The Revelation of Jesus

Hello and thank you for joining us on the Sierra Bible Church Sermon of the Week.

We hope you enjoy this message.

I think if we were to think about it for a second, we all have this one thing in common.

And it's this that we would probably all say in here, there's more going on than what we see.

Now, if we were to sort of take that one step further, we would probably all disagree at some level on to as to exactly what that is.

This book, The Revelation of Jesus, is an opportunity for us to get a God kind of glance behind this sort of curtain, if you will, that separates the physical world that we often and you know, for good reason, live in and that which is going on.

Not just what's going on right now, but what's gone on, going on, and will happen in the future.

As we study this book, there'll be multiple times where we read a phrase like this.

John records this.

He's the one who records this book because it's a book from the Father given to the Son, who passed on to an angel, so that John can see how all that works.

I have no idea.

And bless the church.

So he gives us vision and he has these phrases like this one.

He says, After this is Revelation 4.

This happens multiple times in Revelation.

After this, I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven.

Now, if you bump into somebody on the street and they lead with that, you're like, Woo-hoo, where are we going?

Right.

And yet, this is what he begins to see as this angel opens his eyes to what's really going on.

So he sees this door open in heaven and the voice I had first heard.

So don't just see him standing at the sort of door of heaven with the invitation to look in, but now hear the voice speaking to me like a what?

Trumpet.

What's that sound like?

I don't know.

Like it's somehow this voice, and we're gonna have this multiple times, but it's not just an average voice.

It's gonna roar like thunder.

It's gonna sound like the rushing water, like stand on the mistrail in May.

This is how this voice or communication will come.

And here's John's invitation.

Come up here and I'm gonna show you.

And our hope is in humility, we will be ushered in.

It's why the book was written.

When Kathy and I lived in Moscow, Russia for a number of years early on in our marriage, we loved to take the overnight train up to St.

Petersburg.

There were a couple of unbelievable kind of cathedrals or churches in St.

Petersburg that we loved to visit.

One of those was called Church of the Savior's Blood.

And I don't know if you've ever been to St.

Petersburg, but this is what it looks like.

It's actually built over a waterway.

It's kind of this a magical place.

What's phenomenal about this church, and it always would catch my breath, was that when you would go inside that church, the typical kind of Russian artwork inside of churches, which is iconography, it's a painting that portrays a bit of biblical history.

In this particular church, the entire church is turned into those icons by way of mosaic.

This entire thing is drawn out by little tiny pieces of colored stone.

It catches your breath.

What John is going to do for us will be a little bit like walking into that room.

And it's a little crazy like that too.

When you walk in, you're like, oh wait, I recognize that story.

And then over here by the ground, you're like, oh wait, hey, babe, look, there's another story.

And oh wait, look up here on the wall.

And so as we walk through Revelation together, there will be times where it's very like future, past, present, future.

Look at that beautiful.

And it's kind of hard to get your mind and your heart wrapped around what it is that he's teaching.

We oftentimes sort of do our teaching out of Paul's teaching, and it's very propositional, truth after truth.

Sometimes we walk chronologically through the teaching of someone like Luke, where he gives us this history, not so in Revelation.

It's much more like standing inside a cathedral painted with a story of God and seeing beyond it, and he will reveal these words to us.

And in some ways, as you've studied probably Revelation before, it's an incredible challenge.

But it's also a challenge that Jesus, leaning in right away, gives us a promise that's true of all of Scripture, but when we read it and it's true of everything, we gotta ask, why is he telling us this?

And the promise goes like this Jesus says this.

This is one three, Brian already read it.

Blessed is the one who reads aloud these words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.

It's worth it.

There's a blessing for his church.

There's a way that we are to be motivated as we read and see these images or mini videos that John is able to see as we're ushered in.

We're gonna do this in 10 weeks, God willing, here on Sunday mornings.

As Em said in the afternoon, we're gonna do like this chapter by chapter starting next week.

And so that's gonna take us 21 weeks.

So we'll break that up with Christmas and all those kinds of things to walk more slowly through it.

So part of jumping us in, I've asked Anna, she's taught with me in a couple different settings before, as well as Andrew, who works in lots of areas in our church, specifically with our students, to bring us into a couple of threads that kind of run through this book.

So Anna's gonna help us step into the history piece of this and see um what this book is, and then Andrew will come and teach for a moment as well.

So make welcome Anna.

All right.

Before we start any type of study um over a book of the Bible, there's a few questions we have to ask right off the bat.

Who wrote this, when, why, what's the kind of writing style that we're looking at?

And so who wrote this?

John.

When did he write it?

End of the first century AD, right around 96 AD, is what we're looking at.

And people ask the question Is this John the beloved disciple of Jesus that wrote the Gospel of John?

The traditional view is yes, possibly, but there's also scholars out there that say they're not quite sure.

And so what we do is we call him John the faithful servant of Christ.

But what we do know is that John was exiled to an island called Patmos.

It would have been this little tiny Greek island right off the coast of Asia Minor, which is modern-day Turkey, and it's where they would have sent political exiles during that time.

This these were the years of intense persecution for the church.

And so that's where we find John on this island, right next to Asia Minor, writing these letters as he gets this revelation.

And so when we study scripture, there's something specific that we have to look at as well.

And that's the literary style of writing that we're going to be looking at.

The Bible is chock full of so many different types of writing.

And it's important to recognize what it is we're looking at.

There's poetry, prose, narrative, history, prophetic, all those types of things we find in scripture.

And we don't read them all the same way.

We don't read poetry the same way we read narrative.

Just like I wouldn't read Shakespeare the same way that I would read the U.S.

Constitution.

I would read it differently, I'd understand it differently, I'd know things going into it, and I would feel it differently as well.

And so in Revelation, we actually have three different types of literature here.

First, it's a letter, it's also prophetic, and it's also a revelation, which means it's apocalyptic.

First, it's a letter.

So this little island right off the coast of Asia Minor, Paul is sitting there in his exile.

He gets this revelation and he addresses it to seven churches.

Seven churches at a specific place, a specific time for a specific reason.

And so when we read letters, there is a phrase that is helpful when we're reading and understanding different letters in scripture.

And it's this phrase that goes like this It cannot say to us what it did not say to them.

It cannot say to us 2,000 years later, in 2026, what it did not say to the first century reader and hearer of this word.

We can't glean new information that isn't also true in that first context, right?

And so that phrase kind of gives us a guardrail as we continue to read and we continue to study.

It cannot say to me what it did not say to them.

And so that helps us be faithful to the reading and understanding of this ancient letter.

Second, it's prophetic, it's a declaration of what is true and then a call to obedience, a call to respond.

If you remember in the Old Testament, the prophets, the way God spoke a message to them, a declaration of what was true, thus says the Lord, and then there's this response, a call to obedience, a call for encouragement and wisdom.

And we see that in Revelation.

We see this past this pastoral um voice that John has for this early church.

Are you going to bend your knee to the lamb?

Are you going to go the way of the beast and the nations?

And then last, it's a revelation.

Revelation is is translated apocalypsis in the Greek.

And that means to reveal or uncover.

And in apocalyptic literature, what we see is a recounting of a prophet's symbolic vision using images, pictures, colors, numbers.

There's a lot going on.

But something that's helpful is that it's not meant to confuse us, but it's meant to communicate.

This first century church would have been familiar with Daniel and Isaiah and Ezekiel and Zachariah, and we see over 500 references in Revelation to the Old Testament.

They would have understood what some of these letters and colors, not letters, numbers and colors and pictures represented.

It's not meant to confuse, but to communicate.

God's heavenly perspective to our earthly present reality.

We get a glimpse of this in Isaiah chapter 6, when Isaiah it says in verse 1, it says, in the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on the throne high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple.

Isaiah 6 · chapter mention

And there were creatures flying around singing, holy, holy, holy.

And so there's this moment that Isaiah is standing here, and there's this already but not yet sense of reality.

As Brian spoke about earlier in that first chapter of Revelation, this is the God who was and is and is to come.

And so this word picture that I think is helpful when we translate apocalypsis to reveal or uncover is God pulling back the curtain.

And so there's this moment where Isaiah's sitting there and he's seeing the king high and lifted up on the throne, but you pull back that curtain and he realizes he's in that throne room already.

What is true in heavenly, this heavenly perspective is also true in his earth rearthly reality.

There's a quote by Eugene Peterson.

He has a book on Revelation, it's super great.

And he says, I read the revelation not to get more information, but to revive my imagination.

Saint John uses words the way poets do, recombining them in fresh ways so that old truth is freshly perceived.

It takes truth that has been eroded to platitude by endless usage and sets it in motion before us in an animated, impassioned dance of ideas.

I love this picture of the cathedral and how we see all of these pictures all around.

And you know, John could have just said to encourage and bless that first church.

He could have just said, you know what?

Jesus wins.

You guys got it.

Pat on the back.

But instead, there's these pictures and these images that stir the soul, that give them courage.

And it's because we're people, we love stories.

Why do you read books?

Why do you listen to music?

Why do you watch movies?

There's something that happens in our souls.

You could just tell me, well, Jesus wins, bad guy loses.

Or you can hand me a book called The Chronicles of Narnia, and I get to see this beautiful Christ-like image of this lion and how he comes in and he breathes life into the eternal winter.

And he lays on the stone tablet, and you think he's dead.

Actually, no, he is dead because the white witch has this dark magic, and we have like this silence where the Pevincy girls are like looking in, and it's all really scary and stuff.

Suspense.

And then the dawn rises and the stone tablet breaks, and the lion gets up and roars because Aslan knew of the deeper magic.

Guys, that makes me want to get in line behind the Pevense children.

Oh Narnia! There is something that happens when we read stories, and so in Revelation we get these pictures.

And to think about that first century church in the height of the persecution, their friends dying, their family sent off to exile to recognize that God's heavenly perspective is breaking into their reality.

That's gonna change their endurance.

It's gonna change the way they walk as they see the lamb, as they see the king on the white horse, as they see the deceiver ultimately is taken down.

That's going to change what happens in their present reality, and it changes what happens in ours as well.

So buckle up.

It's a wild ride.

Um, it's gonna be great.

I hope it's encouraging for you guys.

All right, so I have the privilege today.

The first thing that came to my mind when I was reading this is like the words conquerors and faithful and church and witness.

And when I was reading those, I was like, those are all really nice words.

You know, those could all fit on a Hallmark card.

And the interesting thing, though, is that there's a lot brewing underneath the surface here that John and you know, through Jesus is showing us.

Um, it's a heavy reality, um, it's not easily domesticated.

And I'm I want to get at that by showing you a few verses, the first of which are in Revelations 11 and Revelations 13.

Something unusual is there, right?

The beast conquers the church, in a sense, or the beast conquers the saints.

And it's not just John who says this, it's Daniel, 600 years earlier, says the exact same thing.

So I was like, that's weird, right?

And then two chapters after Revelation 13, we read this the saints conquer the beast.

So, you know, how can those two things both be true?

The first question you might say is like, well, what does Revelation mean by conquering?

And what it doesn't really mean is, you know, this team wins the or loses the game and wins the rematch.

Um, in Revelation, here are a list of the faithful witnesses.

You'll notice something about all of them.

They're pretty much all dead, with like one exception being John, who's exiled.

And even the semantics of the term, you know, if you get into the Greek and things like that, there's this deep connection between witnessing and severe persecution.

So when it really says that the beast conquers the saints, at least how I read that is the beast kills the saints.

I think that's a pretty faithful reading.

Um, obviously, that's not something that any of us really enjoy hearing necessarily.

It's not something that I look forward to as like persecution and possibly death.

But um, you know, when I think about, okay, well, what does the Bible actually say about this?

Does this, are we supposed to flee?

Are we supposed to, you know, is Jesus going to come and just um, you know, give us comfort in the midst of our circumstance?

Um, and and there is truth in that, absolutely.

But something that is, this is where revelation can get pretty heavy.

It says, if anyone is to be taken captive to captivity, he goes.

You know, if anyone is to be slain with a sword, with the sword must he be slain.

It says stuff like, Blessed are the dead in the Lord.

And Jesus, when he's speaking to Smyrna, the church, he says, Be faithful unto death.

So I think at a minimum, what God is saying is that the faithful Christian life is not guaranteed to be an easy life.

Because our call, our hope is not necessarily here in earthly circumstances.

And here's a, you know, a little addendum, but there's um, you know, when I think through this too, I think, okay, well, how then does the church actually conquer?

You know, if they're poor, if they're suffering, if they're persecuted, and if they're actually like literally dead.

How is that how are they possibly conquering?

And I want to show you uh one name that I left off that initial list that might help explain some of this is Jesus Christ.

So he is called the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead.

He sets the standard, and we follow.

So there's so many different directions where I could go with this, but I wanted to choose Revelation 5 because there's this beautiful verse.

And John is in heaven, and an elder says to him, Behold the lion, the lion of the tribe of Judah has conquered.

So then John, you know, hears that, and he's like, Okay, let me turn and look.

And what does he see?

He sees a lamb standing as though it had been slain.

So there's this mix of he has the marks of death, but he's standing in the middle of the throne of heaven.

And if you see it, this is the answer.

This is the key to how the church conquers, this is how Jesus conquers.

The point being is that what is seen on earth temporally in this finite life as death and persecution is the very means, it's the very act of conquering from the heavenly eternal perspective.

It's the the vector to that.

And so, how does the the church conquer then?

Well, primarily it's through the blood of the lamb.

And interestingly enough, here there's also the word of their testimony and their fidelity to him.

We are to follow the lamb wherever he goes, but he conquers.

In Revelation, as we'll talk about, it ends in a wedding.

And the church is called the Bride of Christ.

So Jesus Christ is the bridegroom, and he has done so much for us.

He demonstrated his great love for us, he proposed for us, he redeems us, he is the one that accepts us, he even gives us the wedding garments, he does everything and he washes them clean, right?

But and he tells us he's gonna come back for us.

But here's the thing is that we don't know the day.

And so, in the meantime, we are offered the dignity, the responsibility of love, of expressing our love.

And how might we do that?

Well, we're called to keep ourselves for him, which means that we're not to cheat on him with the world.

We're called to keep our garments on, we're called to keep them clean.

At the end of the day, he's the one that washes us clean, but we're also called to stay unsoiled, we're called to remain with him, and we're called to follow him wherever that might lead.

So I want to just bring this up.

Oh, I have a little time, sweet.

Um Because this is one of these most beautiful points that I think.

I want to read this verse.

It says, Oh, and let me also say this too.

In Revelation 19, you see Christ, and he is riding to victory in the final battle.

And who do you see behind him?

But the church.

Right?

And the church has no weapons, they're just adorned in the garments that he's given.

They follow behind him as he leads them to victory, ultimately.

And this is such a beautiful section.

It says, These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation.

They have washed their robes, yet they have made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

Therefore, they are before the throne of God.

For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd.

And God will wipe away every tear from their eye.

And it says that he leads them to the rivers of life.

Which is such a beautiful image, right?

We are going to go through the possibly, you know, we might be called to go through the fires of tribulation.

And through that, through the blood of the Lamb and our allegiance to him, he may lead us through the valley of the shadow of death or death itself, but ultimately he's the good shepherd, and he leads us to the rivers of life.

So we're called to trust him.

I want to continue, but I will end there.

So that's a bit of the history and this call for the church to bear witness in the midst of our very real lives.

Another thread that we see running through this book is this word hope.

Hope.

Look up at the skies.

He's coming again, and every eye will recognize him.

He is coming back.

As much as we might feel for a season, as if we've been left alone to kind of walk through this on our own, he, the pierced one, is coming back.

Skyler and I, our 12-year-old son, were heading up to uh soccer practice on Thursday.

And I said, Hey, did you know that tonight the Bills are playing the Lions?

I said, Who you got?

He's like, Oh, of course, I got the Lions.

I said, I always pick the Bulls early on.

I mean the Bulls, the Bills early on in the season.

And so, you know, we kind of settled on 30 push-ups to the winner.

And we went to soccer practice, got home, had some dinner, and then we walked in to flip on the game and see how it was going.

We picked up, not knowing what the score was, in the middle of the third quarter.

Skylar, looking at the players, his defense, Lions defense, walking onto the field, said these words.

Uh-oh.

And I said, What?

We don't even know the score.

He's like, Yeah, Dad, but it looks like my team already lost.

Friends, as we begin to walk through, as we begin to see these visions of hope and finality and victory in him, may we not be a people that trudges around in our days looking like we already lost.

The church is going to take some losses, as Andrew said.

Well, but Jesus has won, and we want to walk in that.

Pastor Steve, who was our pastor here at Sear Bible Church, the lead pastor for about nine years, just before me, um, he he said this one time, and I didn't publicly disagree with him, but I did in his office.

He said this.

He said, Hope is one of the strongest human emotions.

In fact, he upped that.

He said, Hope is the strongest human emotion.

And I was taking notes like I do every Sunday, and I'm like, I think he's crazy.

So Steve's a good friend of mine.

So I sit down in his office and I said, I think you're wrong.

Like, I don't think hope is the strongest human emotion.

He said, fact check me.

Steve was always right.

I never won these, but it didn't cause me to sit and kind of be quiet under that.

And so what I came to find out was this that we have in sort of our emotional tool case or bank, primary or primal emotions, things like anger and fear, happiness.

And then there are stronger human emotions, things like jealousy, things like shame, and things like hope.

We access these stronger human emotions when we consider multiple areas of truth or our lives.

Primary or primal emotions come by way of reaction.

We respond to our life, that which we're considering by way of truth, in other kinds of ways.

Steve again was right.

Hope is stronger than fear.

Hope is stronger than apathy, it's stronger than this sort of spirit of languishing that sometimes we live with as if somehow what looks like the score for us is the final score.

Hope is written into the revelation of Jesus, and it's meant to be for us not only that which anchors our lives, but in every way to draw us into the goodness of God.

Multiple times in this uh book, we'll just kind of be reading along, and there will be, again, like we've said, this like thunder or this rushing water or this trumpet.

And in these moments, and sometimes they're the midst of incredible uh tribulation and turmoil for the church, there's this rising up when the screen is pulled back, and this word, which is just it's a Jewish word that gets translated into English, and it literally sounds like it did for a Hebrew, and the word is this hallelujah.

And the word quite simply means God won.

Praise the king.

It's it's this praise to Yahweh because he has been and will be victorious.

And so we'll see these times where it's getting so hard, and they just start hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

Let us remind ourselves, even in the midst of the context, whatever that is for us, he has won.

There's hope there.

Look then at the very end of Revelation, how this book finishes with this great vision of God's victory.

This is in chapter 21, verse 1.

It'll also be on the screens.

Again, John says, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

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

And I heard again the loud voice from the throne saying, Look, God's dwelling is now where it's always meant to be, among the people, and he will dwell with them.

They will be his people, and he will be their God.

He will wipe away again the imagery, every tear from their eyes.

There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

He who is seated on the throne speaks up.

What does he say?

I'm making all things new.

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

He said to me, It is done.

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

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

And we as a church learn to pray as Jesus instructed us in Matthew chapter 6.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

Your kingdom come, your will be done.

Where?

On earth, as it is where?

In heaven.

So we get this vision of what in heaven looks like when the the sort of curtain is pulled back and John says, boom, here's chapter 21.

This is what heaven is about.

Let it inform your mission, church.

Let it be the way you you steward your life with purpose as a signpost to what God will one do, one day do.

And so we live and move in that way when the future seems uncertain.

When it just feels because of whatever it is that's facing us, that it looks hopeless.

When maybe you're thinking to yourself, I never thought, I never thought this would be my life.

When you maybe feel like you stepped into a season of kind of fog.

When you happen to be on the other side of your most recent failure.

Revelation is written as a book of hope, the strongest of human emotions.

And so we want to get this vision of what God has done, is doing, and will do into our bones.

To walk along with John as he says, Come up with me.

Come up with me and let me show you what God is doing.

What is he going to show us from the very first page to the very end?

His name is Come on, you're with me.

His name is It's Jesus.

He's going to point to Jesus who was and is and what will forever be, or your version of that.

Let's look at this uh phrase and we're gonna kind of walk through it as as we kind of close up a bit this morning.

This um Brian already read, but to him, this is Jesus who what?

Who loves us and has what?

Freed us.

So there's this us language.

Who's the us here?

It's the church, it's God's people.

He loves us, he's freed us from our sins by his blood.

He's made us to be a kingdom and priest to serve his God and Father.

To him be glory and power forever and ever.

Amen.

Last Easter, it was Saturday afternoon.

We had an Easter service planned here.

My heart and my sort of everything was just preparing for this Easter service when we proclaim the risen Christ.

And uh, but that afternoon, I had uh had been the had the privilege to do a wedding ceremony for some friends uh that come to our church.

And so uh they're cowboy, cowgirl, and so they did a little 300-person cowboy wedding down by Lake Tulak.

And even if you're not a cowboy and you want a really beautiful wedding, just go full cowboy style, right?

It's they're so gorgeous.

You got the little cowboys with their hats on, and all this is happening, and and so I'm out there, there's a pond at my back.

We're on hundreds of green acres, it's absolutely gorgeous.

I'm standing next to the groom, and the bride comes in with her dad in a kind of wagon or or chariot drawn by these black horses.

Dad helps her out.

We'd been told before that she had recorded a few things to be played before she would walk down the aisle with her dad in her gorgeous white dress.

And here's what she says comes over the speaker, she had pre-recorded it.

Again, I'm a pastor getting ready to do Easter.

Okay, so I got all these mixed things.

There's this other thing that's happening behind me, and she says this she says, Kyle, I love you.

I have set myself aside for you and you only.

Today, I commit myself to be your forever and faithful bride.

And she said, and I'm so thrilled about the future that God has for us.

Now, this is just before she comes.

I mean, I'm making that stuff up.

She she said it all, it wasn't word for word like that.

But let me just tell you, as she says this and she's getting ready, Easter's in the backdrop.

I'm a wreck.

I'm thinking, I'm a pastor of this crazy thing called Sierra Bible Church, this church that God calls his bride, that we might be prepared, set aside, ready to be forever faithful to our groom who's given our life.

So, you know, she comes down the aisle.

I'm a mess.

The groom's like, pastor's losing it.

I don't know what's gonna happen here.

I'm just like seeing the bride.

I'm saying, God, might that be see our Bible church, might that be who we are before you.

And I did what I've never done before.

I just had to catch my breath.

So I'm like, okay, we need to just pray.

And everyone's like, we're gonna pray.

All right, let's pray.

And I just, there was this picture, right, of the invitation that God gives us to be receivers of his what?

His love.

The picture that he uses is of a bride and a groom.

That's not coincidental.

That's because Jesus wants to get in your bones how loved you are, how cherished you are, the intimacy and desire of this relationship of a God and us as his people, a people who will one day dwell with him in the city.

He says, You have been loved.

In another place, John would say this.

He says, or John quotes Jesus, and Jesus says this.

He says, I have loved you as my Father has loved me.

Then do you remember what he says right after?

That's John 15.

He says, Now remain in my love.

That's the invitation.

Isn't just this blanket good news that you're loved by Jesus, but Jesus says, Remain in me.

Let your life live in that love.

I just want to ask us today, church, how are you doing?

How are your kind of spiritual God receivers doing?

Are they tuned in to receiving the love of God?

Are you remaining in his love?

I mean, I had a moment this last week, I wasn't proud of it.

Told a couple friends.

You know, shaky up here.

And what I realized as I was studying this is I'm not remaining in his love.

I'm remaining in my love for me.

And I'm not all that happy with me.

And maybe I could sort of understand that, you know, I'm not that good sometimes at loving me.

So I can't remain in that love.

So maybe I'll remain in your love.

Kathy's love.

That's a weight she should bear.

Right?

And then I'm walking around, love me, love me, love me, love me.

And Jesus says, What?

Oh, no, no, no, no.

I've loved you.

Now remain in my love.

That is the place.

Don't put that on your wife, don't put that on your kids, don't put that on your boss.

Don't put that on yourself.

Remain in my love.

This is the invitation that we have.

His name is Jesus.

He has loved us and he has freed us by his blood.

And again, we get these brilliant pictures of this.

And I hope they become part of how we orient ourselves in our faith.

One of those is coming up next week, is chapter one, verse 18.

Here's what John sees or hears from Jesus.

I am the living one.

I love how he says this.

I was dead, and hey, now look.

Right?

It's funny, Norm.

I think we should have laughed.

He's like, now look, I'm alive.

Come on.

That's good news and kind of crazy.

Most of the people you know that die don't have that story.

And he says, I'm alive and forever and ever.

And then what does he say?

This is an incredible picture.

I hold the what?

The keys.

I now hold the keys.

Your good works don't hold the keys.

Your religion doesn't hold the keys.

Your bad work, praise God.

Your inconsistency, praise God, doesn't hold the keys.

Jesus says, I hold the keys.

Come to me.

Trust me.

My blood, I am the one that has freed you.

Revelation 5, verses 4 through 5 give us again another incredible picture of how we ought to feel and sense this freedom that comes by way of his blood.

Revelation 5:4–5

He says, This, this is John.

He gets a little pathetic on us.

I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll.

And some of us are like, who cares?

Like, what's the scroll?

Why are you so excited about this?

The scroll is sort of the history of God's redemptive work in his people.

It's a big deal.

It's God's salvation, it's God's plan for human history, but there's no one to open it.

Then one of the elders said to me, Do not weep, John.

See the lion of the tribe of Judah.

These are some of those 500 times that Anna said that the scripture or the revelation is going to refer back to things that we know from the Old Testament.

The root of David has triumphed.

He is able, we found one who's able to open the scroll and its seven seals.

Later on, verse 9, just a couple verses down from this.

And they sang a new song.

They sang it.

What came out of them was this song.

You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals.

How?

Because you were slain.

And with the blood, your blood, you purchased for God.

What an incredible picture we get to see.

Persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.

You have made them to be a kingdom and priest to serve our God.

And they will reign on earth.

Friends, one of the highest privileges that I've had, I feel, was getting to go to this thing called Urbana a couple times.

It's a mission sort of gathering of people from every nation, every tribe, people come from all over the world.

And we filled the sort of uh basketball gymnasium at the University of Illinois.

And man, we sang songs we all knew in our own kind of original language and sang them together.

If you've ever had this moment, it just you begin to you begin to believe, you begin to hope in new ways.

And this is what we are invited to in this incredible book.

They sang a new song.

Peter says it this way.

He says this, you, you, us, we are a chosen people, a royal priesthood set apart, a holy nation, God's special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness and into wonderful light.

This is the journey that God gives Jesus to tell an angel to open the veil between heaven and earth so that John could see and the church, us, could experience his blessing.

It's our invitation to stand and to be that church that sings these words and just proclaims the goodness of who God is.

And so I can hear our worship team back there.

Come on out.

Ha ha.

What good news as we get to step into that together.

Thanks so much for joining us, church.

We hope that you enjoyed this message.

To find more messages like this, or to see where you can get connected or to give financially, please visit Sierra Bible.com.