Video Transcript: Eternal Pleasures

Let's say this together. If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things that are above not things that are on earth, for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. And our meditation today, especially beyond verse four in connection with other passages when Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory. What's involved in that appearing with Christ in glory? 

I'm going to look at Isaiah 25, verses six through nine. Now we read that quite recently in our Bible reading plan. It's one of the great Old Testament visions of what's coming and it begins with the words on this mountain. You might remember that in Isaiah 11, it talks about on this mountain and the wolf will lie down with the lamb and the infant will play here the whole of the Cobra and the lion will eat straw like the ox and the earth will be full of knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Now when it says on this mountain it's talking about the new Jerusalem, the same thing we sing about when we think about Shall we gather at the river, the river of the water of life that flows on the New Jerusalem. On this mountain where all the creatures lie down together in peace. It seems to be not just the city so those of you who like the country may need to adjust to the city.those of you really like city like they have to adjust to the life of the country because it may have the best of both city and country. 

So on this mountain, Mount Zion in New Jerusalem, the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And He will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples. The veil that is spread over all nations. The death shroud that lies over the whole earth. He will swallow up death forever. And the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth for the LORD has spoken. It will be set on that day, behold this is our God. We have waited for him that he might save us. This is the Lord; we have waited for him. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. And then Isaiah has a couple of other passages. Everlasting joy will crown their heads. Isaiah 65 has quite a bit of material on the new heaven and the new earth which is picked on picked up on by the book of Revelation. Just take this sentence be glad and rejoice forever in what I will create. And then Psalm 16 Verse 11, you have made known to me the path of life in your presence. There is fullness of joy, at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. Pleasures forevermore. Eternal pleasures. That's what God has promised to those who love Him, to those who belong to Jesus Christ. 

And as we think about eternal pleasures, I think it's important that we do that because one of the reasons why some of us have a hard time fixing our minds on things above and fixing our minds on things to come is that it does seem too vague and indefinite, and maybe even not attractive. We think of the new creation as just kind of a fog bank with a glow. And in fact, it's not simply going to be a white light, but more likely lots of living color. And not just kind of an ethereal fog, but a place established in the New Earth with the New Jerusalem as the capital city of that new earth. And we have tremendous pleasures that God has prepared for those who love Him. And we need to get just a little more of a definite picture of what the Bible says is awaiting those who love the Lord. 

Now, the Bible gives a variety of hints on this passage we read from Isaiah 25. The best of foods, the finest of wines and there's lots of other banquet language, feasting language in the Bible. And if you're a person who likes to eat, that sounds pretty good. And it's something that I kind of look forward to. It speaks of music, of harps, of trumpets of singing. If there may be musical instruments that aren't your favorite and you're not a big fan of the harp. You may say well, I really wanted to harp music. I was hoping for something a little more, you know, and well, we won't sweat it. I think we can say that whatever music is there, you'll be able to enjoy it very well. The Bible speaks of the best of the country, of the river of the water of life and fruit trees, of the animals lying down together and being in harmony and the rest of the city of this tremendous new Jerusalem with its gold streets and its gates of pearl and the foundation set with all these fantastic gemstones were all of the most rare and most precious and beautiful things that we have here on Earth are just the common building materials there. Gold is dirt. 

I told before the story of the guy who was given one wish that he could take whatever he wanted with him to heaven. And he knew that ordinarily, you can't take it with you but this time he got a chance. And so his one request was that he could take a suitcase full of gold. And so he got his request, and he was carrying a suitcase full of gold bricks and he got to the entryway to the New Jerusalem and the angel said, Well, why did he got there? We don't usually have people come to the suitcase. And so the angel said, I really like to have a look. And so he opens the suitcase and shows it to him and the angel says Why did you bring along paving stones? Well, anyway, that's not a true story, but it does illustrate the fact that what we think is so super precious, and that we will spend years and years working to accumulate is kind of like the dirt you walk on in the New Jerusalem. 

Now those are some of the biblical hints and it may well be that a lot of that is quite literal. That there will be good food to eat fine wine to drink, beautiful music, the best of the country, the best of the city because it is a new creation. But on the other hand, it may well go beyond anything we can imagine right now. Just as our resurrection bodies are going to be real, they're going to be physical. And yet, the Bible says that what we have now is kind of a seed compared to the full flowering of what the human body will be then. So too the new creation will be the full realization of what we just have a beginning of or a hint out in our best moments right now. And one way that I sometimes have urged people to just think of this is how would you describe the taste of ice cream to somebody who's never eaten anything but oatmeal. Now, this is a challenging question. And you might think about it for a few moments and say, Well, you know, ice cream is kind of like the tastiest oatmeal you've ever had in your life. Well, that, you know, to somebody who’s only had oatmeal and thinks, it's okay, that might be the best you can do with them. And sometimes even going into detail could actually if you got into more literal detail of what ice cream is like you might actually make it less appealing to them. Because you say well, you know, ice cream is a lot like the best oatmeal you've ever eaten, except you scoop it out in globs and it's cold. And you say, Oh yummy cold globby oatmeal just what I've always desired. But if there is literally more true to say that it's cold and you scoop it out and globs it's just that you don't quite get the gist of it because you're describing an experience that they cannot begin to grasp until they've had ice cream. Now, my sympathies to you to those who like oatmeal better than ice cream. For those of us who have more refined taste. I guess that Dr. Sullivan will fight with me later about the sugar factor.

Or take another example. Well I'll talk about that in a minute. The question is, right now how could a new creation pleasures be less than this? Well, because sometimes people don't look forward to the new creations as much because it seems more unreal. And this one they already know the kind of stuff that you like. And that one just seems kind of too vague and too indefinite. Even if you didn't know very much detail one thing you know for sure is Who invented everything good in this world. You know, who gave you eyes to see and ears to hear and hands and bodies to touch and and tastebuds to savor the taste and nose to smell and so on. Who created you with the ability to sense things and then who created everything delightful in the world around you that you sense. We know the answer to that. God is the inventor of pleasure. It's a very dangerous thing to think of God as simply an opponent of pleasure. God is an opponent of sin, of misuse of pleasure, of worshipping pleasures above the one who made them, but he's not an enemy of pleasure. He is the inventor of pleasure. 

And so we need to understand that all things that we delight in and that are most fun for us, comes from the hand of the Father. And not only they come from him, but they're just appetizers for what He has prepared for those who love Him. The good things in life are meant to awaken our hearts to the giver of those things. In the New Testament book of Acts, the apostle Paul was preaching and he said God fills your stomachs with food and your hearts with joy. And why did you do that? So that you would reach out for him and perhaps find those things were signals God was sending to bring your heart from the pleasure itself to the giver of all pleasure who wants to be our supreme pleasure? Not only is he the one who's giving us these things as an appetizer, but the things that you enjoy now have been dropped in the dirt and are decaying. You don't think it was kind of gross if you were in a restaurant and you saw one of the waiters just drop it on the floor and the plate shattered and now he just kind of scooped it up and dumped it on a paper plate and put it in front of you. You grab it what little you could off of that yet and you say ooh yummy. And you get a little bit of broken glass in your mouth from the shattered plate and say man, I really am enjoying this. I sure want to go to a five star restaurant where they would serve this without dropping it on the floor first. The fact is we every pleasure we have has been soiled, dirtied and has a whole bunch of glass in it and a whole bunch of stuff that can really mess us up. And so again, I'm just pointing this out because the things that you find most delightful in this life have been messed up a lot more than we realize by the fall and by sin. And the main course when it comes is going to be clean. It's going to be straight from the hand of the master chef and there's going to be no glass in it to wound us and hurt us. So pleasure, we'll be damage free in that new creation. 

Now as we think about these eternal pleasures, I want to focus on four things with you. First of all, that the new creation is placed to rest, then it's a place to play, a place to discover and a place to succeed. Those are the four things that we want to spend the rest of our time thinking about. First of all, it's a place to rest. You might think well, that's not all that appealing. If you're a little kid, you might say I don't like naps, I have to take them but I don't like to rest. You know, if you're tired if you've been working a lot rest feels pretty good. If you have been harassed and people have been bugging you and trying to harm you just to have relief from being under attack all the time, that kind of rest is delightful. If you've been a slave and you've had to work for a taskmaster and to be set free and have a little bit of rest that would be great. If you’ve been somebody wandering all over the place with nowhere to settle down, no place to call home, then unrest starts to sound pretty good. And for Israel when God promised rest in the Old Testament, it meant rest from slavery that they didn't do it in Egypt. And rest from wandering all over the place in the wilderness without a place to settle down. And it meant rest from warfare from constantly having enemies that were attacking them. 

Now God promised through Moses, My presence will go with you and I will give you rest. That was God's promise and it reached its biggest fulfillment in Israel's life during the time of King Solomon. And King Solomon said the Lord my God has given me rest on every side. What does it mean that there's rest on every side? There's no adversary no enemy, and there's no disaster. No bad stuff happening. Now did this golden age of rest just involve sitting around and napping. Well, if you read what was going on during the best parts of Solomon's reign, they were eating and drinking and making merry. They had some tremendous building projects. They did some amazing research. This golden age of Israel was not just the time of complete inactivity, of doing nothing. So it's important to understand what rest involves and what rest doesn't involve. That's Israel's foretaste of rest. 

Now, think of it this way. Some people are able to retire when they're still in excellent health. And for a few years after that, or maybe for quite a few years, they're able to live free from all the stresses of the daily grind and yet, I know people who are more busy in their retirement, more active in their retirement almost then they were during their working so called working years, because they’ve got hobbies and games and books they wanted to read but never had time to. Travel in places they wanted to go that being tied down to a job never allowed them to do. And they had a lot of work they wanted to do but back then they couldn't afford to do it because they had to get paid for the work. Now they could do work they really wanted to do and so they volunteer for this and they volunteer for that they volunteer for something else and and they're busy and they're working, but they're always doing stuff that they love to do, rather than just the stuff they have to do. And that's a lot of what the rest of heaven is like is. It's refreshing busyness where you're doing what you love to do. So just picture and eternal act of retirement where your health isn't going downhill where you're free to do the stuff you love to do and you don't have to figure out who's gonna pay the bills. 

Now, Revelation also says there'll be no night there. And I think it's a rest where you'll never sleep. My kids might be happy to hear that because sometimes they're a little grumpy when you put them to bed, because there's more stuff they want to do. But the fact is they need to go to bed. Because otherwise they're gonna get really grumpy with me, you know, if they don't get enough sleep. But eternal rest is of such a nature that the things you do energize you and reinvigorate you. Now, Scripture says, Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, they will rest from their labor. Just this week when my kids came up to me and said, What is that book? It was a book about this fat literally, you know, 700 plus pages, a very, very fat book and the title of that book is the saints everlasting rest by Richard Baxter, one of the great Puritan authors. And the whole book is basically a meditation on Christ and on the life to come. The Saints’ everlasting rest. So he thought it was very good. He wrote it by the way, when he thought he was going to die. He recovered from that, but he wrote all that he thought that he was not going to be living much longer and he was meditating on the dead who die in the Lord and the rest they have from their labor. 

Jesus said in my Father's house are many mansions. I go there to prepare a place for you. A place to rest is a place that is secure, that's delightful, that you're not slaving away. It's safer from attack than any castle fortress. You read about the New Jerusalem walls 200 feet thick. Whether or not that's a literal detail, it means it's gonna be pretty hard to break into by the enemy. But its gates are open day and night because there aren't any enemies to try attacking. You know, the Bible, again is using images to portray we know not what except that it's very secure safer than any castle fortress, plusher than the finest luxury motel. But you know, the trouble with the fortress or luxury motel just isn't home. So we can trust also that that place of rest is gonna be cozier than your family room. So however God chooses to arrange that is absolute security. This delightful luxury and at the same time, this place to feel completely at home, a place to rest. 

Now again, we talked about ice cream and oatmeal. There's a little illustration if you're talking about this grand city. How would you describe the Eiffel Tower to someone who's never seen anything grander than a mud hut? Well, you say, you know, it's kind of like the fanciest hut ever built by your greatest chief. And yet, somehow, something got lost in translation. And when the Scripture is speaking to us in terms of this fantastic city that God is preparing and this wonderful home and these many mansions, what is literally true, we can’t always be sure. A lot of things may well be literally true and what isn't will be even better because it just went beyond anything that could enter our experience or our ability to imagine. Well, Heaven as a place of rest, heaven on earth as a place of rest. 

Also, secondly, a place to play. The nursing child should play over the whole of the cobra and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adders nest. The city streets be filled with boys and girls playing there. Now I don't know again how literally to take some of this because I don't know if there are going to be kids who are still a little say when they died and who are going to grow up in the new creation or whether we're all instantly going to be at our full flowering that I'm not sure of. But the sense that God's giving us of a place of delight and a play and where even the smallest and the weakest can be sure that there's no harm coming and that they can just be having a lot of fun. That's certainly here in the picture. Jesus, maybe didn't call it quite a place to play. He made it something maybe even worse for those of us who want to be properly solemn, and upright and religious. If he didn't call it a place of play, He just called it place of party. And Jesus often called the kingdom of having a feast. He was accused of being a party animal, his enemy said he's a glutton and a drunkard. That's what they said. Now, that doesn't mean he actually just stuffed his face and stuffed his face like a glutton or that he was staggering drunk. I'm sure he never was because the Bible says he never committed sin. But he was at enough parties that he was accused of this and he talked about partying enough that he was accused of being a party animal. So we have to be very careful not to equate grumpiness with godliness. You know the old syndrome of being so sour that people think you were baptized in lemon juice. This is not the way to go. So again, there are times to be sober and serious, but Jesus portrayed the kingdom as a party. And what if those eternal robes aren't just choir robes? What if they were party clothes. The Bible does seem to speak of God giving the proper party garments to be a part of the banquet, part of the celebration? 

Now, the harps, the other instruments, dance music, that's kind of stuff that I maybe have to back off on and avoid when I think the new creation because then it might make me less eager to get there. You know, if you're born with two left feet, the talk of dancing is, you know, not all that exciting for me. But then I have to be very careful not to and you know, what? Dancing is one of those things evil people will do and dancing is a hideous evil, that all must shun on all occasions. Some of you may have come from churches, or have heard that kind of ministry. Dancing and card playing were among those things that those who have a share in the kingdom of God would never do. And I'm speaking quite literally here. You think I'm exaggerating? I'm not. Well, you will take up your tambourines and go out to dance with the joyful. It's in there. I can't do much about it. So I guess maybe I'll learn to dance. 

Spiritual and relational pleasures. Now, I've been talking about the various pleasures it's important realize that spiritual pleasures and the relational pleasures and things I talked about a few weeks ago, when I talked about heaven as a world of love, about the relationships in the new creation. Those in a sense are certainly greater than some of the things that I'm talking about right now. Just because something is greater and more important doesn't mean the lesser aren't there. It would be a total disaster if the only thing you looked forward to about heaven was dancing, or a good feast and you weren't looking forward to meeting God, the maker and Giver of them all. Then you would have got everything backwards. That’s what we do here on this earth. We're desiring stuff, not just wrong stuff. It's not necessarily wrong in itself. We're just trying to want it more than we want God. 

But the fact is, that when we do want the Giver, he does have an awful lot of gifts to give and the New Testament and the Old Testament, make very clear that he's got a lot, a lot in store for us. Now, we're still going to be bodily beings. We're going to enjoy bodily delights, and he's just going to keep flooding us with His gifts. Maybe one way to think of it is what's a really good wedding like. You know, there is such a thing as being sober, being serious, and I think eternity is going to be serious fun. There is such a thing, you know, where you know that something really important, something heavy in the best sense, the weight of glory is going on. At the same time, it's sheer delight. 

Think of what goes into a good wedding. A good wedding is often very formal, in some parts of it, and everybody's rehearsed and they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do that particular thing and they're wearing all these fancy, expensive clothes. And the minister says some very lofty words and so on. And so being serious, and I hope to get married, and I'm serious when you show up at the altar. You're committing the rest of your life to this deal. It's a weighty, serious occasion. But does that mean then the reception is got to be this real boring? Everybody be, let us ponder the seriousness of holy matrimony. It is serious. You should ponder it. But you can also have a lot of it at the wedding and at the reception, okay. And delight in the joys that God has prepared for married people. 

I remember my parents anniversary their 50th. Now, did we spend that whole time just sitting there saying, Oh, father and mother, thou hast been outstanding parents and yay indeed and barely superb grandparents as well and we appreciate you and we now will ponder your value. Well, you know, we actually we just went to a mountain chalet and we golfed and went on our water slides and has a lot of food and you know partied and ate candy and stuff that would rot your teeth and be unhealthy for you. And you know, and did a whole lot and play board games laughed and went out what have you. Now there were some serious times as well where we really expressed our thanks and appreciation to my mom and dad. And the last night we were there, there was this beautiful double rainbow that was in the sky and it was just very moving time, you know, where you had some tears. But the tears and the seriousness did not rule out the fun and the delight and I think that's just a little itty bitty taste of God's new creation. In a sense, a moment of serious remembrance and serious gratitude and serious love among family members together with just a tremendous a time of fun and celebration and feasting. 

Well, let's move on. Thirdly, the new creation is a place to discover. Now, if I had phrased that a place to learn, or a place to study and some of you and said, Oh no, I'm up to my eyeballs already in that kind of stuff. And I don't want one bit more. But there's a difference between the way we learn now in some areas and what that place to discover will be like. It won't be just boring classes, but firsthand exploration. Now, if you want to know about volcanoes, you don't look at it in a book and then memorize eight words about different parts of the volcano or lava or this or that maybe you can just go dive in and swim a while and not get hurt and check the thing out. Or dolphins or if you want to check out the woolly mammoth, you don't actually have to examine the bones or the pictures. Maybe you'll get to look at a few live. Maybe this would be heaven indeed for some of my boys. You can check out the dinosaurs alive and in action. I'm not necessarily eating you, but just to see them. You know to see God's creatures firsthand in a renewed and restored creation. When you're talking about history, you don't need to read this book. And some authors have managed to somehow make some pretty exciting history as dry as dust. But you know what happens? We're all falling and even well intentioned authors can be more boring than they want to be. Hey, even some preachers can be more boring than they want to be. And there you learn about God and angels in direct contact and not just through sermons and scholars and people trying their best to explain something to you, but not being very good at it. 

So as a place to discover, whether it's discovering the wonders God has made or whether it's discovering the wonders of God Himself, what a blessing and a joy, that discovery will be. Another good thing about it, one problem we have with school is that our teachers are a little boring at times. Not to be mothers, of course, but some authors can be. But another problem we have with learning is we're not that good students. Sometimes we're lazy. We're slack, and sometimes we're just dunce. A little slow to pick up on things. Hey, don't wanna insult anybody here. But it happens. Okay? We don't always get it the first time and we're not always as excited as we couldn't be. But there, you'll have the curiosity of a preschooler. Somebody's just always wanting to learn a little something more and is all excited about it. You have the intellect of a genius. Somebody can get it and learn it and really grasp it. And learning is gonna be a whole lot more fun when you're truly curious and when you're truly brilliant. 

I think it would also be enjoyable to have guided tours of glory. It's fun in the Bible to read about, say the tour that Ezekiel got, looking around the New Jerusalem and the new temple and the promises that God was making for the future. Or John's tour of the new creation and the New Jerusalem. One of my favorite books, “The last battle” by CS Lewis is kind of a guided tour further up and further in where they're getting further and further into that new creation that's envisioned in that book. And one of the things that happens in that book is they swim up a waterfall or they climb up a waterfall of this particular waterfall happens to be the highest one in the world. Over 3000 feet high on Angel Falls in Venezuela. I always thought it'd be kind of cool to go up a waterfall. I don't know if that'll be possible at all. I know we'll be able to walk on water. I know we'll be able to fly. The Bible says we're going to be caught up to meet the Lord in the air for instance. So it says Jesus walked on water and Peter walked on water. So the bodies we have then are going to have some pretty superb capacities. And that's going to give us all sorts of advantages in exploration and discovery and learning that we don't currently have. 

So again, a place to discover is going to be discovering God's creation, but also discovering more and more of God Himself. One of the great promises of Isaiah 11 about this mountain, this new Jerusalem where all the animals are in harmony is that the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully even as I am fully known. And I hope I don't have to remind you again that this is the best thing. This is the best thing. Just as I talked about the different loves, there are the love for animals, the love for fellow humans, the love for angels, but the love for love himself is the love that swallows up all the others. And the knowledge of all these other things in the discovery and the learning may be exciting because it comes from the hands of the maker. But the best learning of all is simply going to know God more and more and more fully, instead of being beset my doubts, being beset by questions and confusion about things we can't understand. But to have this crystal clarity and this firsthand knowledge and encounter with God and to be just filled with the knowledge of the Lord. What a delight that will be. 

Let me remind you again, that knowledge of the Lord is different in many ways than the knowledge I desperately tried to impart when I'm preaching or when I'm teaching because I'm really a pretty boring kind of guy, compared to the God who made me and the God who called me to preach. When you know him, you'll know just how bad my preaching was because he is going to be so much more alive and exciting and gripping than anything I could possibly convey. Every so often, He does me a huge favor of via his Holy Spirit of sealing something on your hearts and getting you excited about it in spite of me. But you know, in that new creation, we'll know fully even as we are fully known. 

And the fourth thing I want to point out is that it's a place to succeed. And I really value that and let me just say again, I can't stand prosperity preachers. Because they all say if you do it right and behave properly, have enough faith, you would be rich, and you just gonna be loaded with money and you're always gonna be healthy, yada, yada, yada, lie, lie lie. Okay, the fact is many times true followers of Jesus Christ live under the cross right now. And success lies in becoming more and more like Jesus Christ in carrying out his program, his kingdom in a very difficult world faced with enemies and opposition. But the fact is, they are right about one thing, God is going to bless us with success. They just got their timing a little off. Now, the fact is one of the frustrations is that curse that God put on the work after Adam and Eve fell that was gonna be full of thorns and thistles. There was an old Dutch immigrant that I knew growing up. His name was Alex and he was a dairy farmer. And whenever anything went really wrong, just got messed up and frustrating he’d say Oh Adam, Adam. He was so mad at Adam for all those thorns and thistles. Oh, Adam, Adam. And so when you lose your keys and you can't find those thinking things anywhere or when your computer crashes again and you just lost what you were working on for a week or something you were hoping for collapses in ruins Oh, Adam, Adam. 

In the new creation we will have a little bit more of a new Adam and of his ability to have command over the things of creation. The curse on work will be removed and work itself, you know, again, I put this as a place to succeed because if I put it as a place to work, you say, Oh no, I got enough of that already. But the fact is work is gonna be a delight when it always works out. When you never run low on energy. When you're never just stuck with a boring do nothing accomplish nothing kind of job. All the goals we work toward will be achieved because the goals we have will be God given goals, given to us clearly. Not just the kind of stuff you try something here and yeah, that might work out and that one doesn't that one doesn't either. That's the nature of work right now. You have to be able to live with that with ventures that don't work out. But there all the goals we worked will be totally achieved. 

And not only that, we'll enjoy what comes our way. They will build houses and dwell in them. You don't build the house and then don't get to have it. They'll plant vineyards and eat their fruit again. These were people you got to remember who were very familiar in Isaiah’s time with foreign armies coming in and just seizing everything they worked for. Or just when you've got everything going, you up and die and leave behind everything that you were building up. No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat. My chosen ones will long enjoy the works of their hands. They will not toil in vain. What a tremendous sentence in the Bible. They will not toil in vain. That's one of the most frustrating things in life is toiling in vain. You try and you try and try and it doesn't pan out. 

What's our main work? Well, it's gonna be back to Eden only better. Our work is to rule God's creation and to bring out the best in everything and develop it to its full potential. That's our work. That was Adam and Eve original work. That's the work that we imperfectly try to pursue even now. But it's a work that we will pursue with complete ability and talent and success. Then we'll rule God's creation. We wikl bring out the best in everything. Isaiah says the wilderness will rejoice and blossom, new wine will drip from the mountains and flow from the hills. That's the language of creation just flourishing under our rule. Remember what I said in a previous sermon from Romans eight, that the whole creation is groaning because it's in bondage to decay. And it's groaning because it longs for the freedom of the children of God and why? Because when the children of God are free, when Christ who is your life appears and you appear with them in glory, then your glory and your reign brings blessing and success and flourishing to every other aspect of creation. God designed it so that when we fell, everything else fell into bondage with us. And when we were freed, everything rises into the glorious freedom of the children of God with us. When our resurrection bodies rise, the whole redeemed creation rises to. 

So this is just a little bit more of what it means to set your minds on things above and things to come and to look forward to what God has prepared for us. A place to rest, a place to play, a place to discover a place to succeed. Jesus said, I've come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly. He came to give abundant life to taste at least a little of it now through His Holy Spirit and the fullness of it when creation is made new. And in this Lenten season, we remember what it cost to get us that life. Remember he did not just die to rescue you from your sin. Though he did. And he did not just die to rescue you from hell. Though he did. But he died to make you his sons and daughters and to give you abundant life forever and ever. That's what he did in his life here on earth, His perfect life and his death and resurrection. And the Bible says that His blood is infinitely precious in God's sight and if God didn't withhold him, he won't withhold anything else. And the only way that we would ever run out of pleasures in heaven is if we overspent our credit. And our credit is Jesus righteousness and Jesus blood. And that is a credit count, that account that cannot be exhausted. You cannot overspend on the credit purchase for you by Jesus Christ. When you drink of the river of the water of life and when you're doing these things in the new creation and when God has called you to succeed and called you to learn you will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea because you will be full of the Spirit of the Lord. And only if there was a shortage of spirit, would you ever run out of those things and you cannot run out of the spirit because we have the absolute fullness of the Spirit poured on us in the new creation, the inexhaustible river of the water of life flowing to us and through us. And only if God himself God, the Almighty Father were to run out of love and grace and creativity and pleasures, could we run out of pleasures in that new creation? 

But when we've been there a billion years, we will not have begun to scratch the surface of the greatest depths of God's wisdom and knowledge and power. And that is the great thing again about this new creation that God has given us not only to experience and, and take in and relish all these blessings, but again and again and again, to say thank you to the one who purchased them for us. Thank you to the Father who planted out from before the foundation of the world. This is what he was planning all along. This is why he thought it was worthwhile to go through a lot of the mess we go through because he had this in mind as the end result. And this is what the Holy Spirit has already started in you. By faith already now, you can see some of these great and very precious promises of God, even now, you begin to become partakers in the divine nature. And in that future, you taste of life and you have it more and more abundantly, forever and ever. 

Father, we thank you for these precious promises. Help us Lord to set our minds and our hearts on you and on these promises you've given us. Father where we find in our own heart that we don't desire you and that we don't take seriously the wonder of your promises, help us again, to look to the cross to realize the seriousness of our sin that blocks our access to you and find in Jesus Christ our salvation our forgiveness our reconciliation and renewed relationship with you and then to be able to look forward with the light to all that you have prepared for us. Lord, help us to live by faith each day in these promises to set our hearts and our minds on you and on all that awaits us. We bless your name. We thank you. We marvel at who you are, of what awaits us and what you've already begun to accomplish in our lives through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.