Heaven is not a place; Heaven is a Person

Great, well, let's I'll pray and let's begin.

So Alice is going to going to speak and and she's been taking

us on this journey in her talks for the last right the way

through the year really. And what is the good news?

What's the good news of Jesus? What's the gospel?

How does it speak to us in today's time?

So it's it's crucial now, isn't it, as ever that the world needs

the world needs Jesus. Same Lord, I pray that as Alice

speaks to us this morning, you feed us as it says in the Lord's

Prayer, give us the day Our Daily Bread.

I so often pray that now thinking I need to hear fresh

word from God to sustain me and carry me in the day.

So just as we need physical food and bread, Lord, we also need

your life giving word. So we pray you, you give us a

day, Our Daily Bread. Amen.

I was thinking about this, this idea of what is the good news?

Often when we, when we have something to share that we

literally can't keep in because it's explosive good news, it's

often because there's an overcoming of bad news.

I've, I don't think Becca will mind me saying this.

She's not here. I've done this before.

She ran a marathon and she was just literally like, the only

reason I'm doing this, it's because I never, ever, ever have

to do this again. So she's like mile 20, mile 21,

She's like, if I don't do this now, I have to do it again.

So I'm just going to overcome and overcome.

And of course, and it's really good news.

She's, she's overcome and she's done the marathon.

She never has to do 1 again. Obviously, that's quite a

trivial example. Actual bad news in our life is

devastating. It's the thing we think about

all the time. It's the thing that we orientate

our lives around. It's the pain, it's the

wounding. It becomes a focal point.

And I want this morning for good news to be penetrative to that

bad news. It it was it, it when Jesus came

into the world and was explosively healing people from

their sicknesses and delivering people from their demons, He was

actually turning bad news into good news.

He wasn't an idea or a philosophy or a way of life

that's loving and peaceful. He explosively entered the bad

news and it became such good news that we have testimony

after testimony after testimony of life changing encounters with

Jesus that people in the ancient world did something they never

do. They collect the testimony of

ordinary people and put them into four ancient biographies

because they couldn't stop talking about this person called

Jesus who brought in and broke in to the bad news of their

actual life with incredible good news.

I'm, I sit in the New Testament, I sit in the Gospels, and you

cannot get round that. You cannot say you're a

Christian and actually come into alignment with the fact that

he's explosively turning our bad news into good news.

So the one thing I'm learning, I've been mentored a bit by

Bill. So all the mistakes are still

mine, but I'm hopefully growing in it.

Just I'm just trying to make one point in every talk, the talk,

the point today so we can go away and hopefully remember it

is heaven is not a person. Heaven is a place.

Heaven. I'm just testing you all,

listening. Heaven is not a place.

Heaven is a person. Shall we all just say that

together? Heaven is not a place.

It's it's not the good place we go to when we die.

Jesus is the ticket over here to get us somewhere else.

He is the destination, the tellos, the end game, the

formation, the life, the boldness, the courage, the

healing, the peace, the joy, the holiness.

It's him. It's in the person of Jesus

Christ we go. So no, I should have got a

slide. So I actually went on quite a

personal journey with this because I was developing this

product called Biblios. And actually Zac's here.

Should we say hi to Zac and Serena?

Hi, Zac and Serena. Every month we get out Biblios

in youth and Zac's there because I said there are like 70.

And this is very incredibly poignant, and I don't want to be

trite or glib about it, but there are 70 Israeli and

Palestinian photos in Biblios of actual people who live in Israel

Palestine, who lived at that time in Israel Palestine.

And Zac was one of our photographers.

And so I said, Zac, you can put your own face in it.

And so you're in it, aren't you? Do you remember who you are?

I think you're obscure. I think you're like Jude or

something, like someone who's a bit like, yeah, borderline.

Whereas John Tyrrell put himself as John.

He was like, he's John the other photographer.

Anyway, there you go. If you have a look at it, you

can you can spot the faces. But I anyway, I was coming to

the end of putting this product together, which is no view of

the Bible for all kinds of learners and community.

And I was coming to Revelation and I was like, gosh, if people

are actually going to buy this, I'd better be a bit more

convinced about what I actually believe about heaven and hell.

Because like, I'm really convinced by the reality of God.

I'm really convinced by the power of the Holy Spirit.

I'm really convinced by the gifts in the church.

I'm really convinced by the death and resurrection of Jesus,

the divinity in humanity. There are a lot of things I'm

really convinced by. But what happens after what what

this phrase heaven and hell is? I'm not sure I have enough

conviction to be able to deliver something that someone's then

going to pay for. So anyway, I did what all good

people in the 21st century do slightly before AI where they

asked chat. GBTI didn't do that.

I actually asked Google. I googled it.

Heaven and hell. Don't recommend that really

honestly. But what was absolutely

incredible, God was so gracious, was at the very top of my search

came this four part teaching series by a pastor I'd never

heard of called Tim Mackie in a church I'd never heard of called

Door of Hope, Portland, OR basically in the basement.

So it's slightly crunchy. It was really authentic.

It was like really slightly bad audio and everything.

And you could tell it was a church community, probably like

ours, having a weekend, just literally in this basement kind

of trying to go through the biblical trajectory on, on

heaven and hell. And the very first thing he said

was, by the way, just to make the point that the phrase heaven

and hell is never once used in the Bible.

The repeated phrase is heaven and earth.

And in fact, the trajectory of the whole Bible is the reunion

of heaven and earth. And that was his opening phrase.

And I knew he'd opened a a rabbit hole, which is called

biblical studies, which I'm still curiously following today.

And it helped me think through a bit more how we read the Bible

and how we interpret it. Not going to go into that now.

We absolutely will. We love addressing any elephant

in the room and have no problem with that at all.

But today I want to kind of play this video because I think a few

years later he Co founded the Bible project with John Collins

and put this for like long teaching sessions in a basement

into like a 6 minute really good animated video that explains it

all. So we're going to watch that now

and we're going to try and have a a kind of a transformation of

our mind on what this idea of heaven is that's more in

alignment with a kind of a biblical world view.

So in the Bible, the ideas of heaven and earth are ways of

talking about God's space and our space.

So I understand our space really well.

We live here, there's trees, rivers, mountains.

But my understanding of God's space gets a little fuzzy.

And what we do get in the Bible are images trying to help us

grasp God's space, which is basically inconceivable to us.

So these are. Two very different types of

spaces. Yes, they're they're different

in their nature. But here's what's really

interesting is that in the Bible, these are not always

separate spaces. So think of heaven and earth as

like different dimensions that can overlap in the same exact

space. So we talk a lot about going to

heaven after we die, but this idea of heaven and earth

overlapping, we don't talk a lot about that.

Which is kind of crazy because the union of heaven and earth is

what the story of the Bible is all about, how they were once

fully united and then driven apart, and about how God is

bringing them back together once again.

So. Let's go back to the beginning,

where heaven and earth, they're completely overlapping.

Yeah, this is what the Bible's description of the Garden of

Eden is all about. It's a place where God and

humanity dwelt together perfectly, no separation and and

humans then partner with God and building a flourishing,

beautiful world and so on. But as humans, we wanted to do

things a different way. We wanted got out and we wanted

to create a world apart from. Him.

Yeah. So we have these two spaces now,

and the Bible actually uses lots of different kinds of words and

phrases to refer to these two spaces to make a clear

distinction, so. You said that these spaces can

overlap though, so explain how that works.

Yeah, this is where we have to start talking about temples,

because in the biblical world, you experience God's presence by

going to a temple. That's where heaven and earth

overlap. Now there are two types of

temples described in the Bible. 1 is a Tabernacle, basically a

tent that was built by Moses and the other was this massive

building made by Solomon. And these temples were decorated

with fruit trees and flowers and images of angels and all kinds

of gold and jewels and so on. And these are designed to make

you feel like you're going back to the garden.

And at the centre of the temple was a place called the Holy of

Holies, which was like the hot spot of God's presence.

Now we can go and be with God again.

But not so fast, because the temple also creates a problem.

So God's space is full of his presence and goodness and

justice and beauty. But human space is full of sin

and injustice and the ugliness that resolves.

So how do these spaces overlap if they're so different and

they're in conflict with each? Other This was resolved through

animal sacrifice. Yeah, that's kind of weird.

What do animal sacrifices have to do with this?

Yeah, the the idea is this animal sacrifices, somehow they

absorb the sin when the animal dies in your place and it

creates a clean space, so to speak, where you are now free to

enter into the temple and be in God's present.

OK, so if I'm an Israelite and I live in Jerusalem, I might be

able to be in God's presence. But you said the story of the

Bible is all of heaven and earth reuniting.

Right, so we have to keep going in the story where we come to

Jesus in the New Testament and in the Gospel of John, we hear

this claim that God became human in Jesus and made his dwelling

among us. Now this word dwelling is really

curious. It literally it means he set up

a Tabernacle among us. And So what John is claiming

right here is that Jesus is a temple.

He is now the place where heaven and earth overlap.

What's interesting about Jesus is that he isn't staying in this

safe, clean space. He's running around, hanging out

with sinners. He's healing people of their

sicknesses and forgiving people of their sins.

He's basically creating little pockets of heaven where people

can be in God's presence, but he's doing it out there in the

middle of the world of sin and death.

And he keeps telling everyone that the Kingdom of heaven.

Is at hand and he even told his followers to pray regularly that

God's Kingdom come and that His will be done.

He here on earth just as it is in heaven.

But a lot of people are threatened by Jesus and they

kill him, which seems to spoil this whole plan to reunite

heaven and earth. But we we have to go back to a

scene earlier on in Jesus's story where John the Baptist saw

Jesus and said, behold, this is the Lamb of God who takes away

the sin of the world. So Jesus isn't just talked about

as being a temple, he's also talked about as being the temple

sacrifice. Yeah, so so the cross is now the

place where Jesus absorbs sin to create a clean space that is not

limited. Like animal sacrifices.

Jesus's sacrifice has the power to keep spreading and spreading

and reuniting more and more of heaven and earth.

And this is all really great, but it leaves one big question

in my mind, which is what happens when I die?

Don't I just fly over to God's space to be with Jesus?

Yeah, so a few times in the New Testament we learn that

Christians will be with Jesus in heaven after they die.

But that is not the focus of the Bible story.

The focus is on how heaven and earth are being reunited through

Jesus and will be completely brought together one day when he

returns. So in the Book of Revelation, we

get this beautiful image of the Garden of Eden, now in the form

of city, coming to end the age of sin and death by redeeming

all of human history in a renewed creation.

And God's space and human space completely overlap once again.

We believe the best way to understand the Bible is to look

at it. So why does this matter?

Well, according to Steve Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective

People, so funny when people quote that is it, we live with

the end in mind. And I think that's probably

true. We live with what we really be.

Leave is reality about how it's all going to end, how our lives

are going to end and how the the whole thing's going to end.

So if we all think we're going to hell and a handbasket,

whether we're secular people and we think through climate

collapse, World War three, or being taken over by an AO super

intelligence or as Christians through some sort of incredibly

warped and hopeless theology, we will bunker down.

We'll get in supplies and go into self protect mode.

That's what we do. But if we believe something

radically different, something radically good and something

radically hopeful, like actual resurrection from the dead, the

actual reconstitution of a dead body coming back to life, or

actually maybe death couldn't hold him in the 1st place

because he is life. If we actually believe that,

then we will live an incredibly different way because that

prototype of the resurrection of Jesus is the resurrection of all

of creation, the renewed heaven and earth or the new heaven and

earth. So I really want us to think as

a community, what do we actually believe about how it's all going

to end? Not what we say we believe, not

what we think our creed is, not what we think we should believe,

but do we actually believe in resurrection?

So as I said, we've if we've created this kind of false

dichotomy that Jesus is over here and he kind of gets us a

ticket to the good place over here, when we die, we miss the

entire point of the invitation, which is him.

He is life. And we actually have a very

disturbing message. I'm going to use marriage as an

illustration. There are three reasons we could

get married. I'm going to do this from the

female perspective. I think you might understand

that why I'm doing that. We could get married to a person

we don't know very well and don't particularly want to know

very well to get out of an abusive home situation.

Jesus is the ticket to get us out of hell.

That's disturbing. Or we could get married because

that person's pretty rich. We don't know them very well.

We don't really want to know them very well, but they will

offer us a nice, comfortable life if we say the right words,

pray the prayer sign on the dotted line, Jesus will get us

into the good place. He might even give us a good

life now. Or what's a brilliant reason to

get married? Everyone.

Because we love the person we want to be with the person.

Everything's about the person. It's not an institution, it's

not an idea, it's not a ticket out of hell or a ticket into

prosperity. It is the person we are in union

with. Christ, that is the good news.

That is the life. That is the hope.

It's Him. It's in Him.

Not what He can do for us or not what He gets us out of, but in

Him He is the life. So we see in in the gospels,

essentially they're all saying the same thing.

The first three called synoptic same view similar view Matthew,

Mark, Luke talk about either the Kingdom of heaven because

Matthew's very respectful of of the the name of the word God.

And so he calls it the Kingdom of heaven.

And then Luke, Mark and Luke, the Kingdom of God and, and then

John uses the word life, which we actually celebrated this

morning with Rebecca and Andrew Standry's daughter Zoe means

life in Greek and actually 33 times in John, exponentially

more in John than the other gospels.

But essentially you can see from that video as well, they're kind

of saying the same thing that where there's a rule of Jesus

the King, there is explosive everlasting resurrection life.

There are two kinds of life and, and Bill's talked about this and

another talk, there's BIOS life, which is biological life.

We all have it. Our hearts beats our, our lungs

breathe, our brains work sometimes and so on.

And then there's Zoe life, which is spiritual life, which is the

life we need to live that full resurrection union life forever.

And the life we lost, that's when death came in.

We lost Zoe, we lost spiritual life.

And that's what Jesus came to bring.

So the the absolute momentum, the movement, the trajectory,

the climax of the Gospels is that he's absorbed all death

into himself and and death couldn't hold him.

And he rose again and inaugurated a new creation of

that Zoe life for all of us too. And you see right at the end of

the vision of Revelation, they touch on that in the video, this

marriage between Christ and the church, the reunion of heaven

and earth is made possible by Jesus.

But if you notice the bride doesn't go up to heaven in

Revelation 21, it says very specifically the bride.

It is almost revealed. The humanity, the new humanity

is revealed from the heaven space because heaven isn't up

there. It's an unseen realm space right

here. And heaven is revealed, the

bride is revealed, and heaven and earth come back together.

So we are already in Christ in the heavenly realms, and we will

be fully reunited in the new creation with the renewed earth.

But the union is with Christ, not with an idea or a concept or

a ticket or a get out of gaol free card.

It's with a person who we love, we worship, we're consumed by,

we're devoted to who deals with all our addictions, who is the

reason behind because of our absence of him.

We have our addictions and he heals us and he delivers us and

gives us the thing we're all craving, which is Zoe life,

which is him. And so we see this again and

again and again in the yeah, yeah, go back to that one in

that if you look at the original Garden of Eden and then you look

at the the new Eden at the end in Revelation, so the bookends

of the Bible, you see this tree called the Tree of Life, and

that is the one you ingest and you live forever.

And it turns out in the Bible, often trees are a way of showing

us what humans are like humans and trees are are are kind of

sorry. Trees are helpful ways to

understand the human condition. They're often used a lot in in

analogies or metaphors. And here we see that Jesus is

the tree of life. And what's stunning about the

new creation right at the end in Revelation, they try and

illustrate it. Here is it's one tree of life on

each side of the river. So the two Christ and the church

have become one in the new creation, fulfilling what Adam

and Eve were pointing to in the 1st creation.

But Jesus is the tree of life. And we see this again and again

and again. I'm just going to actually focus

on the word Zoe in life and John, but you can see it.

He is, you know, he is the Kingdom of God.

He is the presence of God. He is all that we are looking

for and need and, and are craving.

And so I'm just going to read some verses from the Gospel of

John about Jesus being life. And that means that heaven is

not a heaven is a thank you in him in Jesus was life.

This is in John 14. We will end up on that verse.

So meditate on that. And I'm just going to read over

a few of the verses in John to get you there.

In him was life and that life was the light of all humanity.

Everyone who believes which is actually trust.

It isn't like a creed. I believe in the in in the

gospel or the nice in creed. It's like I actually trust in

God. It's a better understanding.

I think of the life of faith. I trust him with my heart.

I trust him with my relationships.

I trust in my future. Everyone who trusts him has life

in him. For God so loved the world that

he gave his one and only Son, that whoever puts trust in him

will not perish, but have so eternal, everlasting life.

Whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.

Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of

water welling up to eternal life.

This is an image that we are, we feel, God's given us.

Specifically, I hope that we are a place that that water flows up

the life of of Jesus himself flows out of.

Very truly, I tell you, whoever hears my word and trusts me, who

trusts the one who sent Me, has its very eternal life and will

not be judged, but has crossed over from death to life.

For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the

Son also to have life in himself.

You study the Scriptures diligently because you think

that in them you have life. These are the very scriptures

that testify about me. And Jesus says, yet you refuse

to come to me to have life. And then he's, he gets very

specific. I am the bread of life.

Whoever comes to me will never go hungry and whoever believes

in me will never be thirsty. I am the bread of life.

He says again, I am the living bread unless you eat the flesh

of the Son of man and drink his blood.

That's entering into the very brokenness of, of, of God who

broke for the human condition. Unless that's the way you live

and feed and eat and consume, you have no Zoey life in you

because that's the root to the resurrection.

The spirit gives life. The flesh counts for nothing.

The words I've spoken to, they are full of spirit and life.

Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of life. He raises Lazarus from the dead

and declares I am the resurrection and the life, the

one who trusts in me or live even though they die.

I am the way, the truth and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through me.

So in that text he's basically saying I am life, I am Zoe life

and then finally now this is life that they know.

And whenever you read the word no, it means experience.

It doesn't mean just a factual understanding of something, but

an experience of someone in a way that is intimate.

They know they experience you, the only true God and Jesus

Christ whom you have sent. That is life.

That's that's what the good news is.

That's the aim. The tell us.

That's the the trajectory. Everything is about being in

God, in the Father, in the Son, in the Spirit, in union with the

Son, in intimacy with a Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

That is life. There isn't a life outside that.

And that's the thing we have to wrestle through to breakthrough.

Because if that isn't life for us, we haven't really tasted it.

Because that's where the life is.

It isn't anywhere else. It isn't Jesus is over there to

get me to the good place over there, or Jesus is over there to

get me to a good life over here. He is the good life over here.

So we we know this, I know, but what I what we're kind of going

to land on is so we can experience life from today,

resurrection, eternal Zoe life. Do you remember those pockets of

counter revolutionary Kingdom that have invaded this earth?

That is the role of the church today, to host places of heaven

on earth today because we are in union with Christ who is in the

Father. So we are already able to host,

experience ourself and host for other people life, true

spiritual life marked by love and joy and peace.

That's why the corruption in the church is the worst form of

corruption you will ever come across, because everywhere else

should be deaf, but we, we should be hosting life.

That's why judgement begins with the House of God, because we not

just should know better, but we've tasted Him and it's a holy

thing to taste him and represent him well.

This is where life is in our communities, in the way we treat

each other, in our love and our joy and our forgiveness, in our

kindness and in in the welcome we then give to people wherever

they are on their spiritual journey or self identification.

This is that we are now the wells of life of of everlasting

life for people. But that is nothing if we

haven't tasted it ourselves. And that's partly why we're

going again and again and again. What is the good news?

Do we actually know it? Has it penetrated us enough for

us to go? This is the most extraordinary

thing or truth or reality I could ever come across.

And I'm bursting to tell people because that seems to be what

happens in the 1st century. And it seems to be what happens

when the Spirit comes in power on communities ever since.

There isn't. Oh gosh, you got to tell someone

about Jesus. There is this explosive.

This was bad news and now I'm telling you good news.

It was a beautiful moment last night.

We were celebrating Christie's 20 years clean and sober and

there were two people he he was sharing and then also someone

else who is now 7 years clean was also sharing.

And they knew each other before. And Christie wanted people to

know the hell he used to live in, didn't he, Jane?

He particularly said that that he was 6 stone, I think just

just, and just in a hell house. And he met this other guy and

there was just, it was just absolute.

It was just death, guns, drugs. It was just horrific and he he

said it's no use celebrating who I am now if you do not

understand the hell I came from. That's the good news.

And so that's what I want us as AI want us to authentically

including myself. We all want to authentically

have such an incredible fresh taste encounter, touching of the

reality of the Son of God in the Trinity that we cannot but keep

it in. We we want to express it.

We want to share it because that to me feels the most authentic

kind of witness, the kind of witness that says, I don't care

who hears, I don't care who's offended.

I don't care who wants to kill me.

I, I cannot keep this in. And so it starts with us.

It starts with us saying is, is he really the life?

Is it him? That's the life.

Or is he ticking the box for some other good things that I

might see life in? I don't want us to waste another

second waiting for circumstances to change before we can start

living. Waiting for something in our job

to change, our relationship to change, our money to change, our

health to change. Because none of them are Zoey

Life. They not, they aren't.

They don't deliver. There's just something else to

worry about. There's something else to get up

and stay awake all night over. There's something else to be

stressed over. There's one thing that's worth

pursuing one life, and it's Jesus.

His name is Jesus. He is the life that will

literally deliver. All these other things are

saying they'll deliver to us. He is the healer, He is the

peace, He is the joy, He is the grace, He is the forgiveness and

and it's a media and it's today. That's why Paul can say in

Corinthians in the time of my favour, I heard you and in the

day of my salvation, Yeshua, Yeshua.

It's the same Hebrew root word. I tell you.

Now is the time of God's favour. Now today is the day of

salvation, of restoration, of intimacy, because Jesus is right

here and we can access Him whenever we like.

He is not far off, He is close, and we can approach the throne

of grace to access that grace and mercy whenever we like.

Day or night, He's the life. All these other things may or

may not be part of His blessings in the world, but none of them

is Zoey life. They're all subject to death and

will not be raised from the dead.

There is one thing that is raised from the dead and that's

Jesus. And in Him is the one life that

we're actually all craving. So our response is to repent, to

have a change of mindset about how we actually value Jesus, who

we actually think he is, What how how how we love him, how we

devote ourselves, how we orientate ourselves around him.

Because it's either all true or it's not true.

It's either really is there's a fundamental devote, a kind of

devotion, a centrality of the Christ who holds the cosmos

together, or none of it's true. There is no space for any kind

of nuance on that either that we are literally BIOS life and

we're just a bunch of accidental chemicals that try and get try

and just manage our hormones so they're as buzzy as they can be

until we die, which is basically Western secularism.

How to have the good life, Just manage the hormones until you

die. Or there is Zoe life, there's

resurrection life. Christ holds the cosmos together

and he's worth orientating everything around because He is

life and there is no life outside him.

He is the good life. He's the good place.

He's the reunion of heaven and earth.

And So what I want us to do is have a change is we can't get

that revelation. Jesus says the Father gives the

revelation of the Son to PT. He said you didn't get that from

human thinking. You got that because the Father

revealed to you the Messiah. But what we can do is say we

want that revelation. We're postured to that

revelation. We know it will blow us apart.

We know we'll have to, everything will have to go to be

surrendered. We know that you cannot touch

life without being completely discombobulated and disrupted

and disturbed. We know that we can see that.

But at some point we have to be ready and desperate enough to

say we're willing for that because the world is going to

hell in a handbasket because the solution's with us.

And if we're not stepping up and bringing a solution, we are

going down with it. The Titanic, it's hit, it's hit

the it's hit the iceberg. And we are available if we to be

hosts of life, to be those lifeboats.

We are available in the irony with the Titanic, as they could

have saved everyone if they'd managed it properly and known

properly. We are those lifeboats.

We are able to host the presence and the life of God.

We have more than we need, but we need to, we need to believe,

we actually need to believe in him ourselves, not just be nice

people. That isn't, that doesn't cut it.

It doesn't cut it with the rise of the far right.

It doesn't cut it with climate change.

It doesn't cut it with the volatility in the world at the

moment. It doesn't cut it being nice

people. We have to have people who

actually believe that Jesus is life and literally orientate

ourselves around that around him and living in that Zoe life.

So it's a repentance is literally it's kindness leads it

to it's just a change of mindset about reality.

What we actually think reality is.

If we want to tell people about Jesus, we're really not that

convinced ourselves is that a compelling witness.

And this is no disrespect. It's no disrespect, but the

Jehovah's Witnesses have to get a certain amount of people to

become Jehovah's Witnesses, to be one of the chosen 144,000

that will actually be elected in their theology.

That is not loving. I want to tell someone about

Jesus because I'm so obsessed with him myself.

I cannot imagine them having to live another day without him.

That is alignment. Now of course, Paul says where

Christ is preached out of selfish ambition, we celebrate

it like great God. God will work through anyone,

any, anywhere, anytime. But I want us to be in the

people who authentically have so encountered Jesus that we cannot

but tell other people about him and want other people to taste

him and his goodness. And the way that happens, and

this is where we want to end, is we except ourself experience a

healing or a deliverance in our body or in our in a friend,

because that's the testimony of the Gospels.

It's story after story after story of eyewitnesses who

personally experienced God healing.

They had blind eyes and and they saw they were tormented by the

demonic and they were given peace.

That's what the good news is according to the Gospels, that

there was such a personal encounter and experience of Zoe

life that they couldn't pass it down in oral tradition until it

was organised into four biographies, which we call

Matthew, Martley and John. So I would love this morning to

start, you know, to start to steward.

We already are through living free like these pockets of

resistance where Zoe life penetrates into our death and

our sadness and our pain and brings through to resurrection.

We absolutely believe in the discipline of lament, in

bringing our bitterness to God. I love the beginning of Ruth

where Naomi just says don't call me, don't call me Naomi, call me

Mara because I'm bitter. Chapter 1 of Ruth, what's

beautiful about it, though, it's by the end of chapter 1, it says

the barley harvest had had begun and she started to go home.

It's actually the moment when we declare our lament and our

bitterness before God, that God's already setting up the

fruit of our restoration and our resurrection.

But he wants us to become that intimate, that authentic, that

vulnerable with him, that we can bring our lament of bitterness

to him because he's already turning the famine into a feast

for us. So I we are all about honouring

lament. We think it's a discipline in

Scripture, it's a discipline in the Psalms.

And Paul says very clearly, we mourn with those who mourn and

we rejoice with those who rejoice.

To be a healthy body, we have to be aware of our pain.

And at the same time we believe in the Jesus of the Gospels who

healed everyone and delivered everyone.

He, he just did. And we have to wrestle and

reckon with that universality of life overcoming death.

So what I want us to do now is if there's something in our life

that we would like God to breakthrough on, that would

produce the kind of testimony that says I've encountered Zoe

life, Then we can either gather with people we know and trust

and stand and pray for that, or we can come to the front.

Any of us could be available here to pray for it.

Or if you prefer to find a stranger because it's easier

sometimes to talk to someone you don't know, find someone.

Or it may be that stay at this moment, now isn't the time to do

it, but you know, you need to find certain people to pray with

something to see that breakthrough.

I would encourage us to do this because why else are we here if

we're not seeing good news, penetrate.

If we're not seeing life overcome death, if if we're not

seeing and tasting the thing that we think is good news, we

might as well do what everyone else is doing.

They're either gaming, Netflix in mouths somewhere else in a

yoga studio. We believe in penetrative

resurrection life here. And so that's what I want us to

encounter. So I'm going to pray now and I'm

going to ask the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is so gentle and

respectful and kind, just so loving and joyful, the Holy

Spirit. Only goes where the Holy

Spirit's invited. There is no coercion in the

Kingdom of God. There is full love and love is

always about full consent and permission.

So I'm going to invite the Holy Spirit now to ask us to show us

what does God want for us now from this?

What's the Zoe life he wants us to encounter?

And then I would ask us to have the courage to act on that

prompting of the Holy Spirit. Thank you, God, that you, you

have, you have inaugurated the Kingdom of light.

If the Kingdom of light is always overcoming darkness

because you just turn the light on and the darkness has to go

and all, we know that you've come, you've come, you said

you've come and you're anointed to do a lot of things.

You're anointed to bind up broken hearts.

So we just say if there's any broken heartedness here today on

any subject, that's specific because the surgeon, the great

surgeon, is incredibly precise in how he wants to minister to

us. If there is any specific area of

broken heartedness today that you want to heal, I pray you

speak to us about that. You, you command us to heal the

sick and you command us to deliver people from their

demons. So I pray if there's anyone

who's who just there's actually something physiological or

something neurological or something that you just know.

Do you know what I want, Zoe life in that area.

And again, it's very specific. And if, if there's any area of

captivity to addiction, you say you come, you set captives and

prisoners free. That isn't a nice saying or a

trite saying or oh gosh, isn't, isn't this good?

You actually do want us to walk out of our cages to addiction

and be free. And so I bless if the, if the

Holy Spirit wants to put his finger on that, we're just going

to wait. We're just going to wait for a

minute in silence and just see where the Holy Spirit wants to

minister. And then we can pray for each

other. OK, so I think if you find

someone near you to pray with or come to the front, but if you

feel like this is God wants to just bring that penetrative,

that resurrection, that Zoe life into an area, there's faith in

the room. There's faith in the room for

for that to happen. We get the tempos.

Anyone who needs to collect their children, they'll be

coming back now, but we're going to be here and available for

prayer and ministry for as long as we need to be.