Jeremiah chapter 29, and I will read from the beginning down to verse 14. This is the word of the Lord. These are the words of the letter that Jeremiah the prophet sent from Jerusalem to the surviving elders of the exiles and to the priests, the prophets and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, and then the text picks up in verse 4. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon, build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce, take wives and have sons and daughters, take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile. And pray for the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you shall find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, do not let your prophets and your diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream. For it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name. I did not send them, declares the Lord. For thus says the Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you. And I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord. Plans for welfare and not for evil. to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you, declares the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, declares the Lord. And I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile. And then in the New Testament from Hebrews chapter 2, I'll read down through verse 19, not verse 18. So 2, 5 through 9. For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere what is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him. You made him, for a little while, lower than the angels. You have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet. Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him, that is, to human beings. But we see him, Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God, he might taste death for everyone. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Again, we ask you, Holy Spirit, to come. You were the one who gave these words to Jeremiah and to the author of Hebrews in the first place, and now we ask you to give them to us. We've read them. We've heard them with our ears. but we want them to be written upon the tablets of our heart. And you alone can do that. So make us responsive and receptive to what you have for us today. And may you receive the glory and praise, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated. I've discovered on my last three visits to Hawaii that A, I'm either allergic to my grandchildren, but that couldn't possibly be. So the only other alternative is that I'm allergic to paradise. And that's really a sad thought. I get cold and I'm sniffly and coffee and hacky and you'll hear me sniffing. I'll try and keep it to a minimum and pray that my voice will hold out. Otherwise, Eli's going to have to come up read point three to you. We passed a new year on Wednesday. And I don't know how you celebrate or if you celebrate. I haven't been up at midnight intentionally on New Year's Eve for a long, long time. I figure it's going to happen with me or without me, so I can safely go to bed at a decent hour. When we come to temporal markers like that, it's often a time to kind of pause. In your normal flow of life, one Monday is like another. One Friday is like another. The weekend is more or less like another. But when we come to a birthday or a holiday or a New Year's Day or something, it might be a moment to just freeze the moment for a second, look back, and look forward, I suppose, On Thanksgiving, for example, we like to pause and look back over a year and particularly remember the blessings, including the blessings in disguise, that God has given to us through a course of time and rejoice and give thanks to Him. On a birthday, maybe you look at the year past and it's a time to take account. What were my successes in the last year of my life? and what have been the failures. And so, we take stock. We assess things. On New Year's, we tend to kind of look to the future and think, okay, we got a blank slate, and what are we gonna do? And New Year's resolutions, you know, it's the whole thing. And so, we're prospecting toward the future. What will we do? I think another way we can pause is to get the big picture in view, and particularly a perspective. The longer I live the Christian life, I realize how much of it depends upon context, of seeing my little story in the context of God's big story. Things that seem so very, very important to me in the moment, how do they fit into the big plan of God? And what should be my perspective on my life in the world, and that's what I want us to think about this afternoon for a few minutes. We're often told, and this is echoing the words of Jesus, that we are in the world, but we are not of the world. A few years ago, somebody even invented a little set of decals. I've seen them on the back of pickup trucks or on t-shirts or something. N-O-T-W, right? Fairly legible. not of this world. It's always struck me as ironic that you can craft a statement that says that I'm not of this world in whatever the latest trend in graphic design might look like. So, well, that's another thing. Well, that's easy enough to say. It's easy enough to agree with. But what does it actually mean? Christians live in the world. Jesus, when he was praying for us, he said, Father, I don't want you to take them out of the world, but to protect them from the evil one who is still the main operator in this fallen world. We talked a little bit about that last week. God loved the world, the world being hostile to God, an enemy of God pushing back against God. And God could have judged the world and been perfectly right in doing that, but he didn't. Instead, he sent his son to become the savior of that world. Well, we live in the world then, and we're constantly facing difficulty in that. And I think it's more difficult for us who have lived in a culture which, even though we're abandoning it, had a lot of Christian influence. If you're in an Islamic society as a Christian, you pretty much know that you're an outsider, whether the persecution is overt, state-sponsored, or just your neighbor's. Every time I read something about the suffering church in India, some Christian who's minding his own business in a little community has his store smashed by Hindus who don't want Christians in the neighborhood. Or maybe beaten up and left for dead, and sometimes even thrown in prison. So there are some cultures, and you could think of communist, Marxist, atheist cultures. Again, there's no question of where the line is drawn, really. But our society has been influenced by Christianity, and that has shaped our culture. And that makes it, in many ways, more difficult. Because the counterfeit and the real stand right next to one another. The areas where we can cooperate and there's where we must resist are very hard to distinguish. And if we don't see the bigger perspective and God's bigger story for his creation, we can lose our bearings. And I think it's helpful to think about two biblical images that help us see ourselves in this world. The first one is the exile. Now we just read Jeremiah, and we'll come back to that passage a little bit later. But there you can see an exile is someone who has been displaced through the actions of someone else. And they no longer are at home, so they don't have their home, they don't have their business, they don't have their circle of friends, they've been thrust out. You think about the many refugees that are around the world. They're running away from someplace which was their home, and now they are more or less temporary. We used to have Southeast Asians come to our church from time to time in San Diego, and some of them had been in camps in Southeast Asia for five years, for 10 years, for 15 years. And I'm told that in the Mediterranean world, it's even worse. You might be in a temporary camp for your whole lifetime. So it's not a position that we would like to be in. We don't mind going on vacation, but we want to be able to go back home whenever we want. And we want to take as much as what we have at home with us so that we'll feel like home even when we're away from home. Well, one of the ways in which the Bible describes our relationship in this world is as exiles, aliens, strangers. For example, in Hebrews 11, verse 13, speaking about the Old Testament saints, it says, these all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them afar off. and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on earth. Or when Peter writes his first letter, he addresses it to those who are elect exiles in the dispersion of Pontius, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia. And his first exhortation is, I urge you as sojourners, as exiles, to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul. So we can think of ourselves as outsiders. And we must think of ourselves as outsiders. And it's not so much that we have left the world, But the world and its rebellion against God has left us behind, and we've been called out of that world to serve the true and living God again. And so we sense that. And again, in some cultures, that's real clear. And in ours, oftentimes, much, much more gray, much more need for thoughtfulness and alertness and awareness. But there's another metaphor as well, and that is the one of air. What is an heir? You know what an heir is? It's what you breathe. Oh, no, no, not that heir. H-E-I-R. It's someone who is going to inherit property or money, usually when somebody dies. So a lot of the adults in this room have wills. And in that will, they designate what their children or grandchildren are going to receive from their estate. But they don't get that until the parent has died. And maybe some of you are still waiting for that rich uncle to die who's going to give you a million dollars that you didn't even know you could inherit. So there's that idea of an heir. a beneficiary, if you will. Some of us have insurance policies that name a beneficiary. And this is another metaphor that the Bible uses. Paul writes in Romans 8, the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God and, if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. In Galatians, Paul calls us Abraham's offspring. We'll say more about that in a moment. Heirs according to the promise. For the promise to Abraham and his offspring that he would be heir of the world did not come through the law, but through the righteousness of faith. For if it is the adherents of the law who are to be heirs, then faith is null and the promise is void. So back to the question of how do we relate to the world. Well, I'm going to argue that sometimes we act like aliens. Well, no, I should say it this way. At the same time, we've got to get used to saying we're aliens, we're strangers, we're outsiders, but we're also heirs. This world, because it belongs to Christ, belongs to us, but not yet. So we'll unpack that a little bit. But on the ground, that's a question of our loyalty then. When we see ourselves with respect to the world, we have to decide, where is my ultimate loyalty? Whose will will I primarily obey when there are conflicts between what the world requires of us and what our God and Savior require of us? We all have an earthly home. You have an earthly family. And in some cultures, family is everything. Any other loyalty, any other requirement, every other love has to be subjected to the love of family. In other cultures, it's the tribe. I belong to a certain tribe, and my ultimate loyalty and love and devotion and obedience is going to be dictated by that tribal interest rather than anything else. But we also serve a risen Savior that we keep calling Lord. You realize in a week as a Christian how many times you might say, Lord Jesus? Well, what does Lord mean? It means the one to whom you owe absolute loyalty, absolute love. And so, how do we measure our response to these different situations? And again, particularly in the Christian Western world or post-Christian Western world, how at home can we be in the world? How at peace can we be with this present world, which is an evil age, an evil world, and lies in the power of the evil one? Again, we read that verse last week. And yet still be loyal and faithful to King Jesus. Now we can always imagine the martyr story where we're called upon to renounce and spit upon the name of Jesus or else suffer persecution. And we know we wouldn't do that. At least we hope we wouldn't do that. But most of the time the conflict of loyalties and devotions is not nearly that clear cut. So how do we navigate? Do we withdraw from the world? Many Christians have done that throughout church history. We'll go to a monastery, we'll go to a convent, we'll get our own little community and drive horse and buggy, but we'll just keep ourselves as distant from the world as possible, and that'll be the safest exposure and safest solution. Others say, well, really, it's no big deal. If you're a Christian, you're bulletproof. And so just go ahead, engage, involve, and God will protect you. Well, that doesn't get us very far either. So I think it's a helpful perspective to keep in mind both that we are exiles and heirs. Many would say we can be one, or should be one, and not the other. Or the other, and not, if you're an heir, you're not an exile. If you're an exile, you're not an heir. tension of a paradox troubles us sometimes. Before I unpack those two visions a little bit more, let's think about just kind of what is the world itself think about this question. Christianity in the Middle Ages and on into the Renaissance was really considered to be a life and culture embracing, everything was religious. And Christ and his word spoke to every area of life. And so people would go to war with one another over religious questions. And some of you know enough about European history, the many wars between Catholics and Protestants, especially, but sometimes it was even smaller groups. And so some thinkers, by the time you get into the 15th or 16th century, they said, why don't we just agree that most of life is just neutral? And we all agree on how life should be lived in the secular world, and then all the different religions can have their little compartments that are kind of adjunct, and you can worship and believe whatever you want, just don't bring it into the common world, where we all have to get along. Sadly, secularism itself is a religion, and so rather than promoting a particular religious view, it tries to exclude religious views, and principally it excludes Christian thinking, at least consistent Christian thinking. So secularism is the prevailing assumption. The only thing that really matters is life in this world. Religious views are privatized. You can believe whatever you want as long as you keep it in your heart of hearts. The idea of separation in church and of state really comes to mean separation of government from any religious considerations. And morality and religious convictions are excluded in favor of political expedient. So in our day and age, you know, we believe that abortion, the question of whether an unborn child should live or die, is fundamentally a religious question. And our opponents say, no, it has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with politics. And so there's a conflict there. There must be a conflict there. And increasingly, religious convictions, biblical convictions, are excluded, even when paganism is tolerated, and even encouraged. So, the question is in what are the alternatives? And there's a couple of dualistic alternatives that have been proposed by Christians. The first one is kind of a fundamentalist isolation. That's what I said. You just back away from the world and you have as little to do with the unbelieving world as you can. So you have your own communities, you have your own businesses, and you stick pretty much to yourself. And again, the idea is that this world and life in this world is of little importance. When I was growing up as a young Christian, we would sing frequently a little ditty. This world is not my home. I'm just a passing through. My treasures are laid up way beyond the blue. The angels beckon me from heaven's open door, and I can't be at home in this world anymore. And so, it was recommended that you don't smoke, and you don't drink, and you don't dance, and you don't this, and you don't that, in order to keep yourself protected from the world. That started unraveling in the 50s and 60s, and it's long gone with the wind now. The idea is that we just mind our own business, but the world won't let you mind your own business. That's the nature of the struggle. Sometimes, well, in the new right from several years ago, the idea was that we need to take back political power, we need to get the votes, we need to get the candidates, and we'll protect ourselves and save ourselves with a political messiah. Again, that's not what God has called us to. We can't fight Goliath with Saul's armor. Remember when David was given Saul's armor and he put it on? It won't fit. I'm not going to use Saul, the unfaithful king, his armor to fight the enemy Goliath. But in the reformed world in the last decade or more, there has emerged a different kind of dualism. It sometimes goes by the name the two kingdoms view. This is much more sophisticated theologically, and it certainly has many elements of truth. some problems. It disparages any interest in transforming society, perhaps with the exception of families. Most of these brothers, they really want you to have a Christian family. But then it stops making sense when you talk about Christian society, or Christian economics, or Christian education, or Christian politics. And so they see transformationalism, as they call it, as wrong-headed. They emphasize the spirituality of the church and have trouble drawing a line between institutional engagement and a Christian's personal engagement. Discourse and decision-making in the common world, that's their name for the secular world, have to be based not on scripture, because the world doesn't believe in scripture, but rather on general revelation, things that supposedly the world might go along with. Now, that's a simplification. I hope it's not a distortion. But again, the idea in both of these views is that the real goal for the church is to be translated. Individually, we go to heaven when we die. And in the end, we will be partaking in a heavenly kingdom and not an earthly kingdom And that tends to play into the hands of the secularists, who have no problem at all with you believing whatever you want to believe, as long as you keep it to yourself. Maybe to your church and to your family. But don't say things like, all of life belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's anathema. Well, is there a better approach to this answer? Here we get this paradox. You know, paradox is when you believe two things that appear to be contradictory with one another, but when you see them in a bigger picture, you see that you can live with that tension. And so we are to be, at the same time, aliens in relationship to the world, and heirs in relationship to that same world, that same created order. And let me take them in the order of airs first, because I think if we can get this air idea, then we can see how the alien idea is a temporary condition and live well in that way, and I'll try to not draw this out too much. Here's a good way to see this. In Genesis, Paul says to his fellow Jews, remember Paul was a Jew, a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and he says to his fellow Jews, When we were under the law, that is, in the old covenant as God's chosen people, we were heirs, but we were treated like slaves. When I was thinking about that, I thought, my grandchildren are visiting today, so I could. Have you ever felt like a slave in the family? Do you tend to think of yourself more as slaves most of the time? I mean, everybody's telling you what to do, right? And there are problems if you don't, right? So we can feel like slaves, and yet you are children and heirs of your mom and dad. You have the highest imaginable status But while you are young, and this is what Paul says, so the Jews were heirs of God's promises, but they were treated just like slaves until Christ came. And that was their 21st birthday, when they got to become adults and inherit the promised blessings that are now available in Christ. So you can see how you might be an heir and feel like an alien or feel like a slave at the same time. But they don't cancel each other out. Because you feel like a slave doesn't mean you're not an heir. And because you are an heir doesn't mean that the slave feeling is an illusion. So they fit together. Now, when we go all the way back to Abraham, the father of the faithful, we see his situation. And it's really an example of what we're talking about here. If you don't know the Old Testament story, I'm going to have to kind of skip a little bit, but you remember Abraham was a pagan. He lived among pagans, and God came to him and said, I'm going to take you away from your home, and I'm going to take you to a land that I will give to you, but not yet. And Abraham, by faith, follows God in obedience to that promise. So Genesis 12, verse 1, the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. When they came to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time, the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, to your offspring, I will give you this land. In the next chapter, he says, look at the land. Look north, south, east, and west. I'm going to give all this land to you and to your offspring forever. And Abraham believed that promise. So he left, and he went. But he lived like an alien. in the land that God had promised him. And it was 400 years before God gave the land to the sons and daughters. So Abraham himself didn't possess the land, but he believed that his heirs would possess the land because God had promised. And you know, there's that interesting story. When Abraham's wife Sarah died, he bought a piece of land, a cave, where he could bury Sarah. It was his land, but he had to purchase a burial plot. 400 years later, God brings Israel out of Egypt with Moses and Joshua, and the people enter in and possess that land. And so Abraham, and more broadly, Israel itself, were both assured by God's promise that the blessing of possession would certainly be theirs, but it didn't look like it yet. It looked like they were aliens and strangers. But instead of letting being an alien or a stranger or a slave dominate their mentality, they were to rest and identify themselves on the hope and the assurance and the confidence that the land would one day be theirs. And we're told in the New Testament that we, not Jews, we who have come to trust in Jesus the Messiah, are children of Abraham along with the Jews who, by faith, entrust themselves to Jesus the Messiah. And so in Galatians 3.7, know then that it is those of faith in Christ who are the sons of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, in you shall all the nations be blessed. Those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith. And that promise included not only a seed, who would be Jesus, but a land that would be the whole creation, the whole world. Matter of fact, that word in both Hebrew and in Greek can have that double meaning of land or world. So the promise is that Abraham and his descendants will be inheritors of the whole created order one day. That's the way Paul characterizes the promise that God gave to Abraham. So God said, in effect, I'm going to give you a land, a piece of territory, Canaan or Palestine, But that land is a type, a symbol, a pointer to the possession of the whole cosmos, the whole created order. And that's why the psalmist says that the meek shall inherit the earth. The meek are those who don't trust in themselves but trust in the Lord God. And Jesus repeated that, blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth. So that's the promise that when we think about the created order, fallen as it is, it belongs to those who believe the promise to Abraham. So the promise of the world is ours in Christ because Christ himself is the one to whom the promises of Abraham are yes and amen. We are heirs because Jesus himself is the heir. Again, back to Romans 8. The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God, and fellow heirs. So we are heirs together with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him. Now one more thing about this heir thing, and that takes us to the text that I read at the top, Hebrews chapter 2. not to read it again, but just to highlight a few things there in Hebrews 2, verses 5 through 9. The author of Hebrews explains to us both the already aspect of the promise and the future, not yet, aspect of this promise. What is true now and what will be true in the end. He says, God promised the world, the creation, to human beings, and that comes right out of Genesis. God created Adam and Eve. He put them in the garden. The garden represents the whole creation. And he gave them a command, be fruitful and fill the earth and exercise dominion over it. But human beings instead rebelled against God. And so they forfeited that inheritance in favor of their own self-worship and their own rebellion. But that doesn't mean that the pledge disappeared. But now it has to be realized through the mediation of Christ himself. So the author says, then, it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come. Remember, he's thinking about a new heavens and a new earth that's coming yet in the future when all of the effects of sin have been taken away. He didn't subject it to angels, but rather to human beings. And Psalm 8 is quoted, what is man that you are mindful of him, you made him a little lower than the angels and crowned him with glory and honor." So that commentary explains the reality that we do not yet see. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to God's human creatures. But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned, with glory and honor because of the suffering of death. What we see in Christ in his humiliation, his entry into the world, is that he was made low, he was humbled for a while, but now, with his death, his resurrection, and his ascension, he's been crowned with glory and honor And He is the King of kings and Lord of lords. All authority in heaven and on earth have been given to Him. So He's entered into His inheritance. So in Christ now, we see what our future entails. He reigns. We will reign with Him. Now, the New Testament has a lot more to say about how that is going to come to pass, but that's sufficient for our own purposes here. In Jesus, we see our future. Jesus is the Lord of all creation. And one day, together with him, we will rule in glory over a new heavens and a new earth. Revelation 5.10 calls us a kingdom of priests that will rule on the earth. That's your inheritance as a child of God, the promise to Abraham fulfilled in Christ finally fulfilled in you and I when the Lord returns. And so we are heirs. This world is our possession. We can't back away from it. We can't distance ourself from it. We can't be neutral about it because it's our property, if you want to put it that way. It's easy to distance yourself from things that you don't care about. I do it all the time. But things that are important to you, you hold on to. and you do your best by them as you can. Jesus' glorification is the beginning of this new creation. And in Christ, you who believe in him are new creatures. And it's the basis of that hope that we live. Again, Paul says, the creation waits in eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. The creation is subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be set free from the bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. And that gives us hope. It gives us confidence and assurance as we face this world. You know, sometimes when the bad guys have all the weapons, it's really encouraging to know that you're right and they're wrong. They may beat you up, but you know that you are right and they are wrong. They are the usurpers. They are the rebels. And so we live in that hope. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Spirit, you may abound in hope. You know, we say a lot about faith as Christians. We say a lot about love as Christians, and we should. I think we need more hope. and a hope pinned not to what we can see as a potential bright spot on the current horizon, but hope that looks back to Abraham and now back to Jesus in his death and resurrection and forward to his return and the way in which he assures us then that that creation, when it's finally fixed, will be ours because it belongs to our dear Savior. All right, let me quickly say a little bit more about this alien side. This is easier because I think we, as Christians, to a greater or lesser degree, we experience this all the time. I mean, you're in polite company and somebody's taking the Lord's name in vain and you just, it grates on you. When every punctuation mark is Christ this or God that, we feel it. Some of your neighbors are willing to get along, they're willing to live with you in relative peace, as long as you leave them alone on the religious question. But again, sometimes the pressure is there. You're called upon to do things in your business life that you know is not pleasing to the Lord whom you serve, and you have to say no, and you may lose your job. There are all kinds of ways in which we experience this not belonging, this not fitting in. And of course, it shouldn't be a surprise to us. Jesus said, if the world hates you, know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, if you really belong, if the secularist was really correct in saying, it's all neutral, it all fits together, there's no problem, then the world would love you as its own. But because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you." So, you know, spending a lot of time feeling sorry for yourself because the world doesn't love you enough is really kind of wasted. Jesus said, I'm telling you this now so that when these things happen, you'll say, oh yeah, he told us about that. We should expect it. So we need to stand in opposition to the world. There is that hostility, that antithesis that's been there from the very beginning after Adam and Eve fell into sin. But the advice that was given by Jeremiah in that other passage, passage Jeremiah 29, to those who had been exiled to Babylon, helps us in thinking about how do we, at least from our part, how do we live in the world never forgetting the antithesis between faith and unbelief and faith between serving God and rebelling against God, obeying him, and so forth, we can still live in the hope that God has given us through his promise to us as heirs. And knowing that, then we can follow the instruction of Jeremiah. And we had it there. He says build houses live in them These false prophets were saying the world will be over by Christmas the exile will be over by Christmas will be home in no time and Jeremiah says no. No, they're lying to you You're going to be there for 70 years because that's what God had said about the exile. So build houses live in them plant gardens Eat of their produce. Do you kind of hear an echo of be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth? The instructions for human beings has not changed. Take wives and have sons and daughters. Take wives for your sons and daughters so that they may bear sons and daughters. So we're talking about an intergenerational thing. Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray for the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare, you will find your welfare. And we could reverse that. In your welfare, in God's blessing upon your faithfulness, that city will find its welfare as well. As we live in this world, we need to insist that we must not compromise with its evil. And again, sometimes that makes, that involves very sophisticated and subtle judgments about our behavior. But we have to live, and our neighbors have to live. And we, serving the king as heirs, should be able to be helpful to them in legitimate endeavors, whether they're building their homes, whether they're planting their fields or running their businesses. And so we should do those things that promote human welfare. Not because we're saying the world is fine just the way it is. Far from it. We see the day coming, but we are partners on that earthly level with those that we live among. And particularly as we pray for the welfare of our cities and of our societies. And as for the transformations, God will take care of them himself. I'd say we are incidental transformationalists. Our goal is not primarily to transform society as such. Our goal is to be faithful to our king. And God says if we are faithful to him, he will be faithful to us. And he will bless the effects. And that's what we've seen in Western culture. As Christianity, the early preachers in Europe who went out with the gospel, they were They were seeking to persuade men to change lives, to get people to submit to the lordship of the risen Jesus. But in its wake, institutions were changed. the institution of marriage first and foremost. Husband and wives began to see each other differently and behave towards one another differently. They began to see their children and treat their children differently. They structured their civil society in ways that much more reflected the values of the kingdom of God, and changes came. And it's easy for us to kind of take them for granted, because they're now so pervasive. But it's like we took all these blessings from God and then we said, but we don't need God. We'll just keep the blessings. And now the blessings are going away. Surprise, surprise. God wants us to be faithful. And God says himself that he is in the business of making all things new. Thus, in this age, we need to persevere and improve as we can. while we are waiting for the return of the king. What the result will look like in the near term or in the intermediate term or in the far term, you know, most people, I think, assume Christians that we're living more or less at the end of the story, but we could still be at the beginning of the story. What if human history lasts 10,000 more years? It could. So what we see right now shouldn't really Disturb us too much. We know that the future is in the hands of our God And so we need to be faithful in small things and the Lord will bless Remember the picture that Jesus used of the advance of his kingdom. It's like leaven in a lump of dough And once you put it in there, it's going to permeate the whole loaf of Christ's people in this fallen world, being faithful to the gospel call, are going to see changes that will come in people's lives. And as people's lives change, the things that they do, the way they relate to one another, will change as well. And that should be our hope. We went down to the Iolani Palace again yesterday. It was a visit. We'd been there before. And just having a quick sketch of Hawaiian history again, I was impressed. When the missionaries from New England came in 1820, they had a very specific mandate, a very specific focus, and that was to make Christ known among the pagans of the islands. And they began to do that by preaching and teaching. They knew if people were going to grow in Christ, they needed to have a language that they could read. So they reduced the Hawaiian language to an alphabet, and they translated the scriptures into that language. And soon, Hawaii had the most literate population of any place in the world for a period of time. and institutions develop, and there was strength, but then not very long, it begins to be eclipsed by interests from the mainland, certainly, monetary interests, but also because in a couple of hundred years, Hawaii was able to go through what it took a thousand years in European history to be blessed by God, to decide we can have the blessings without the God, and then to see those blessings decline. And now, at least if you believe the posts in the museums and so forth, the official history is that things were much, much better before the missionaries came. When you could be strangled for looking at the chief. When your body and soul belonged to him absolutely. Boy. when your children could be killed just because you didn't like the kind of child you had. If we are so perverse that we think those are the good old days in Hawaii or anyplace else, then we are deeply foolish. And when I say we, I mean them. We belong to Christ. We believe his word. We embrace the promise to Abraham because it was given to us, non-Jews, in Jesus Christ. And we know that God is in sovereign control of the future, and when it's a hundred years out, or a thousand years out, or millennia out, that's God's business. A thousand years, one day, one year, a thousand, or one day, a thousand years. But we know that we can live well with this tension. Yes, we're aliens. We're strangers. We can never forget that. We are outsiders. But we also are heirs, and that's what we're moving forward to. Kids anticipate growing up and becoming adults. We anticipate that future. So as we start a new year, there is every reason for us to be confident, to be hopeful, and to be bold. Hopeful people, confident people are bold people. I'm afraid too much of us just said, you know, the world is going to be what the world is going to be and I'm just going to try and not get in too much trouble and live it one day at a time. Well, back up. Get the big picture in view again. See your little story and the story of your family and the story of your church community in terms of this big, big picture and live in light of that and God will bring changes. in your lives individually and in your service to the world around you. Lord, we thank you for the promise that if we are steadfast and unmovable, abounding in the work of the Lord, we can know for certain that in the Lord our labor is not in vain. Please establish the work of our hands as we do it deliberately, by faith, in what you have done and what you will do through us, who are both aliens and heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, in whose name we pray. Amen.