Well, let me pray and we'll continue. Father, as we gather on this Easter morning, we are reminded again of this astonishing travail that has yielded the greatest triumph of all time. The humiliation, the crushing, the self-giving of the Messiah that has enabled you to triumph over the powers and the principalities, that in his suffering and death, in his travail, all victory has been achieved. Truly it was in that spectacle that he became the King of the Jews. And not just the King of the Jews, but as Israel's Messiah, the Lord of all the earth. And Father, we look to the suffering of the Messiah and we marvel at that willingness to give himself for us. But we don't often recognize that being sharers in his life means being taken up in his suffering as well. That we are called to the same life. We are called to the same self-giving. We are called to be heralds. ambassadors, testifiers in word and in deed of this great triumph, the way in which the Almighty God has demonstrated his power through unbelievable weakness, unbelievable humiliation. We see in Christ the truth that power is perfected in weakness. And so, Father, as we gather As resurrection people, I pray that you will reach us in the very marrow of our being with what it means for us to be a resurrection people, what it means for us to be faithful with this good news of Christ's triumph, of your triumph in the Messiah. So gather our minds, gather our hearts. We pray that you will instruct us and encourage us that even in these few minutes together that we will be changed and that we will come from this place with a renewed sense of commitment, with a refreshment in our own hearts and minds, with a joy inexpressible and full of glory. So meet us by your spirit, Father, the spirit who inhabits us, the spirit who binds us together and makes us one. the Spirit who communicates to us and perfects in us the life of the Lord Jesus. We pray, O Spirit, that you will work in our midst to bind us together, but as resurrection people, as the fullness of him who fills all in all. And as Nathan prayed, we pray this for your people throughout the world who are gathered on this resurrection morning. And Father, may it not just be once a year that our hearts and minds are set on the resurrection of the Christ, but that we would be a people who live out that reality as sharers in it. So bless us in our time of consideration, we pray in Jesus' name, amen. Well, it seems like every year when we come to Easter, my mind always turns back to the The so what question, you know, Christians all are aware of resurrection. We all recognize and celebrate resurrection, right? We often greet each other with that greeting. He is risen. He is risen indeed. And we very much define our faith around this idea of resurrection. But I wonder how often we think about what that really means or why it matters. And I think, you know, as we even look at what's happening in the church, the church is very much in a time, certainly in our culture. of confusion, of disarray, not knowing what it is, who it is, how it ought to be. We see more and more of the spirit of the times working itself into the Christian community. I use the expression zeitgeist, if you're aware of that. It's a German term, but it means the spirit of the times. And there are things that characterize our culture, things that we're preoccupied with, things that are important to us. And the church has more and more imbibed and embraced those things, not always wrongfully, but in the sense of trying to be relevant, in the sense of trying to meet the people of our culture with this thing of the gospel of Christ. But in my estimation, as we again come to Easter, I think that not really getting at this issue of resurrection, even as we've been considering this issue of incarnation and I've been pointing to the fact that resurrection is what really brings incarnation to its climax. If we don't really get at what this thing of resurrection is all about, I think that that is a big part of this confusion that is in the church. We don't really know what it is to live the Christian life. We don't really know what our mission is. We don't really know what it looks like to be faithful. because we don't really understand the significance of the resurrection. As I say here, Jesus' resurrection completed his incarnation, not just with respect to his personal existence, but for the sake of the creation. Incarnation, as I've said the last several weeks, ultimately has its end point, its consummation in the creations participation in its own way in this thing of incarnation. Incarnation is the way in which God has made himself one with his creation. And if it's true that God's goal is to be all in all, to sum up everything in the Messiah, in whom all the fullness of deity dwells bodily, then we see that ultimately that's true with resurrection as well. Its significance, if resurrection completes Jesus' incarnation, the bringing together of God and man fully realized in this thing called the resurrection of the Messiah, then ultimately resurrection is a creational reality as well. When we talk about new creation, we're talking about God's intent for this principle of newness of life, this principle of creatures becoming what God intended them to be, being related to God rightly, we see that as ultimately extending beyond human beings but to the whole creation. So typically, and this is again my opinion, my estimation, my experience, when Christians relate together incarnation and resurrection, it tends to be in terms of incarnation speaks to the sinlessness of the Messiah such that now he could make a substitutionary sacrifice for sinners. He could be a suitable sacrifice and resurrection attests to the fact that yes, indeed, he was a suitable sacrifice. So resurrection answers to incarnation in that sense. Incarnation says this is the sinless human being. Resurrection said that sinless human being really did make satisfaction for sin. But the reason for incarnation is we've seen an incarnation fully realized in Jesus' resurrection is relational, not legal, not ethical, not dealing with moral or ethical issues in the ultimate sense. So incarnation actually fulfilled in substance, in essence, in the person of Jesus, God's relational design for mankind. We've seen that, right? Incarnation wasn't just about having somebody who can die, suitable to die on a cross to pay for the sins of people in the way we've been taught to think about it, but ultimately this is the way in which and the beginning of this process of God taking up human existence into himself. ultimately with a goal to the whole creation being summed up in him. So resurrection perfected incarnation, but that perfection was to have a fullness in the human race. That's why Paul says the church is the fullness of him who fills all in all. Christ has his fullness in the church. If he is the man of the spirit, if he is the man conceived of the spirit, animated, led, informed, empowered by the spirit, The church is His fullness in that it is the dwelling of God in the Spirit. The church is where Christ manifests His life in the world, but ultimately that dynamic extends beyond the human race to the whole creation. Incarnation and therefore resurrection, which brings that incarnation to a head with respect to Jesus, its climactic realization, incarnation and resurrection have their ultimate goal in God being all in all. through the creation being summed up in Jesus. And these are obviously things I talk about all the time. Well, why am I getting at that today? Because this is the essence of the kingdom of God that the scriptures promise. And if we're going to talk about what does the resurrection mean to us as believers, well, Christians recognize ultimately that somehow our ministration, our calling, our obligation pertains to this thing of being servants of and promoting the kingdom of God. Somehow this thing of the kingdom is at the center of what we think our responsibility is. I've heard others affirm this as well, and I think we can all see the truth of this, that typically Christians are focused in one of two areas. I'm not saying this is all that we care about, but in terms of our mission, okay, what does it look like to be faithful as believers? We tend to focus either on this thing of soul winning or social action. And this just isn't an American phenomenon, but we see that demarcation very clearly in our culture, right? Christians who are all about evangelism, in other words, getting people saved, or Christians who are more concerned with issues of life in this world and making life better for human beings and what does it look like to improve the human lot and work for social justice and work for philanthropy, these things that are virtuous to us as human beings. Well, those focuses both point to different conceptions of this idea of kingdom. The soul-winning side of it is oriented towards the idea of a heavenly kingdom. The goal is to save people from this world, right? Save people from this world to go to heaven when they die. And often that's accompanied by the idea that this world is destined to be destroyed anyway, right? We don't really care about this world because it's all going to burn up anyway. It's to be destroyed. The goal is to rescue people out of the world. to rescue them so that they can have a heavenly inheritance, a heavenly kingdom. The other side of it is more oriented towards this world and views the kingdom in terms of this life, this world, what God is doing in the present state of things. But I would argue both of those on either side of the equation show a crucial misunderstanding of this thing we call the Christ event. The incarnation, Jesus' life, his ministration, the things he was promoting, the things he accomplished by his death, and ultimately what has been implemented now by his resurrection and enthronement. So God's intent for an all-encompassing, everlasting kingdom, notice I don't say heavenly or unearthly, God's intent for an all-encompassing everlasting kingdom is the lens through which we must interpret the phenomenon of Christ crucified. If we say the gospel is about preaching Christ and him crucified, how we understand this idea of the kingdom is important to that message and how we even understand what it is that we're getting at. If we're preaching Christ crucified, well, that was that he would inaugurate this thing called the kingdom of God. What does that mean? So the kingdom is the lens through which we interpret Christ crucified even as Jesus' substitutionary death is the necessary means by which God has secured this kingdom. In other words, cross and kingdom go together. So the Christian responsibility as it pertains to personal salvation or evangelism and on the other side social action cannot be divorced or undertaken independently. Why? Because man's purpose in God's designs has to do with man's role in the creation, right? The goal isn't just getting souls saved to go off to heaven. The goal is a family of imaged children through whom God will exercise his own presence and lordship in the world. So man's purpose in God's design means that the renewal of human structures and the human social order, as well as the material creation itself, all of those things are essential aspects of the salvation of human beings. So as I say here, there is no human salvation apart from creational and societal renewal. If we say we're about getting people saved, but we don't care about this life or this world or its issues, then we really don't understand what salvation is all about, right? Because ultimately, it's about the renewing of all things. It's not just about human beings getting forgiven so they can go off and be with God someplace. It ought to be obvious to us just from the fact that the gospel, the good news, proclaims Jesus universal Lordship. He is Lord over all creation. When the apostles and the early Christians went out into the world, as I've said so many times, they didn't get arrested and persecuted and beaten and killed because they were telling people how they could go off to a marvelous afterlife existence. people in the ancient world believed that when you died your soul went off into some place that they called heaven or a marvelous existence. Nobody would have been perturbed by that. What got them in trouble was they were proclaiming the Lordship of Christ over all of life, and specifically in the Roman world There was no such thing as a Lord other than Caesar, right? And you see this in the book of Acts. The way in which even Jewish opponents got the Roman authorities to rise up against the early Christians is to say, these guys are preaching sedition. They are saying there's another king other than Caesar. And the one thing Caesar wouldn't abide, he accepted whatever gods were out there as long as you accepted him as a god also progressively in the first century. the Caesar cult, which was growing, but he didn't care how many gods or whatever you wanted, your own religion, your own views, whatever. He didn't care about any of that, but any kind of authority challenges to him were something that the Roman Caesar would not tolerate. So the gospel proclaims Jesus as Lord over all creation and everything in it. And that means the present world as well, but obviously with a view to the consummating of that lordship in a renewed earth. So we are called to manifest and serve Christ's Lordship, not just by personal evangelism, but by speaking truth to power. And that doesn't just mean our words, and power doesn't just mean political powers. It means that we are striving to see the reality and principles of new creation reflected into and worked out in the world. Most importantly, by living out those principles in their public and private lives. How do we speak truth to power? By living according to a new principle of power, a new principle of authority, a new kind of lordship, as citizens of a different sort of kingdom. And so it doesn't mean just making phone calls to Congress or writing letters to our congressmen or whatever it happens to be. Not that that's illegitimate in some absolute sense, but we speak truth to power by living out a different sort of human existence in the world. In Jesus' words, as we're gonna see in the coming weeks in the Sermon on the Mount, the kingdom of God calls the sons of the kingdom to be salt and light. Not light shining from a distance, but light that is in the darkness, right? Light that shines from within the darkness. Just as salt works, it has its savoring effect, its preservative effect by intimate contact with that that it's put into. Salt on the table doesn't do any good, right? The salt is worked into the meat and it preserves it in that way. So the salt and light idea show us that we are to be actively and intimately engaged in the world. but in a way that conforms to and advances the truth of the new world that Jesus has inaugurated in himself. We are to be resurrection people. So we know, hopefully we know, this is something we stress all the time, we don't just proclaim the truth, we embody the truth. We embody the gospel we proclaim. What is the gospel? The good news that in Christ God has put to death the former order of things, right? In the Jewish view of things, you had the age that was and the age that is to come. The age that is, that the Messianic figure comes and addresses to inaugurate the age to come, the Cholam Haba, the coming world. A present age, a coming age, and in Jesus we see that God has judged, condemned, put to death the former order of things, right? The world that was, the way of being human, its orders, its structures, its thinking, its power arrangements. Christ has put all of that to death. And by his resurrection, he's inaugurated a new order of things. And we as sharers in his life, the good news is that God has done that. We are the ones in ourselves just by who we are who bear witness of the truth of that, the reality of that. And it doesn't mean we never say anything, but the point is that we embody that which we proclaim, just as Jesus embodied what he proclaimed. So our mission is to display and to demonstrate new creation and its meaning and its implication by the lives that we live in the world. So here are just some summary thoughts, and then I've got kind of a final statement that I wanted to read. Because we say, OK, well, practically, what does this look like? Should I be involved in politics? Shouldn't I? Should I care about what goes on in the public schools, or shouldn't I? Should I be involved in philanthropy? Should I be volunteering my time at a homeless shelter? What should I do? What should I do? What should I do? What does this really look like? And I don't think those specifics can be answered as much as here are the principles of thinking that define for us, because it's going to be different for each one of us, right? But when we take these things that I'm going to talk about here and put them in the light of the early church, go back and read and consider again the book of Acts and how these Christians turned the world upside down in one generation. What did they do? How did they engage this thing of the practical Christian life to turn the Roman world upside down? But some things that I would say about that is that living in this way, living a gospel life, demonstrates that there isn't a secular and a sacred. And that's very much a part of American culture. Go to church on Sunday, do the religious thing, and then you go to your job and you do your other stuff, and you kind of carry out your life, right? There's the secular, and there's the sacred. There's my everyday life, there's my life in this world, and then there's my religious life. And I do my 15-minute devotional in the morning, and then I get on with my life. Or I read my three chapters, and then I get on with my life. That kind of dividing lies against the truth. We've even seen that this central principle of Sabbath finds its reality in Jesus. We live a Sabbath existence. If you look at 1 Timothy 4, this is a passage I love to come back to because Paul is saying something that really we tend to miss when we come to this passage. We often treat this as an end times passage. Paul says in 1 Timothy 4, the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons. We say, okay, this is what it's going to be like before the Antichrist or at that time. This is how things are going to get so bad going into the tribulation or whatever. This is end times prophecy. But that's not what Paul is saying. He's saying that this deceitful spirit ministration, these doctrines of demons, this comes by means of the hypocrisy of liars seared in their own consciences with a branding iron. A way of thinking and a way of instructing in the church. What is this instruction? What is this doctrine of demons, this deceit? Men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude. It is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer. In pointing out these things to the brethren, you, Timothy, will be a good servant of Messiah Jesus, nourished on the words of the faith and the sound doctrine which you have been following. See, Paul is saying that the satanic seduction is to say, this is clean, this is unclean. Touch this, don't touch this. Taste this, don't taste that. Why is that a satanic deception? Because the issue is always up here. Everything God created in itself is good. His creation is good. His verdict of it was very good, right? God's own word is that it is good, and when it is received and embraced as an act of worship and prayer, it is sanctified. And so the natural mind influenced by the spirit of the age, the spirit of this world, is that holiness is about not doing this and doing this. That cleanness, uncleanness, in here in things outside of me rather than in my own mind. It's again the secular and the sacred, the dividing of things up. This is good, this is bad. Don't eat meat, do eat meat, right? Don't touch this, do touch that. It's the separating of things into categories. That's why I wanted to read that. But there isn't that. All there is is this reality of a renewal in the Messiah and God sanctifying all things to himself. but as they are received with understanding and with a heart of worship. So also the notion of saving souls for heaven in view of the creation's annihilation is itself unbiblical. So any evangelism, any ministry of the gospel that we do that seeks to save souls for heaven falsifies the gospel it purports to proclaim. If our gospel is just about trying to save souls for heaven, it's not the gospel. We're falsifying the gospel in the name of preaching the gospel. But on the other hand, ministry that focuses on earthly and societal ends for their own sake is also not Christian ministry. And we see a lot of that in Christian missions, in parachurch ministrations. I know of one entity that's been involved in African missions for probably three generations now, and hearing one of the men who've been a part of that lamenting the fact that after all these decades of working so hard, seeing very little fruit, and the Mormons are moving in and the Jehovah's Witnesses are moving in and local African spiritualistic, you know, folk religion tendencies are moving in. But so much of their ministration has been about building infrastructure and digging wells and building homes and and trying to secure a better life for the people. And it's not that that in itself is wrong or bad, but it's been done to largely the neglect of this thing of really communicating the truth and the life of Christ. It's about making lives better in this world. And it hasn't borne very good fruit. So on the one hand, we're not to retreat from the social order that we inhabit, whatever our social order. You look at the early church, and nowhere did Paul or anyone else say, oh, you need to go hide in the mountains, or you need to renounce the culture that you're a part of. And the Roman Empire was vast, and there were all kinds of cultures and communities and languages and religious practices throughout the Roman Empire. It was a vast and very diverse community of people. And Paul doesn't tell any of them, you need to leave your community. You need to forsake the social order that you're a part of. But there's also no indication of any attempt or any instruction to attempt to overthrow the social order. Whatever authorities exist, Paul says, they exist by the will of God. That's why he can say in Romans, pay your taxes. Whatever authority exists, it exists by the will of God. God is not a God of chaos and anarchy, but a God of order. And this idea of overthrowing the existing order was the heir of Second Temple Jewish messianism. All of these promises of God arising and fighting the great battle against the adversary and releasing the captives and restoring the covenant and gathering his people back and putting the son of David on the throne, through the centuries of Israel's oppression and Gentile domination, they developed a very nationalistic theology and a nationalistic view of that. which was essentially Messiah's gonna ride in on a white horse with the sword and he's gonna defeat whatever Gentile powers in control at the time, whether the Greeks or the Seleucids and then the Romans. And the Zealot movement, remember one of Jesus' 12, Simon the Zealot was a part of that Zealot movement. And the Zealots were like revolutionaries who were seeking to incite a revolution against Rome through guerrilla warfare, guerrilla tactics, in a sense, kind of like certain strains of Islam, that if we can stoke the fire of a conflict with Islam, then the Mahdi will return, the messianic figure in Islam. They believed that if they could get this revolution going, then the Messiah would appear. But the whole goal was to overthrow Rome and establish a Jewish kingdom. Jesus warned about that, and you see even warnings related to that in the Sermon on the Mount. the turning the other cheek, the going with your enemy, the loving your enemies as yourselves, you know, all of that had a very much a Roman focus in that time to the Jewish people. They weren't so much thinking it of in terms of, okay, you know, letting my wife be mean to me or my neighbor or whatever. It wasn't that. It was, he was trying to speak against this revolutionary spirit that was filling Israel at that time. that wasn't going to go well for them. And he warned them, you go that path and the Roman army is going to come and they're going to destroy everything. And they did do that, right? So Christians aren't to be disengaged passive doormats, but they confront the world and its powers by living lives that manifest the truth and power of God's triumph in the Messiah, the King, Jesus himself and the new creational kingdom that he rules. And again, when I say powers, I'm not just talking about political powers, but cultural powers, intellectual powers. Think again, what Paul said in second Corinthians 10, he says, the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly, but divinely powerful. They're of the spirit, right? For the tearing down of strongholds, where are the strongholds up here? We speak against these things. We tear down these strongholds. Every lofty thought, seemingly lofty thought raised up against the knowledge of God, we take every thought captive to Christ. So the powers are more than just political kings, rulers, governors, whatever. It's really all of these ways in which the fundamental satanic world system operates that Jesus confronted and condemned. Now is the ruler of this world cast out, right? That's what was said and that's what was accomplished. Well, that's how we speak truth to power, by living according to a different principle, the kingship of Jesus himself. So confronting and challenging the powers and their systems involves walking in the Spirit, living out Jesus' own life. Remember Paul in Romans 8 where he says, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, Christ in you. The Spirit of the living God is the Spirit who has become functionally now the Spirit of Christ, the one who joins us to God. And the Spirit of Christ is how Paul can say, Christ in you, the hope of glory. The Spirit is the one who communicates to us and perfects in us Christ's own life and likeness. So that walking in the Spirit means manifesting that life, not taking up the tools and weapons of earthly conflict. That's why I wanted to read John 16. And if we go back and look at that for just a second, Jesus here says, and we tend to, again, think that this is about what the Spirit is going to do apart from us, but what has Jesus already said? When the helper comes who I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, he will bear witness of me and you will bear witness of me because you've been with me from the beginning. So when the Spirit comes, he's going to convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. How will he do that? through the people of the Spirit. See, Jesus is saying that this ministration of the Spirit in convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment is going to come through you. And it's that witness that is going to cause you to become sharers in my suffering. As the world responded to me, so it will respond to you. It does not know the truth. It does not want the truth. The powers will push back against you. But this is how the Spirit will do it. Convict the world of sin in what sense? They do not believe in me. Convict the world of righteousness, in that I'm going to the Father, and of judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged. This is what it is for us to speak to the powers. So I've put this, and I don't usually do this, but I thought it was a succinct statement. This is actually this third page here. This is an excerpt from a sermon on Pentecost that Tom Wright delivered in 2010. But I thought it gets at this idea really well in a principled sense. Okay, what is it to live out Jesus' resurrection? We say Christ is risen. He's risen indeed. Isn't that wonderful? Okay, let's get on with our lives. No, the resurrection of Jesus changed everything. And it should change the way we think. It should change what it means for us to inhabit this world according to a new kingdom and a new Lord and testify of that in the world. So here's what he says. And again, this was a sermon that he delivered on Pentecost when the Spirit was poured out. The best way to understand Jesus' instruction about the coming of the Spirit, I suggest, is to recognize that he was telling his followers that they will find themselves in the same position as he has been in. As the Father sent me, he says on the evening of Easter Day, so I send you. in the same way with the same mission unto the same goal. The Father's sending of me has its ultimate fruition in my sending of you. In you is how the Father's sending of me will work itself out in the Father's purpose in the world. And when we consider what that means, we realize that he has stood himself, Jesus, at the place where the worlds collide. And never more so than when he faces Pontius Pilate and tells him about God's kingdom about truth and about the nature of power. And the point of John 16 is that this is what we are to do as well. How tempting it would be to imagine that when the Spirit convicts the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, that we will be merely flies on the wall, spectators in this great cosmic struggle. But of course, that is wrong. The Spirit is given to us so that God's work may be done through us. God intends that the Spirit will declare that the world is in the wrong, but it is we who, tremblingly but in the power of the Spirit, will make that declaration. So we are to be the people through whom it is made known that the world's failure to believe in Jesus is the great, dark symptom of its failure to grasp the vocation to be genuinely human. In other words, of the world's sin. This is what sin is all about. We've talked about that so much. It's about deviating from the truth. It has nothing in the first instance to do with morality or commandments or anything. And so when a human being deviates from the truth of his humanness to any extent, in any way, in any form, as God created him to be, that is sin. The Spirit convicts the world of sin in that sense, because in Jesus we see what a true human being is, and that's what God calls everyone to be. So when people refuse the Messiah, they won't believe in him, they are refusing the truth of their own human existence, what God created them to be. That is them being convicted of sin. If I hadn't come, Jesus said, the world would not be guilty of sin, right? It's the sin of not knowing and refusing to live a truly genuine human life. That's how us living in the Spirit testifies of a new kind of human existence that convicts the world of sin. It's the Spirit working in us in that way. Secondly, we are to be the people through whom it is made known that now at last we see how the world is meant to be. Not just how we are to be, but how the world is to be. that heaven and earth are not distinct spheres in which God can stay safely in his place while we run our world in our way, but that the proper ordering of the world, its righteousness, a thing conforming to the truth, the rightness of a thing conforming to what it is. The proper ordering of the world, its righteousness in technical language, is now set out for us in the ascension of Jesus, that great bringing together of the two worlds of earth and heaven. Convict the world of righteousness because I go to the Father. God has brought heaven and earth together in the Messiah. And we are the living evidence of that. We embody that truth. We are the dwelling of God in the Spirit. So the great imagery of Revelation 21, right? Heaven, the new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to the earth. Now the dwelling of God is with men. And think of Jesus even in the Lord's prayer. Thy will be done on earth as in heaven. Not, O Lord, preserve us till we go off to heaven. It's the merging of God's space and our space, the forming of a creation that is the dwelling of God, right? The ultimacy of incarnation, the ultimacy of resurrection. And then finally, we are to be the people through whom it is declared that God has fixed a day on which he will judge the world justly, and that the judgment of the ruler of this world, which was meted out on the cross itself, is the measure of that final judgment. If we're living according to a new principle, a new way of being human, a new kingship, a new kingdom, we are testifying that the ruler of the world, that the world serves whether it knows it or not, has been judged, right? There is a new sheriff in town. And again, it's not necessarily by letter writing. It's certainly not by blowing up post offices or whatever it is people think. It is by living according to a new principle of human existence. We are to be the people, in other words, who learn not so much to be chameleons passing with some embarrassment from one world to another. In other words, OK, now I'm a Christian on Sunday. Oh, now I've got to get along with the people on the workplace. You know, we're just chameleons going back and forth, fitting in wherever we are because we're too embarrassed or too ashamed to actually be what we are. We don't pass with embarrassment from one world to another as we live out our lives, but we're those who learn the new combined color of a heaven and earth combined reality. a new heaven and earth reality in the Messiah in which we can speak to God about the world and we can speak to the world about God in the same tone of voice and with the same full integrity. So that we can in our lives and in our words speak in prayer to the Father for the mess that we still see around us in the world and speak in witness to the world about the sovereign rule of God through Jesus. And when we even imagine what that might be like, we find ourselves back in the book of Acts declaring that we must obey God rather than human authorities, that we must speak of another king, namely Jesus, that we must declare that God is king and Jesus is Lord openly and unhindered. And so what we see then again is that This way of being in the world, the chameleonic thing, is because we don't want to be embarrassed. We don't want to be jeopardized or impacted in any negative way, right? We want to avoid the suffering that came to Jesus by living according to a new pattern of humanness in a world that doesn't know it and doesn't like it. A new pattern that condemns it in its falseness. That's the suffering that comes. So as I say in my notes in concluding, living according to Jesus' spirit will ensure that we share in his suffering. This doesn't mean, again, looking for trouble or whatever, going and trying to make idiots out of ourselves so that people don't like us, or nailing ourselves to crosses on Easter like they do in some Catholic cultures. It's not that. It's simply that we, in sharing in the life of the Messiah, if we do that faithfully, we will endure the same reaction and response that he endured. And that suffering is neither unfortunate nor merely the means of personal growth. Do we learn sonship through the things we suffer? Yes. But God isn't simply making us suffer because it's for our good. like a parent that spanks his child and says, this is for your good, this is for your good, just remember that. And it's not just an unfortunate thing, oh, how can we suffer? God deliver us from our suffering. This is living out Jesus' life in the world. And ultimately, it is that suffering that advances Jesus' kingdom. How did the early Christians turn the world upside down? By living a life that brought the ire of the world upon them. The whole idea of the martyrs, martyr really is a witness. We tend to think of it as dying for the faith. Well, that was just an implication of it, but the issue is witness, it's testimony. So it's the suffering of Jesus that continues in and through us, the suffering that began in him and really had its substance in him, but that continues through us. That's what advances Jesus' kingdom. How so? Because it's in that way that there's the manifestation of his life and this contradictory power in the world. a different sort of power that operates according to a whole different set of principles. Remember, again, Jesus and Pilate. Are you a king? Yes, but my kingdom is different than you think. My kingdom doesn't originate in this world. It's of a different sort. It's for this world. It will gather up this world, but it's not power as you know it, this contradictory power that defines the new kingdom and its new kingdom, and a new king. That was the way a small, powerless, and perplexing community turned the world upside down in a generation. That's an astonishing thing, really. A small, powerless community of nobodies that perplexed the world, turned the Roman world upside down. No cell phones, no cars, no mass communication, walking, letters, boats, horseback, and they turn the world upside down, the Roman world in one generation. How? By living out the life of Jesus on display in the world. That's what we're called to do, and that's what our witness is ultimately about, and that's what it is to be faithful with this resurrection truth that we proclaim. Well, let me close in prayer, and then we'll have our meditation before the Lord's table. Father, I pray that you would help us each to process these things. I pray that you will work them deeply into our hearts and minds by your spirit. I pray that you will transform us by them, that these truths will alter the way that we think, the way that we understand our vocation as Christians in the world, what it is that you have commissioned us to do. And how it is that in fact the church does turn the world upside down. How it is that the church does win people for Christ. How it is that the world does testify of him truthfully and bear his fragrance in every place. So help us in these things father and again. Let them continue to work themselves out deeply in our thinking, in our contemplation, as we move forward. And bless us together in all of this, even as we come to the table now, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.