[0:00] Today we have the pleasure of hearing God's word from Jeff Kreisel. And Jeff is one of our supportive missionaries here at CMPC. And Jeff labors at USAPHA or the Air Force Academy with RUF.
[0:14] We just prayed for RUF at Colorado State. We support Wes Calton at Colorado State and Jeff at USAPHA. So please give attention to God's word. All right, well, good morning, everyone.
[0:32] As Andy said, my name is Jeff Kreisel. I serve as the RUF campus minister at the Air Force Academy. I also serve as a brigade chaplain in the Army Reserves here at Fort Carson.
[0:43] So kind of I got a foot in both the blue and the green worlds. My family and I, we've been here for eight years working at the Academy and at Fort Carson. My wife, where is she?
[0:55] She's somewhere. Where is she? Oh, there she is. Anyway, my five kids are here. Get a chance to meet them. They're all amazing. We love being here.
[1:06] We've loved it every moment of these past eight years. It's kind of a beautiful merging or marrying of the different things that we love. I'm a military brat, Army brat.
[1:18] I've never known a day outside of the military. We love the gospel. We love college students and we love the mountains. And so we kind of get to see all four of those things interweave through our time here.
[1:30] A good example of this would be a couple months ago over MLK weekend, we took about 84 of our cadets to Crested Butte for our annual winter retreat.
[1:40] And throughout the weekend, I had several amazing conversations with college students as they were trapped with me on chairlifts throughout the day.
[1:51] They couldn't get away. It's perfect ministry. They've kind of made a joke of it over the years. They call it ski chairlift discipleship with Jeff. And because they know that if you sit on a chairlift with me, you better come prepared to like tell your entire story because I'm just going to keep on asking you questions.
[2:10] But yeah, it's a beautiful merging of the things that we love. I love snowboarding. I love snowboarding with cadets. But if I'm being honest with y'all, my body hates being above a certain elevation for too long.
[2:27] Above like 9,000 feet of elevation, my body just kind of falls apart. I honestly can't remember the last time that I didn't get some degree of altitude sickness when I was up in the mountains for more than a few days.
[2:41] And I have tried every tip and trick that you can find on the interwebs. And I'm telling you, nothing works for me. It doesn't matter how much water I drink or electrolytes I inhale or Advil I take or carbs I take before I go.
[2:56] My body just doesn't like the higher elevations. Yes, you can feel me. I can stand a few days, but there always comes a point when my body says enough is enough and I have to come down, right?
[3:13] Well, this morning we're going to consider a passage in the book of Revelation, Revelation chapters 4 and 5. And it is a passage that I would argue will take us into the theological stratosphere.
[3:26] A passage that takes us to such spiritual heights that it will take your breath away. Like you don't really know how to cope with the reality of being this high.
[3:40] You'll feel lightheaded. You'll feel a little woozy. This morning, God is inviting us to enter his heavenly throne room. There is no higher place.
[3:52] No spiritual reality higher than this. But the reality is due to our fallen nature, due to our finitude, we can't handle such great spiritual heights.
[4:05] God is too holy for us. If we were in his direct presence, we couldn't survive. It's like trying to fly in an unpressurized cockpit. Like you have to have something standing between you and him in order to survive.
[4:21] His unfiltered presence is too much for us to handle. But out of God's kindness, he has given us apocalyptic literature, like the book of Revelation, so that we can, in a very real sense, enter the heavenly places while we are still fallen and finite.
[4:45] I like to compare the book of Revelation with my students to like wearing a VR headset, right? It's like we naturally can't enter God's throne room. He is infinitely holy and we are not.
[4:57] But with this kind of like VR headset on, we are able to like safely like navigate, enter the spiritual stratosphere.
[5:10] But just because we're safe when we approach God's word in Revelation 4 and 5, it doesn't mean that it won't take your breath away. It will. And so I have a long scripture reading.
[5:23] It's two chapters, but I'm going to cut a little bit out. So if you guys have your bulletins, please open those and follow along with me as I read. Revelation 4.
[5:39] After this I looked, and behold, a door standing opened in heaven. And the first voice which I had heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this.
[5:52] At once I was in the Spirit, and behold, a throne stood in heaven with one seated on the throne. And we can jump to verse 6. And around the throne, on each side of the throne, are four living creatures.
[6:07] Each of them with six wings are full of eyes all around and within. And day and night they never cease to say, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.
[6:21] And whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks to him who is seated on the throne, who lives forever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who is seated on the throne and worship him, who lives forever and ever.
[6:34] They cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Worthy are you, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power. For you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created.
[6:47] Then I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll, written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals. And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?
[7:04] And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it. And I began to weep loudly, because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it.
[7:16] And one of the old elders said to me, Weep no more. Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.
[7:28] In between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders, I saw a lamb standing as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.
[7:42] And he went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne, and when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the lamb, and they sang a new song, saying, Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood ransomed people for God, from every tribe and language and people and nation.
[8:06] And you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth. This is the word of God for the people of God. Let me pray for us.
[8:18] Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come. Lord, I pray that you would help us to behold you more clearly this morning, that we would behold Christ, the slain lamb who takes away the sins of the world.
[8:35] We pray all this in his name. Amen. All right. So, the book of Revelation was written by the Apostle John while he was on this desolate island in the Mediterranean Sea called Patmos.
[8:50] Nowadays, this island has a reputation of being one of the quietest Greek islands. It has a booming tourist economy. It's kind of known for its beautiful beaches.
[9:02] It's a place that you want to go. But 2,000 years ago, it was not a place that you wanted to go. It was a place where criminals were exiled. I like to think of Patmos kind of like the Alcatraz of the Roman Empire.
[9:16] So, why was the Apostle John exiled to Alcatraz? He was an old man at this point in his life. He was probably around 80 to 90 years old.
[9:31] So, he wasn't exactly a physical threat, but John was exiled here because he was deemed a social threat to the social peace of the Roman Empire because this man would not shut up about the good news of Jesus Christ.
[9:48] He wouldn't stop talking about Jesus. Day after day after day, John refused to worship Caesar as Lord and God.
[10:01] And that's a key phrase in this passage. He refused to worship Caesar as Lord and God because Jesus alone was his Lord and God. And as a result of him taking the stand, refusing to worship Caesar, many early Christians followed his lead and also refused to worship Caesar as Lord and God.
[10:21] And as a result, during this time, under this emperor, approximately 40,000 Christians were brutally murdered for their refusal to worship Caesar just like John.
[10:36] And so, they're trying to contain John's influence. Now, I don't know why John was not a martyr like all of the other apostles. Why, in God's providence, John survives.
[10:49] Maybe it was because he was an old man at this point and they just thought like, hey, he's going to die soon anyway. Let's just exile him to Patmos or something. Or maybe it was because his followers had become so large that maybe an uprising would result if they did murder him in a public way.
[11:07] And so, whatever the case may be, they chose not to martyr him. Instead, they exile him so that they could contain his influence, so they could stop him from influencing others in their refusal to worship Caesar.
[11:23] And so, they send him to Patmos. Now, I will say that I think that if the Romans had the gift of hindsight, John, there's no way John would have survived. He would not have been exiled to Patmos.
[11:37] They would have taken care of him just like they did all of the other apostles. Because when John was exiled on this deserted island, God powerfully worked through him in a way that 2,000 years later, we will forever feel its ripples.
[11:55] You see, it didn't matter where John was. God was going to speak through John. Whether through his words or through his pen, God was going to speak through John.
[12:06] And when God speaks, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. Those were John's words in his great gospel. You see, while John was in the darkness of exile, he receives a vision from God that would come to be the book of Revelation, and this book, through this vision, would light up the world.
[12:31] It would light everything up. One scholar put it this way, John creates for us a new conceptualization of the world. He is giving us a new set of glasses by which to make our way through the broken world.
[12:47] You see, Revelation isn't just a vision of the future. Revelation is a glimpse into heaven. And when you get a glimpse into heaven, you start to long for it.
[13:01] And when you start to long for heaven, you start to become a citizen of heaven, even in the now. And when you start to become a citizen of heaven, you start to pull that heavenly reality into your present tense.
[13:14] You start to bring heaven here. One of my favorite TV shows is the show Silo. It's on Apple TV. It just came out with its second season, and it's such a cool show.
[13:27] If you haven't watched it, you should totally check it out. So the show is set in a world that has just endured some sort of apocalyptic, like cataclysmic event that forced all of the human survivors into this underground shelter.
[13:44] that they call the Silo. And it's a self-sufficient city that inhabits about 10,000 people. So the show is set hundreds of years after the cataclysmic, apocalyptic event.
[13:59] And so you have these 10,000 people who have been living underground. They don't have any conception of what the world looks like for years and years and years, generations.
[14:10] In an effort to prevent all of these inhabitants from opening the Silo doors and exposing the entire population to some form of toxic radiation, the leaders of the Silo decide that it was in the best interest of the Silo to destroy every remnant of life before they entered the Silo.
[14:32] So the inhabitants have not only never seen the natural world, they have like no mental conception of it. No mental conception. They have no idea what a beach looks like.
[14:47] They have no idea like what a beautiful mountain backdrop in Colorado would look like. Or like a beautiful sunset or a rainforest and all the animals of the earth or like the clear night sky in which you can see thousands and thousands of stars.
[15:02] They had no mental conception of the world in which they were actually living. But then something happens in the first season. A little spoiler alert, sorry. There's a little children's book.
[15:15] In this children's book, it predates the Silo. It predates the cataclysmic event. And this children's book, it's a picture book. And it contains these like vivid images of what like a healthy world actually looks like.
[15:32] And this book starts to circulate around the Silo and instantly the inhabitants by looking at the images in this book received a new conceptualization of the world.
[15:45] The book gives them a vision of the invisible world that they were unfamiliar with. It shows them how the world should be.
[15:58] And so the protagonists in the show, they become evangelists of this little children's book. And they just keep, they keep showing it to other people. They're like, see, look.
[16:09] Behold, like this is the real world. This is what our world should look like. Revelation 4 and 5 is kind of like that book. And John is urging us also to stop whatever we're doing and to look at the vivid images in this book.
[16:29] He's saying to us, look, like this is what the real world is supposed to look like. This is the world you were made for.
[16:41] Behold these images. They will completely change your life forever. They will light up the darkness. They will give you a new conceptualization of the entire world.
[16:53] So there's three things in this passage that John wants us to see. He doesn't just want us to see. He actually commands us to see them. The Greek word for behold is edu.
[17:06] And he uses it as an imperative. He's using it as a command. He's commanding us to see three vivid imageries that he believes will change our lives. So the first thing he wants us to see is a door.
[17:20] And it's a door that leads to heaven. A door that leads like to the ultimate spiritual reality that is behind our physical reality.
[17:32] That explains our physical reality. Revelation chapter 4 verse 1. He says, And after this I looked and behold. Look.
[17:43] Pay attention. A door standing open in heaven. John is exiled on this deserted island in Patmos, right? And the door just shows up where he stands.
[17:58] Now, I would argue that throughout human history everyone has been like frantically looking for this door. It's a door into this deeper spiritual reality that will explain why we experience the things that we experience on the physical plane.
[18:19] It's a door that will answer our deepest questions like why am I here? And what is real? And where did matter come from?
[18:29] And where did the mind come from? How should I live in this world? Where is the door to a happy, beautiful, flourishing life?
[18:42] In Genesis 11, the inhabitants of earth, they tried to build a tower. The Tower of Babel. A stairway to heaven. Why were they trying to get to heaven?
[18:53] Because they're trying to find this door. In the New Testament, we see the Pharisees and they believe that strict obedience to the law, that's the door to heaven.
[19:06] That's how we enter God's presence is through my own effort, through my own working and striving. You see, it isn't just the Old Testament and New Testament people that are striving for this door.
[19:18] Like literally every religion and philosophical system is searching for this door. Be it existentialism or like mysticism, skepticism, stoicism, pantheism, atheism even, nihilism even, they're all looking for a door.
[19:38] They're looking for the good life. They're looking for answers to their questions. They're trying to, in a sense, get out of this inhospitable silo to see the world for what it's supposed to be.
[19:54] I love taking my kids to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. And my favorite exhibit goes between like the gorilla exhibit or the lion exhibit. But I'll be honest, it's like every time I go, I always feel really bad for the animals.
[20:09] They look like they're kind of going crazy in there, right? You know, zoologists call this phenomenon zookosis. They essentially lose their minds because they're not in a habitat that is suitable to their flourishing.
[20:28] And so they pace back and forth. They just lay down and they just sit there all day not knowing kind of what the actual habitat that they were designed to be in looks like.
[20:41] And that is essentially a good description of our world. We all suffer from zookosis to some extent because we have no idea how this world really should be.
[20:52] But we're all trying to find the door that will give us the answer to those questions. Now some people will look to other people to be the door, right? They look to politicians like they're the door to a good life.
[21:06] They're going to bring heaven to earth. Or some view like the wealthy, the celebrities as the door. Like that's what beautiful looks like. Some people would view like technological innovators like Elon Musk or something.
[21:19] Like he is going to lead us out of the inhospitable, inhabitable silo, out of the zoo and into like the promised land of like technological innovation and AI or whatever.
[21:34] Other people turn to philosophical minds like Plato and Socrates and Kant and Hume and Nietzsche and Marx and Albert Camus. Like all of these different philosophical people, we will put our hope in them to take us to the door that will explain our existence.
[21:52] And the reality is that every single door that the world has tried to enter, it leads to some form of idolatrous worship. Because here's the thing, when you walk through any door looking for heaven, worship is always waiting on the other side of that door.
[22:14] It's always waiting. Political worship, celebrity worship, technological worship, philosophical worship. Have you ever walked through the gates like to go to an SEC football game?
[22:29] Like, for some people, you are entering into their house of worship. Heaven on earth. Have you ever walked into a Taylor Swift concert?
[22:41] Have you gone through those doors? For many people, that is a place of worship. Ever walked into a Louis Vuitton store? For many, that is a place of worship.
[22:52] That's where they believe heaven meets earth. But according to Revelation 4, there's only one door. And you won't desire this door unless you get a vision of what lies behind the door.
[23:08] Until that vision breaks into your reality and sets your imagination free and offers you a new conceptualization of what life should be and could be.
[23:19] So, here's what the exiled John discovered on this desolate island in the middle of the Mediterranean. He wants us to see that there's a door.
[23:32] And it isn't somewhere like out there that we have to like find. Right? It's right there. It's everywhere.
[23:45] He's on this island and this door is open right where he stands right in front of his face. It's open. All he has to do is walk right through it. See, he doesn't have to like fly like, you know, like John, Michael, Wendy, and Peter Pan to go to this other reality.
[24:05] He simply steps into it right where he is. You see, for the apostle John, heaven, it refers to this other reality that is actually not so far away as we may think.
[24:22] It's actually right here. It's close at hand. It's all around us. It's a reality that intersects and informs our visible, tangible reality.
[24:35] Yes, sin separates us from this reality. but it's not spatially far away. Now, why is this so important?
[24:47] It's important because this means that it doesn't matter like where you are or what you're going through. God is there. According to Revelation 4, you're never truly alone.
[25:04] Through faith in Christ, you have heaven there. you're never trapped in a silo, even when life feels like a dark dungeon, even in exile on this desolate island, standing in God's presence was just a doorway for John.
[25:24] And the door is, in fact, according to John in his gospel, a person. It isn't like a philosophical thought or an ethical framework.
[25:36] it's a person. The door is none other than Jesus himself. John writes in his gospel in chapter 10 verse 9, Jesus says, I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and he will go in and out and he will find pasture.
[25:57] So wherever you are, like whenever you pray in Jesus' name, you step through the door into the heavenly throne room of God. That's unbelievable. Like wherever you are, whenever you gather with fellow believers for corporate worship, you step through the door.
[26:18] Like church isn't just some country club with like-minded people. It is where God meets with his people, where God dwells with us. And what do you call the place where God dwells with people?
[26:32] that's heaven. We get a glimpse of it. We get to taste it. Not in its fullest sense, but we get to experience heaven even now.
[26:43] John is saying that wherever you are, like whenever you sing Christ centered songs, you step through the door and you join this eternal, never ending choir of worship to God.
[26:59] Wherever you are, whenever you forgive other people, as God has forgiven you, you step through the door. Wherever you are, whenever you work with purpose, with the purpose of glorifying God, like through your work and in your work, you step through the door, wherever you are.
[27:20] In Acts 16, the apostle Paul and Silas, they're arrested, they're beaten, and they're thrown in jail. But to their Philippian jailer's surprise, the jail cell was actually a door into the heavenly places.
[27:36] And therefore, even in prison while awaiting trial, Paul and Silas can't help but sing. They worship, they're praising God even in prison.
[27:49] Remember, when you walk through the door, worship is always waiting on the other side. You see, Paul and Silas carried this new conceptualization of the world with them wherever they went, even a prison cell.
[28:04] And so when this earthquake strikes and it opens their jail cell, they don't take this as an opportunity to run away. Well, why? Because they were already free.
[28:18] Like they may have been in a jail cell, but they were no longer in the zoo. They were freed from zookosis, right? They were already experiencing the joys of heaven even in prison.
[28:32] And they wanted to share this freedom, this joy. They wanted to share this door, this Jesus, with the Philippian jailer who was now thinking about taking his own life because certainly he would be punished greatly if all of the prisoners escaped under his watch.
[28:51] But that's not what Paul and Silas do. They stay in the jail in order to show him the door. They're saying, see, look, behold, a door is open, is standing open in heaven.
[29:09] It's right here. This is the door to human flourishing. This is the door to joy in the midst of sorrow. This is the door to life eternal.
[29:19] This is the joy to human flourishing in an inhabitable world. This is the door to the worship you were made for. All right.
[29:29] Second thing that John sees that he wants us to see is found in verse 2. It says, at once I was in the spirit and behold, there's that word again, a throne stood in heaven and one seated on the throne.
[29:46] You see, as soon as John goes through the door into the heavenly places, he sees something. He sees a cosmic throne and someone is sitting on the throne.
[29:59] The throne isn't empty. It's not an unoccupied chair. Like, you have to imagine that with everything John's gone through and everything that he's going through, you have to, like, think that maybe at some point he started to wonder, is that throne in heaven unoccupied?
[30:24] Like, he's watched all of his closest friends die. Like, they've all died for their faith and thousands of others. Like, he was, in a sense, the last man standing. The emperor's reign of terror was underway and he was feeling the full weight of it.
[30:42] Like, how could God be on the throne and yet allow all of that suffering to happen? allow all this hardship to happen? Why was John starving and alone and exile and pateness if God was on a throne?
[31:00] You know, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. You know, while John's particular questions about why things were happening the way that they were happening, those questions weren't directly answered.
[31:12] This image of God sitting on a throne spoke well over a thousand words to John's soul. Like, this picture, this image of an occupied throne, it tells us that God is in control, even when life feels out of control.
[31:34] It tells us that God is sovereign and he's good and he has a plan, even when life doesn't make much sense. this image tells us that our God has the best sight picture of human history, past, present, future.
[31:53] He sees how it all works together. I used to be an air traffic controller when I was in the Air Force and every now and then I would get a pilot that would think they had a better idea than me.
[32:06] You know, and I would say, hey, traffic, three o'clock, two miles, report traffic in sight, they'd be like, I don't see anything. You know, I'd be like, well, he's there. I see things that you can't see and God has the best sight picture of all human history.
[32:20] Like, well, things like death and injustice and racism and persecution grieve God to his core, he's big enough to, like, take, like, these broken, dark things and then speak gospel light into them.
[32:35] I'll never forget a conversation that I had with one of my elders when we were attending a church in Dallas while I was in seminary. And this was a man who had experienced unfathomable hardship, like, immense suffering throughout his life, like, more than I could ever begin to fathom.
[32:55] And so he tells me his story. And I mean, I hear his story and then I asked him, I said, how can any of these things that you've been through work together for good?
[33:05] And he looked at me and he said, he said, Jeff, God uses our hurts to make us holy reflections of him. See, I was asking, are you sure that God is on his throne?
[33:20] And he tells me God uses our hurts to make us holy reflections of him. In other words, yes, he is on his throne. And then he went on to say this. He said, God writes pain into our stories to redeem our stories so that we can use our stories to tell his story of redemption.
[33:40] And then he said one of my favorite lines, our God makes broken things beautiful. Yeah, he's on his throne. Listen, it is this truth of God's sovereignty, of his reigning and ruling over all things that drives these four creatures in Revelation to just worship and they sing unceasingly.
[34:06] They praise. Verse 8, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and who is and who is to come. Like, I know, like, I purposely took them this out of the reading, the descriptions of these four creatures, and they seem really weird, right?
[34:25] They have different faces and they got, like, six wings and, like, eyeballs are, like, covering them from top to bottom. We don't really know what to do with these creatures, but don't miss the forest from the trees, my friends.
[34:37] A lot of people, when they read Revelation, they miss the forest from the trees. The four creatures aren't, like, some weird mystical beast that we will one day encounter in the new heavens and new earth. They simply represent all of creation.
[34:51] All of creation. But that isn't a simple truth, right? Like, John is telling us that, like, everything in creation, like, from the smallest molecule to the largest celestial body, everything exists in a constant state of praise to the God on the throne.
[35:11] And then the worship service gets even better, right? It isn't just creation singing God's praises, but all of God's people join into the song, represented by these 24 elders.
[35:25] Like, once again, don't miss the forest from the trees. Most likely, the 24 elders, they simply represent the 12 tribes of Israel in the Old Testament and the 12 apostles in the New Testament.
[35:36] In other words, they represent all of God's people. They represent all of those who looked forward in faith to Jesus and walked through the door, and everyone who looked backwards in faith to Jesus and walked through the same door.
[35:53] They start to sing, chapter 4, verse 11, worthy are you, our Lord and God. You catch it? Who did they identify as Lord and God? It wasn't Caesar.
[36:05] To receive glory and honor and power because you created all things, and by your will they existed and were created. But then something happens during the worship service in heaven around the middle of the song.
[36:20] An angel stands up, and he has this booming voice so loud that every square inch of all creation can hear his booming voice. And he says this. He says, who was worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?
[36:34] And in response, let's just say that the crickets join the song. Verse 3, and no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it.
[36:48] So silence sets in. Like no one is worthy to open the scroll. What is the scroll? Well, it contains the entirety of God's plan.
[37:03] Past, present, future, it contains the meaning of life. It contains the answers to our biggest questions. It contains the path to a flourishing life.
[37:18] It contains God's plan to make all wrongs right. God's plan to make all sadness untrue. God's plan to bring heaven to earth, to marry the two for eternity.
[37:32] Everyone longs to know what's on this scroll, but no one can open it. No philosopher, no politician, no celebrity, no innovator, no athlete, no scientist, no software engineer.
[37:48] No one can give a sufficient explanation for the meaning of the universe. And no one can provide a decisive solution to all the problems that we see in our world.
[38:00] The injustice, the prejudice, the sickness, the cancer, the war, the death. Like no one's able to open the scroll.
[38:10] No one is able to get us out of the zoo. No one's able to free us from the silo. And then weeping breaks in.
[38:23] Verse 4 of chapter 5 says, And I began to weep loudly, because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. And it's at this point that John looks at our weeping world, and he gives us the last command to behold.
[38:42] Chapter 5, verse 5. And one of the elders said to me, Weep no more. Behold, the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.
[38:55] And immediately, like, hope sets in. Like, both of those terms, the lion of Judah, the root of David, they were biblical images, biblical terms of the messianic expectations of a warrior king coming to conquer.
[39:15] The Messiah is going to be strong, and he's going to be powerful. He's going to be like Aslan, right? He's going to overthrow evil, and he's going to bring justice to the poor and the oppressed.
[39:27] But then we have, like, the plot twists of plot twists. You see, John is expecting to turn and see a lion moving towards the throne of God to take the scroll from his hand.
[39:41] But that's not what he sees when he turns. The lights went out. Ooh. Instead, he turns, and he beholds a slaughtered little lamb.
[39:56] He sees a little lamb. It's like John the Baptist. Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And this, my friends, is when the oxygen leaves your lungs.
[40:10] This is like the highest of heights in the theological stratosphere. It leaves us speechless. The one who conquers, the one who is worthy to open the scroll and give us the meaning of life, the plan of God, that one is a little lamb who went to a cross.
[40:35] And why did he go to the cross? Well, he went to the cross because of us. He went to the cross instead of us, and he went to the cross for us. Why?
[40:47] To open the door to the throne room of God. To tear down the barrier that stood between our fallen natures and God's holy presence.
[40:57] To invite us into that eternal, everlasting choir of praise. It's the image that turns the world right side up.
[41:09] It's the image that says to a weeping world, there is a cosmic plan. And the lamb of God is at the center of that plan. Your life is soaked with meaning because God is on the throne.
[41:25] But that doesn't mean that your life won't be easy. He's saying, look at the lamb. He's slaughtered. Just as he suffered, you too will suffer. But don't lose hope. Wherever you go and whatever you're going through, because of Jesus, you carry heaven with you.
[41:45] The throne is occupied. The slain lamb is always there interceding on your behalf. And the door into God's presence is always open.
[41:56] My friends, these three images, when taken together, will give you a new conceptualization of the world. They'll free you from the zoo.
[42:09] And they'll drive you to worship. Amen? All right. Let me pray for us. Heavenly Father, you sit enthroned in the heavenly places.
[42:20] And through Jesus, the door, we get to enter. We get to be in your presence. We get to dwell with you. We get a glimpse of heaven now.
[42:32] And I pray, Lord, that as we leave from this place, that we would be portals to heaven wherever we go. That we would be, in a sense, the wardrobe. That we are the touchpoint between heaven and earth.
[42:44] That we would bring heaven into our homes. That we would pull heaven into our work. That we would pull heaven into our neighborhoods and our schools. We pray that people would see heaven in us.
[42:57] They would ask us about the hope that we have. And that we get to tell them about this open door. Just like Paul and Silas to the Philippian jailer. A door to freedom, to joy, and to life everlasting.
[43:09] We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. Amen.