2020: The Worst Year Ever? | Guest Speaker: Sam Rapp

Well, good morning, Redeemer family, and welcome to our online worship service on December 27th.

We are thankful to be worshiping alongside you.

Even though we are not here in person with you all, we know that we are all worshiping together as a family in spirit and in truth.

Yeah, we just hope that you had a great Christmas, a great Christmas week, good break.

Though I do recognize that Christmas did look a lot different this year for many of us, including myself and including many of you.

I also recognize that some of you have lost family members, some of you are suffering and are going through some of the hardest seasons of your life right now in this moment.

This has been a hard year for most people that I know.

Everything is different.

Jobs have been lost.

Alcoholism, addiction, abuse are all at record highs.

I even went to the dentist a couple weeks ago and felt like I was a rare specimen, a new species that was being researched because of how many layers of scary-looking protective gear that the dentist had on.

And me personally, I don't really like going to the dentist on a normal year, but when your dentist is dressed like an astronaut on Mars, it doesn't make it much better.

All that being said, 2020 is a year that is unlike most, if not all, years that any of us have lived in.

Because of this, Time magazine, the very famous publication, came out with an edition of their famous magazines earlier in December, and it looks like this.

And as you can see, the title of the magazine is 2020, the worst year ever.

Now there is some history behind this big red X on the cover.

This red X in the entire history of Time magazine has only been used four times before this one.

And Time Magazine is a magazine that is almost a hundred years old.

The first time was in May of 1945 to mark the death of Adolf Hitler.

The second was in 2003 when Saddam Hussein was crossed out by the United States at the beginning of the Iraq War.

The next one was in 2006 when U.S.

forces killed the Iraqi leader of Al-Qaeda, Abu Zarqawi.

And then the most recent before 2020 was in 2011 when the very famous killing of Osama bin Laden was marked.

Now, if you're anything like me, you probably heard these names and thought, whoa, I would not equate this year to some of those evil men that were on those covers.

Or if you did have a terrible year full of suffering, maybe you did actually equate it.

Maybe for you, 2020 is indeed the worst year ever and a year full of evils to the same extent as even Adolf Hitler.

As I read further into the history of this infamous red X, I learned that it is used to symbolize, quote, the end of a long struggle.

So the use of a red X in 2020 obviously is not to mark the end of COVID, because we clearly still have some work to do, although we're making good progress, but it is symbolically marking the end of 2020.

Stephanie Zakarek, the writer for Time, puts it this way.

She says, There have been worse years in U.S.

history and certainly worse years in world history, but most of us alive today have seen nothing like this one.

You would need to be over a hundred to remember the devastation of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, and in your 80s to retain any memory of World War II and its horrors.

The rest of us have had no training wheels for this, for the recurrence of natural disasters, for a virus that originated possibly with a bat, only to upend the lives of virtually everyone on the planet and end the lives of roughly 1.5 million people around the world.

There's obviously a lot that could be said on this quote and further into the devastation that COVID has caused in our world.

But as we jump into the word of God together, I want us to have three words on our mind for the rest of our time together sitting under it, and that is God with us.

We just celebrated Christmas two days ago, which is maybe the clearest, most tangible expression of God with us that we have seen thus far.

Literally Emmanuel, which is the Hebrew word that literally means God with us.

This God man, Jesus of Nazareth, came to dwell within and among flesh to bring the presence of God, to bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth.

So this morning, we're going to be diving into the book of Revelation, which is a book that some of us, including myself, might be a little intimidated by.

However, my goal is not to bring a traditional brimstone and fire kind of message.

My goal, and hopefully the goal that we see throughout all of the text of Scripture, is to make much of Jesus and remind us of the beautiful hope that we have in him.

This tangible hope through our confusion, through our suffering, and of course through this pandemic that we're still living in.

So let's jump into the Word of God together.

This is Revelation chapter 21, verses 1 through 6.

Revelation 21:1–6

So it says this.

And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.

Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.

And he who is seated on the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new.

Also he said, Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.

And he said to me, It is done.

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

To the thirsty I will give from the spring of water of life without payment.

This is God's word.

And before we consider it further, let's let's pray together.

Father, thank you for your word, and that, Lord, it has been sustained over thousands of years, Lord.

Thank you for sustaining us through this year, for bringing us to December 27th to sit under your word and be reminded of the hope and the dwelling place that we have in your presence.

And so, Father, I pray that this morning, that even though we are not together in person worshiping, that as we are sitting in front of our screens, that we would be reminded of the deep communion we have with our church body and with our Father in heaven through Jesus Christ our Lord.

And it's in his name that we pray.

Amen.

So here's what's going on in this very uh strange and maybe uncharted territory book for a lot of us.

John, the beloved disciple, as Jesus referenced him, has been cast away to be imprisoned on the island of Patmos.

And then Jesus sends an angel to John to give him a vision, and this vision is what we know as revelation.

However, if you're like me, this book has been anything but a revelation.

It's been anything but a clear revelation for us.

It is the distant, kind of scary, fiery book that's at the end of the Bible that we kind of keep at arm's length, right?

You know, we're quick to open the Psalms or the Proverbs or Philippians or John, but when it comes to Revelation, we're like, no, that's that's too scary.

We're gonna keep that over here for the pastors to deal with.

However, I was doing my studying and reading on this passage over the last week, and I learned that, according to this guy named Kevin DeYoung, who's one of my favorite pastors, the book of Revelation can be summed up in one word.

Nike.

And you know, you might be thinking, here goes Sam talking about Nike and Jordans and shoes and stuff again, but hear me, the Greek word Nike literally means victory.

Kevin DeYo puts it this way: Revelation is the story of the devil trying to conquer the church, but the church overcomes the devil in the world because she belongs to the Lord who has won for us the victory.

All that being said, honestly, this book is probably my favorite book in the Bible because for those of us who are in Christ, who are unified with Christ, who have received him as our Lord and Savior, we already have the victory.

It has been won, it is finished.

Tatalesti, as Jesus said when he rose, it is finished.

And that brings me to my first point for us this morning.

Point number one.

The powers of evil have been completely disarmed at the cross of Christ.

Let's talk about verse one one more time here.

Verse one says this again.

If you're like me, if you grew up maybe going to the beach often, going to uh yeah, go tubing or go, yeah, do whatever on the beach, you might read that line and kind of get sad.

Read the line that the sea was no more.

See, I grew up going to the beach all the time.

I love I loved going to the beach.

I loved looking at sunsets on the beach, loved, yeah, throwing footballs in the water, skipping rocks.

I loved going on boat rides.

I even was fascinated, especially by movies about the ocean.

However, if you've ever seen Titanic or the perfect storm, you know that the ocean, which is at some points a place of beauty and majesty, can quickly become a place of unstoppable chaos because of its intense power.

And so here, John, the writer of Revelation, is trying to connect his readers all the way back to Genesis, all the way from Revelation back to the beginning.

Genesis 1, 2 says this the earth was without form and void, and the darkness was hovering over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

In the ancient Near East, in millennia before Jesus in Mesopotamia, the sea was a great, a place of great power, a place of chaos.

It instilled a lot of fear in the people surrounding it.

And we see in Genesis 1 in creation that God doesn't only bring light and life into this world, but he brings order out of chaos.

And that's what happens in Genesis 1, that even though there are dark and frightening waters, he brings light and goodness and order into it.

And through this order, God is offering himself to his people.

And that's what we see in verse 3 of Revelation 21 again.

John says, And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

He will dwell with them, and they will be his people.

And God himself will be with them as their God.

This is the greatest glory in all of heaven, that we will get God.

We will receive God in communion with him in its fullest.

And see, that was Adam and Eve's most beautiful, sweet, sacred privilege in the garden.

It wasn't just that they were innocent or they had freedom to live and walk in the Garden of Eden, but their privilege was that they got to spend every waking moment in full, uninterrupted fellowship with their God, walking with him.

And that brings me to my second point.

Says this our greatest hope and glory of heaven is the perfect eternal experience of God with us.

See, heaven is not heaven simply because of angels or sinlessness or the fact that it will be super happy and joyful.

Although these things are all true and wonderful.

The ultimate restoration, the ultimate hope that we have in heaven is that our relationship with God will be completely and totally made perfect, made whole, and will have nothing in its way.

There will be no bridges to cross anymore.

We will be walking in a perfect garden again.

We will get God and complete perfect union.

But we do see that the fruits of this companionship are in verse 4 of Revelation 21.

It says, He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.

Neither shall be shall there be mourning or crying or pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.

If you're anything like me, you have probably cried more tears than normal this year.

You cried because of the lack of normalcy of a new uh life, a new world.

You've maybe cried because you lost a family member.

Maybe you cried because of a divorce or a new addiction or a new struggle that you found in your life that has been uh exposed during COVID.

And hear me.

Your pain is real, it is tangible, and it is not something to ignore.

But we do have a hope that the pain you're feeling, the addiction, the struggles, the divorce, it's not going to last forever.

Matt Chandler, one of my favorite pastors, talks about this idea of Christians having this one 10,000-year lens.

That if we have a kingdom in eternal, a heavenward, a 10,000 years in the future perspective, looking forward to the glory of heaven, our struggles, our pain does not necessarily go away because we still feel it, but it will give us a power and a way to actually tangibly walk through it.

To know that not only does God actually care about our pain and feel our pain with us, but he is working towards a day when your tears will be wiped away, when your pain is no more true, and when our tears will be wiped away eternally.

And this brings us to our last point this morning.

The cross of Christ has paved the way for perfect and unstained communion between us and God.

Unstained communion between us and God.

See, when I was growing up in church, I used to get kind of salty at Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of the tree that they weren't allowed to eat, right?

I was always like, man, if only they didn't eat that fruit, then life wouldn't hurt.

This world wouldn't be so broken, I wouldn't be sad or sick ever, suffering would end, and I would stop sinning.

However, let me propose a theory for us today.

What we will have in heaven in heaven as the redeemed and restored sons and daughters of Jesus is better than what Adam and Eve had in the Garden of Eden.

See, I don't say that to say that the Garden of Eden wasn't amazing.

I don't say it to diminish what Adam and Eve had pre-fall.

What I do say is to glorify what we now have in Jesus, this new life that we have in Jesus.

Author and Pastor David Guzick puts it this way our instinct is to romantically consider man's innocence as man's perfect state, and wish Adam would have never done what he did.

But we fail to recognize that the redeemed man or woman is greater than the innocent man, that we gain more in Jesus than we ever lost in Adam.

God's perfect state, hear me, is one of redemption, not innocence.

We gain more in Jesus than we ever lost in Adam.

Redeemer, I welcome and understand that 2020 has been absolutely insane.

That nothing is the same as it was before, that everything is different.

To the point where Time magazine, one of the most influential publishers, has equated in some ways 2020 to Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden.

December 27th, the day that we are worshiping together right now, is the last Sunday in 2020.

The last Sunday of the weirdest year most of us have lived through.

However, I want to encourage us, and this is something we've been praying through and praying for in all of us, that we are not stuck.

That this world, a vaccine, a president, these are not our hopes.

These things make terrible gods for us in our life.

Our hope through life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is resting in the future.

Recognizing that it is through him that this is where our hope comes from, not through these things that we see.

When all things are made through, when our tears are wiped away, when our pain, our crying, and our mourning are all no more, when those things are completely destroyed and finished and wiped away.

This is the hope that we only have in Jesus.

We only have this hope because of what Jesus has offered for us through the cross.

Let's pray together.

Father, you are glorious and faithful.

Lord, we we are looking to the future.

We are hopeful for heaven one day, Lord, not just because there will be no sickness or disease, not just because there will be no divorce or pain, but Lord, most importantly, because we will have eternal communion and fellowship with you.

Because we will actually get to live in this idea of God with us fully.

That Lord, we are in this stage of the world that is called the already, but the not yet.

But Lord, when we are in heaven, when you the new Jerusalem, the new heaven, and the new earth are all made real and tangible for us, Lord, we will be in the already and no longer have to fret about the not yet.

Because it has been finished, it has been done away with, Lord.

The the victory has been won, the battle is over, and Satan and death have been defeated.

And so, Lord, we just pray that you would help us look to you in faith.

Please, Lord, give us grace and help us look more like Jesus.

We ask all this in his name.

Amen.