I am making everything new. Rev 21

Happy Mother's day.

Text: Rev 21:1-5
The anchor key verse for the semester. Gen 1:27. We are made in the image of God.

Our key verse is: Rev 21:5

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

The king is speaking to you.
The speaker -the one who seated on the throne The King is speaking to us.

Trustworthy and true
"I am making everything new." Since the king is speaking this is trustworthy and new.

How the world is going to end?
The graduation is not the end. The world will end with a new earth and a heaven coming down from the heaven. There will be no seas. The new Jerusalem is coming down.

The gospel declares that we are beautiful.
We will be a bride dressed beautifully for his bridegroom. From man's perspective this is not an easy verse to accept. But the king is speaking.

I am beautiful to my king Jesus.

Why we are beautiful? When God made the world, everything was beautiful. But we sinned God. As a result, the world became ugly. The decay and death came to us. We challenged God's authority and willfully sinned against God.

It is not easy to see. The entropy rules the world. Everyone grows old and dies. Everyone becomes beautiful. For example, my younger sister was once a beautiful woman like her daughter present here with us. But when I looked at her she is now a middle aged woman. She is breaking.

We have much mourning and death. Our lives are full of buckets of tears. The Bible is realistic. We are living in the world that is decaying.

With our own eyes we see us who are not that beautiful.

What does the gospel declares? To Jesus we are like brides beautifully dressed for her bridegroom. We are beautiful.

I see my wife spending my hours a day making herself beautiful. Even though the Bible says we are beautiful we do not practice this truth. It is not easy. If we practice this truth, the beauty industry will be go out of business tomorrow.

We feel ashamed. We want to make us beautiful. For women, it is beauty treatment. For men, it is to gain power and have beautiful cars. But no matter what we do we cannot get rid of our shame. We feel that we are not beautiful.

In this world, Jesus came. The very Son of God came and died for our sins. Not only he died but God raised him from the dead freeing the agony of death. The Bible tells us that Jesus freed us from the old order of things.

When we accept Jesus, we are beautiful to him. We have Bruno Mars moment each day. I can hear Jesus saying, "Sam you are beautiful."

I look at the mirror and saying, "Jesus you are right. I am beautiful."

This is our confidence in Jesus. This is trustworthy and true. We put our faith in him. "The king is making everything new."

How then shall we live with this good news of God?

The Bible does not say that we will have no more pain or death as soon as we accept Jesus. We will have death and mourning. The buckets of tears will be there. There will be heartbreaks, betrayals and so on.

Give time, you will find out.

What is the purpose of God giving all these trials and temptations? But we have the gospel of Jesus. We are confident that God is making everything new.

Solomon, the wisest guy in the world said,

"He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. " (Ec 3:5)

He had the glimpse of God who will make everything beautiful because God made us in his image. We have this eternal perspective. But he could not know.

But we who believe in Jesus knows more than Solomon.

We will be beautiful because our goal has been changed when we meet Jesus. We want to please him (2 Cor 5:9) like a bride beautifully dressed. This bride is like Jesus, so beautiful. We want to be like Jesus (Ro 8:29)

In our sufferings and in our sorrows we hear the good news of God. We live to please the King. We pray to be like his beautiful Son.

So we thank God for his grace for saving us so that we can live to please God by becoming like his Son.

We can say at the end of lives,

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing. (2 Tim 4:7-8)

I cannot tell that you will be pain free when you meet Jesus. But I can tell you, this Jesus is worth more than any beauty treatments that the world offers.

He is worthy. His word is trustworthy and true.

God made his promise to us to live with us.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

There will be no more shame. No more beauty treatment. No more pretense. We can live under the grace of Jesus.

We will be completely united with our LORD Jesus.

This is God's reward and God's promise for those whose goal is to please God and be like his Son by making the confession of faith and trusting his word:
"I am making everything new."

"I am making everything new." Everything includes me.

Everything includes you.