone poles? Not an effective way to advertise. Maybe three or four people will see it.
[22:33] But if you write on a college campus, if you do the right digital advertising on Instagram, you can reach thousands of people in minutes. That's what Jesus as prophet has done in heaven.
[22:45] He is the digital advertisement that is sending out the news of God, not on a telephone pole for three or four people to see, but for everyone to know that Jesus is Lord and he is coming and he is our king and he will redeem us.
[23:00] And so these are good news because we need a prophet, a priest, and a king in our sin-soaked world to be prophet and priest and king from heaven. Jesus is our king in heaven because he rules and defends us.
[23:14] He restrains and conquers our heaven. We are still sinners. We still do things that are contrary to God's law and so we need a priest who is in the courtroom of heaven pointing to his finished work to the Father.
[23:27] We need a prophet who is sending out the good redeeming news of the gospel, the power of God to salvation to all those who believe in our world. And so friends, the ascension is not just unproductive Jesus waiting in heaven until the Father says and go.
[23:44] No, the ascension is the second person of the Trinity perhaps more active now than he ever has been for your faith and for the church. That is the good news of the ascension.
[23:57] It is to your advantage, to our advantage that he goes away. So what? So what? How does this, why does it matter?
[24:09] Third and final point. I'll try to apply this first to those of us who are Christians and then to those of us who are still searching, those of us who are not Christians. So one of the most exciting, I think, so what's for Christians is when we come to the Lord's table, when we come to the sacrament, the meal of eating with Christ.
[24:27] And so I'll try and explain it this way. There have been several different views of how to interpret the Lord's Supper across church history. Our Baptist friends, if you're Baptist, we're so glad you're here today.
[24:39] I'm going to try and explain a little bit about a little about Baptist theology of the Lord's Supper. But in Baptist theology, the Lord's Supper is eating and drinking to remember what Jesus has done on the cross and nothing more.
[24:52] We call it the memorialist view. We eat and drink and we feel pious feelings towards God, but that's it. And if I'm honest, I don't think that that takes seriously John chapter 6 when Jesus says, unless you eat my body and drink my blood, you have no part in me.
[25:08] I think there's holes in this. Our Catholic friends, if you're Catholic, again, we're really glad here, but I would argue that there's an error here. Our Catholic friends would argue that at the Lord's Supper, at the Mass, Christ is re-sacrificed for our sins again.
[25:23] And I would argue that this does two errors. First, it shortchanges the once and for all atonement that Christ has done on the cross that Hebrews talks about. But I also would argue, as Calvin argues, that it's pulling apart the dual nature, the union of who Christ is, that he is both God and man inseparably at the same time.
[25:41] And it's pulling Christ down from heaven and then spreading his body out throughout the whole universe. That's a big problem. Calvin, the Reformed tradition at the Lord's Supper, says that through the Holy Spirit, when we eat and drink the Lord's Supper, the Holy Spirit lifts us up to be with Jesus.
[26:04] Not that we pull Jesus down to be with us, but the Holy Spirit lifts us up to commune, to unite a little bit more with our risen and reigning prophet, priest, and king.
[26:16] That we are made to partake of Jesus' body and blood spiritually just as our bodies are nourished by bread and wine. Communion is not God coming down to be with us.
[26:30] Communion is God lifting us up spiritually to be with him. It's practicing for heaven. When we eat and drink, even a meager little cracker and a small tablespoon of drink, we are practicing for heaven.
[26:44] And in this way, Christians, when you eat and drink this meal, you walk out of this building more united to Jesus than when you came in. Mysteriously, I don't understand this.
[26:55] At the end of his section on this in Calvin's Institute, he says, I don't understand it, but I experience it and I know it's true. When you walk in and take the Lord's Supper and you walk out, you are somehow more united to Christ than when you walked in this building.
[27:09] That's true because of the ascension. I'll try to make this practical for a particular group of people who I am a part of right now, which is parents of young children.
[27:22] My daughter is four. Sitting through church can be hard for her sometimes. My wife is expecting another one in five weeks. And I read this blog on Mere Orthodoxy, a great blog, a couple of weeks ago, and it says, parenting in church is really challenging right now.
[27:36] It's challenging because it's wrangling toddlers the whole time because they're just wiggling and so it's hard to pay attention. It's hard to get them to pay attention. But the Lord's Supper and our doctrine of the Lord's Supper, meeting the ascension, means that at this sacrament, grace happens to us.
[27:55] And even in our distraction, the Holy Spirit is actively bringing us into presence. So even if there are moments when you as a parent are like, I don't know what the pastor said today, when you eat and drink this, God is being faithful to you even in your distraction, lifting you into his presence.
[28:13] And that's true for all of us, but especially for those of us who struggle to sit and wiggle. Christ's ascension means that Christ the God-man is sitting in his throne and we are united to him when we eat and drink in faith.
[28:28] That second, last thing, how does this relate? So what for those of us who are searching, who are not convinced of Christianity yet? What does this ascension mean? Briefly, I think it tells us that this world is not all there is to life.
[28:44] This world is not all there is to life. There's a book by two secular atheist philosophers named Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly. The book's called All Things Shining. And as secular atheists, they try to say that there's no real purpose to life.
[28:58] We're materialistic beings, ultimately lights and clockwork, atoms spinning around, and that there's nothing really more to life than physics and chemistry.
[29:09] And so all you can try to do is scratch out some shiny, sacred micro-meanings out of a gray, dull universe. And that's what they call it, All Things Shining. There's nothing to life. Just try and create a little bit of happiness in your life.
[29:22] It's depressing stuff. So tough way to be a human being. But if I'm honest, and if you're here and you're not a Christian, I want you to think hard with me on this. I don't think that that actually corresponds with how most of us live.
[29:36] I don't think that's existentially, day to day, how most of us go through our lives. And think about it this way. Think about some of the most satisfying moments in your life. Sipping a good drink by a creek with some friends.
[29:51] Or the smell of barbecue on a Saturday afternoon. I did some barbecue ribs yesterday, and it was amazing. Just this extra sensory experience or sweet rolls coming out of the oven on Christmas morning.
[30:03] Right? These are moments that are more than just biological life. They're more than just nourishing our bodies. Right? And they point us to, if you're honest, they point us to that there is something more to this life than just electrons spinning around protons.
[30:20] that there is actually some good, true, and beautiful things in our world. And Christ's ascension affirms what you already intuitively know.
[30:33] It affirms what you already intuitively know, that there is purpose to this world. And not only that, it puts what you intuitively know into a place and a person.
[30:44] The risen and reigning king. And it affirms it and it puts it in a person. It says that there are good, true, real, beautiful moments in our life.
[30:55] And it says it's Jesus and he is the place and the person where all of those things find their culmination. He is the one who is the center of the enjoyable things that we all intuitively experience in our lives.
[31:08] So if materialism is real, the most you can hope to get out of life is just as much dopamine as you can squeeze out of this world. And that's all you get. But if Christ is ascended, then all of those joy-filled moments point us to a place and a person.
[31:24] That is Jesus Christ where the ascension is both validating and personifying the goodness that you experience. And without the ascension, all you have is to just try and get one more hit.
[31:39] And if that's true, you might as well do heroin because that's the most bang for your buck. I'm serious. The ascension points us to the place where all goodness is centered.
[31:49] That is Jesus Christ. If it's true, then what you already intuitively experience is real. And I think that's reason to trust. I think that's reason to believe.
[32:02] I think it's reason to say Jesus is different from anything else. I've covered a lot of territory today. I hope you see that the ascension is not a liability to the Christian faith.
[32:14] it's not a downgrade for your spirituality. But it's good news. It is better, as Jesus says, that I go away.
[32:24] It's to our advantage because we have a prophet, priest, and king who is ruling and reigning, who is bringing us slowly and more but progressively into the presence of God and who is sending out the good news of God's redeeming activity in our world.
[32:37] And that that is reason to believe. And it is comfort for those of us who are Christians. It matters, and I hope that all of you can trust it a little more. Would you pray with me?
[32:49] Father in heaven, we pray that you would encourage our faith, all of us, in the unique way that we need to be ministered to by the ascension. Thank you that Jesus is not waiting around in heaven until he comes back, but that he is indeed active right now bringing his kingdom, bringing us to the Father, building his church, help us to trust that, bring your kingdom and be glorified in it.
[33:16] It's in Jesus' name we pray. Would you please stand for our final hymn? God sent his son, they called him Jesus, he came to love, heal and forgive, he bled and died.
[33:50] He bled and died to buy my pardon, an empty grave is there to prove my Savior lives.
[34:04] Because he lives, I can face tomorrow, because he lives, all fear is gone, because I know he holds the future, and life is worth the living just because he lives.
[34:38] How sweet to hold a newborn baby and feel the pride and joy he gives, but greater still the calm assurance this child can face uncertain days because he lives.
[35:10] Because he lives, because he lives, because he lives, I can face tomorrow, because he lives, all fear is gone, because I know he holds the future, and life is worth the living just because he lives.
[35:44] And then one day, I'll cross the river, I'll fight life's final war with pain, and then as death gives way to victory, I'll see the lights of glory and I'll know he lives.
[36:17] Because he lives, I can face tomorrow, because he lives, all fear is gone, because I know he holds the future, and life is worth the living just because he lives.
[36:59] Christians, lift your hands and receive a blessing not from me, but from the living God. The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
[37:10] The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Have a happy Lord's Day. Be well.