Ascension Service

[00:00:01] Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our father and from our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. [00:00:12] Why did Jesus go up? [00:00:14] Like, to make a place for us? Thank you. Thank you. What a wonderful answer. [00:00:23] All right, so he goes to make a place for us. We'll go there like we heard in the song, right? In my father's house are many rooms. Jesus says, and I go to prepare a place for you. [00:00:36] All right, so where's his father's house? Is it up there? You know, the. This is. I'm getting such good attention from the youngsters. This is really good. [00:00:49] Okay, so just getting too many answers. That's a good thing. [00:00:54] So where is it? Where's his father's house? You know, we've got telescopes now, okay? So we can see up there and we haven't found it. Right? Now, of course, the scripture is not talking about some confined space, like just another room, right? Like, where is the right hand of God if Jesus has gone and sat there? Well, I mean, with God, it just works differently, right? Like God's different than us. He made us with bodies to inhabit space, right? And Jesus, I mean, God is spirit. Okay? So when we see Jesus ascending into heaven, it's not that there's a stool waiting for him up there, you know, a throne, and he sits in it, and we just haven't seen it because, you know, he's ascending. So why up? Why does he go up? [00:01:49] Well, because he's going onward and upward, right? Or, well, because he doesn't want to be in the pit even. Nobody likes to be in the pits, right? [00:02:02] We like to ascend. We like to be on top of the world, right? [00:02:07] See, we use this language of being like, low. I'm feeling really low, or I'm flying high right now, or I'm on top of the world. We use this language all the time, and there are good reasons for that. Part of it's hidden to us because of our modern perspective, because we live in the world of telescopes and looking at planets and having light bulbs in our house so that it's no longer dark at night, things like that. But you might call it heaven and earth, okay? This space where being low is no fun and being up high is good. This is just connected to the world and the way things work. [00:02:54] One little example would be that things that are low are dark. [00:03:01] You go lie on your face in a field, you're not going to see very much. [00:03:06] You go in a cave, you're going to see even less. You go down underground, it's going to be really dark. But you go up high and you're going to get perspective. You're going to understand where you are. You're going to understand what's around you, maybe even what's around you for miles. [00:03:21] That's just the experience of being up high as opposed to being down low. [00:03:27] So that's what it means in our prayer today. That was, I don't know when it was written. It's probably fairly ancient. [00:03:35] That's what it means. [00:03:38] Almighty God, as your only begotten son, our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into the heavens, so may we also ascend in heart and mind, and continually dwell there with him who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit. One God, now and forever ascending with heart and mind. It's like your mind's in the gutter. [00:03:59] Just another phrase that we use, right? You don't want your mind in the gutter. [00:04:04] That's where, like, the unrefined things are. Just like, unrefined metals are down under the ground. They're dirty, they don't look like anything. They're dark, they don't reflect light. And then you pull them up out of the ground and you refine them. You shine them up, right? Or you. You burn away what doesn't belong and you shine them up, and now they reflect light. [00:04:27] Now they're bright and beautiful. You've brought it up. You've made it. Ascend. [00:04:35] This is what we're talking about. All right? So we were made not to live in the gutter, not to be confused and lost in the darkness. Not understanding, like, relationships or our purpose in the world, or, you know, things, okay? We weren't made for confusion. We were made for understanding. But how does that understanding come? It comes from God's word. God made us. He made everything. He understands us and everything. [00:05:08] Yeah. And he gave us. He gave us his word. Okay? And the way that we were originally supposed to work was we listen to him, and he shapes our understanding of ourselves, of our purpose in life, of the way that relationships work, right? Of our place in the world, by listening to his word. We are shaped by his word, and we have perspective. Like, we're on top of the world and we can see we're up in the heavens. [00:05:36] That's what we were made for. [00:05:40] So Jesus ascending into heaven, it's not that, like, the earth is bad, right? It's that by rejecting God's word and turning away from him and not looking to him to make things understandable for us to guide and direct our lives by not looking to him, we've made ourselves carnal, which is like meaty. It's like this unrefined stuff that you have to refine before you can even consume it. Right? It's earthly. Okay, we've made ourselves earthly by rejecting the word. [00:06:14] So what's the goal? The goal is that heaven and earth would join, like here. How does it happen? By faith. By faith in Jesus. By paying attention to him, looking to him, receiving his word, and being shaped by it. [00:06:32] When that happens, we're guided according to good order, just like in a body. [00:06:41] If all the parts of my body are just acting on their own and not listening to the head, it's going to be really chaotic and possibly painful. But if all my body parts are listening to my head, then it's like heaven and earth are joined so that my body parts that can't do anything good on their own, that can't order themselves rightly, they're actually sharing in the wisdom of my head so that there's this beautiful participation in heaven. So this is the joining of heaven and earth. It's everything. Being guided according to, well, according to God's will. [00:07:22] That's the goal. [00:07:24] And that's what our long run on sentence, confusing difficulty, epistle reading said at the very end. [00:07:33] It says, talking about how Christ has been, he was raised from the dead, and then he was seated at God's right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not just in this age, but in the one to come. [00:07:48] All things are under his feet. [00:07:51] And then it says that God has given him as head over the church. Okay, guiding, guiding the church. Like all the people of the church, God's assembly, God's people, okay. Jesus is the head guiding the church, which is his body. Again, we just. By listening to our head, by listening to Christ, we're guided in good order. [00:08:16] Heaven and earth meet. [00:08:19] Earth is filled with heaven. So Christ is Jesus. Christ is the head over all things to the church, which is his body, which embodies him, the fullness of him who fills all in all. So again, there, God's people are, the fullness of him who fills all in all. You see the joining of heaven and earth here, the joining of heaven and earth. [00:08:45] This is wonderful. Paul says elsewhere, things like, Jesus has seated us in the heavenly places with Christ. That is to say that in Jesus we have understanding, knowledge. We know God in him, we know about what it means to be a human being. You want to know what it means to be a human being. [00:09:04] Look to Jesus, the man who lived a perfect life, who gave himself up in perfect love for us, for human beings. [00:09:20] Look to him and see he wasn't affected by pride or envy or his own desires that might wreck him or wreck us. He wasn't affected by any of that. He wasn't even affected as he walked to the cross and people were making fun of him and beating him, spitting on him and things like that. And then he goes and he gets crucified, wrongly, as a criminal, as if he were a criminal. [00:09:51] He didn't even fight back. [00:09:55] There we see Jesus gladly giving himself up, self sacrificial love for us. That's what it means to be a human being, to obey our heavenly Father and to give ourselves up in love to one another. [00:10:11] But it's not. Christianity isn't just about, like, okay, so now we've stated all the rules, you know, here's what it looks like to be a human being. Now go get to it. And I, you know, start making your way up into those heavens little by little. [00:10:26] It's not like, you know, I'm wearing this white up here because I'm pure. You know, that would be, it represents the heavens. This is the sky that I'm wearing right now. But here's the key. Like, the sky is covering me. This is Christ's purity and saying, like, don't look at me, okay? Cause I'm all messed up. But by faith in Jesus, I have his forgiveness and life. Like, he's promised me everything, like a rich inheritance that I don't deserve. He's enlightened my heart insofar as I look to him, right, it's all like, everything that we have that's good comes from God and not from us, not because we deserve it. Christianity is about looking to Jesus for mercy and forgiveness, looking for him to purify us, to make us like himself. And he's gonna come back, he's gonna become visible to us again on the last day, and he's going to judge the living and the dead, and he's going to purify things forever. And all who are in him by faith, all who trust in him, he will renew completely and purify and restore to be what we were made to be in the beginning. Thanks be to God. In Jesus name, amen.