May 25, 2025, Message by P. Kevin Clancey
Transcribed by Beluga AI.
Amen. All right, dear ones, life is good. God is good. He has redeemed us.
This reminder, in two weeks, right here in Poulsbo, we’ll be concluding our Holy Spirit conference with Dr. Dean Braxton. So, I invite you to come. I invite you to come to all the meetings that start Friday night, June 6th in Bremerton, Saturday night, June 7th in Bremerton, then Sunday morning in Bremerton. But then Sunday night we’ll be up here.
All right, so June 6th is the, in 1944, 156,000 troops invaded the shores of Normandy, and 4,000 Allied soldiers that day, more so the preceding days after that, died. And we honor that.
This weekend, turn to somebody and say, I’m glad we’re not speaking German. All right, so for those. Well, yeah, that’s midway, but yeah, yeah, yeah. So for that day and for just the people throughout our history, over half a million died during the Civil War, both North and South, so that we could live in this country and be free.
So we are grateful, Lord, for those lives.
All right, we’re going into Romans 9. Romans 8, 9, and just want to say about Romans 9, 10, and 11, Paul makes a shift. All right.
At the end of Romans 8, he kind of makes a conclusion, concluding statement. I’m convinced neither life nor death, angels nor demons, height nor depth, the present nor the future, nor any powers in all creation can separate us from the love of God, that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And in 9, 10, and 11, Paul shifts to this question of what about the Jews and the Gentiles,
39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:39, CSB)
what about Israel?
We are thousands of years removed from this. But during the time of Paul, this was a huge question that the church was facing. We still deal with it today. I mean, people still talk about what does it mean, what is Israel’s place in God’s ultimate plan of what he’s doing on earth, etc.
And that’s still very relevant as people, you know, as Israel’s national Israel is continually in the news.
But back in the first century, here was the issue. And the issue was that God had made all these promises to Israel, and now the Messiah had come.
That’s what the Christians. That’s what these Christians are saying. They’re saying Jesus is the Messiah.
But surprisingly, not really surprisingly, when you look at the Old Testament prophecies, but surprisingly to the current people during Paul’s time, is that the Gentiles were the ones who were far and away now outstripping the Jews in accepting, believing in, and receiving the benefits of this Messiah. The Jewish Messiah has now become this great gift to the Gentiles.
And so Romans 9 is written from Paul to kind of wrestle with that question, you know, what’s going on here? And so we’ll look at that for the next couple of weeks.
We’re going to look at Romans 9 tonight. We’re only going to look at the first five verses. Verses 6 through 33, we’ll get to later. And those are very kind of very controversial verses. And the church has argued about those verses. It’ll be some theology. But I just want to look at the first five verses tonight.
So, Romans 9:1-5.
1 I speak the truth in Christ I am not lying; my conscience testifies to me through the Holy Spirit 2 that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the benefit of my brothers and sisters, my own flesh and blood. 4 They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the temple service, and the promises. 5 The ancestors are theirs, and from them, by physical descent, came the Christ, who is God over all, praised forever. Amen. (Romans 9:1-5, CSB)
And may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock, our Strength, and our Redeemer. Amen.
So, Paul is an apostle. He is very adamant about that. He declares that he’s an apostle. The other apostles accept him as an apostle.
And oftentimes, people ask, what is it that makes an apostle? By the way, we know the word apostle. Epistle is another word. Anybody know what an epistle is? You would think a letter, but actually, Bryan. Oh, I thought you knew this one. An epistle is the wife of an apostle. No, you’re right. First shot. Ats, you are right. An epistle is a letter.
So the apostle writes epistles, and they talk about the qualifications of the first century apostles, that they had to be with Jesus. They had to witness the resurrected Jesus. An apostle literally means one who was sent. Apostles are given signs and wonders. They are persecuted. But I think Paul gives us another characteristic of an apostle that we often overlook, and that is his incredible love for the lost, his incredible love for God and for God’s people. That’s what makes an apostle.
Paul is sent to be a missionary to the Gentiles, and yet his heart breaks for his own family. I was talking with Atz earlier about just how my mom’s generation, her brothers, her sister, their spouses, when I became a Christian, they became a target of my Prayer life. My own family became a target of my prayer life. And I prayed that none of them would leave this planet until they were ready to meet Jesus. And I tried to share my faith with them, with my aunts and my uncles and that sort of thing, but that was my prayer. I had a heart for what my people, my people.
And listen, all people are God’s people. But you came from a context. You came from a tribe, you came from a family unit. You know, Karen will talk about her large family and the number of her large family that don’t know the Lord. In contrast, Brian, to your family, where you had that Christian upbringing and that was a part of your family’s inheritance.
And so we have these people and an apostle. Even though Paul is sent to the Gentiles, his heart breaks for the Jews. And this is what he says. He actually says this: He says, I wish I’d go to hell so that they could be saved. I’d give up my salvation. So I wish I would be cursed and cut off from Christ so that they would be saved.
That’s a big love right there. That’s a big love right there. And that is the heart of why was Paul’s ministry so effective? Maybe because that’s who God made him to be.
He had such a heart for the lost to be found that he could even wish that he himself would be cut off from Christ so that others would be saved. Now, that’s not a possibility. That’s not how God works. You don’t have to pray that. You don’t have to pray for a lost family member and say, Lord, you could cut me off as long as they would be found.
God doesn’t work that way, but it does reflect the heart of an apostle. And there’s lots of people today, and people question whether or not they’re modern-day apostles. Certainly not in the same sense of the 12.
But apostle literally means one who is sent to establish a work or to come into a new region. So can there be apostles who are sent, who operate in signs and wonders, who are persecuted, and who love God and love people passionately? Absolutely.
And who help kind of grow works and regions and have some sense of spiritual guardianship or love or passion for the lost in a particular region?
Sure, there can be that today. But I will tell you of many who claim to be an apostle. Oftentimes it’s more of a sign of a badge or a prestige. You know, I’m an apostle and I get to boss everybody around because I’m an apostle. That’s not what the first century apostles were like.
They had an authority that came from their relationship with God that flowed out of their humility, their sacrifice, the price they paid, and their persistent drive and passion to expand the gospel and to build up the church.
And so he’s a missionary to the Gentiles, but his heart still breaks for Israel. I wonder what evangelism would look like if the church had the heart of Paul. I’ll bet prayer meetings would be full. I bet prayer meetings would be full. And I bet evangelism would be a priority that we would have. And it’s.
And I’m not shaming anybody. I’m not doing that. But what I am saying is it probably is a worthy prayer to pray. Lord, give me the heart of St. Paul for the lost. Give me the heart of St. Paul for the lost. That I would love people so much that I would even wish myself to be accursed, that they might be saved. And that’s a great picture of an apostle. And then he talks about these eight gifts that God gave Israel in the Old Testament.
And as I read this, I realized that the Old covenant is a shadow of the New Covenant.
And that all of these eight blessings that God says, you know, throughout Romans, Paul’s arguing, what advantage is there to being a Jew if everybody’s justified by faith, what particular advantage is there of being a Jew? And he kind of says both. He kind of says there’s a great advantage, but not the advantage, you think?
And he’s really going to deal with that in the rest of Romans chapter nine, that being an ethnic Israel does not guarantee you the blessings of the Messiah Jesus, as some supposed. And that’s going to be the argument he makes in chapters 9, 10, and 11.
But here he talks about the incredible inheritance that Israel has received. And if we understand our Bibles and we understand that the blessings of the Old Covenant contained in them, they’re a shadow or a picture of the blessings that we receive in the New Covenant.
The author of Hebrews talks about that. And so all the blessings. I want to talk tonight about all the blessings that he lists here that Israel received and then how they apply to us as now people who have been, who follow the Messiah, Jesus, who have put our faith in him.
And. And how is it. And Paul talks about this in Romans 11. He says, We’ve been grafted into that tree. And so what do these blessings now continue? They weren’t just there for the Old Testament Jews. They continue to have application.
And even a greater and bigger and more realized application in the lives of his people today. And so the Old Covenant is a shadow of the New Covenant.
The first blessing, he says, is adoption. And Israel is called God’s son. God chose Israel. God chose Abraham. God chose Isaac. God chose Jacob. God chose David. God chose the tribe of Judah. God chose Israel and adopted them.
He calls Israel, oftentimes in the Bible, he calls Israel my child or my son. He laments when Israel disobeys him and he has to bring them into judgment.
He laments that his child is rebellious. Sometimes he talks about him as his wife, that his spouse is rebellious, as in Hosea. But God has this relationship with Israel. And Paul says Israel’s benefit is they were adopted by God. They were God’s people. Well, guess what? We have become adopted by God. We have become children of God by believing in his son.
John 1:12 says, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. We are now included in God’s forever family.
12 But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, (John 1:12, CSB)
There’s a great book I’ve read on the Jesus revolution. And I just. The book is good just because of the chapter, the title. The title of the book is God’s Forever Family. They were estranged from their families. They were estranged from the culture. They were lost. And they were adopted into God’s forever family. They were looking for family. They were looking for belonging. We become the children of God by believing in his son.
You better get to like one another because we’re going to spend it forever with each other. And we will be brothers and sisters in Christ.
All right, so we’re going to. We’re going to hang out together forever. All right? You know, Brian, you will forever be Isaiah’s dad, but you’re also forever going to be his brother. We are brothers together in Christ. We are connected. We have been adopted into God’s forever family.
God will be with us. He will be our God. And we will be his children. We are. Jesus is our big brother. We will be like him. We will be conformed to his image. And so we have been adopted by God. We are. We sang it tonight, right? I’m no longer a slave to fear. Why not? I’m a child of God.
When I was a kid, I used to have witch nightmares. I saw the Wizard of Oz when I was three years old. A lot of people saw the Wizard of Oz. A lot of people got freaked out by the flying monkeys. Not me. It was the witch.
And that witch haunted my dreams from the ages of 3 to 11. It was horrific, it was terrible.
And I’d have a witch nightmare, and I would be in my bedroom, and my parents’ room was down the hall on the other side of that, on the other side of, you know, the other side of the back of the house.
And all I wanted to do right in that fear, in that terror where I knew that witch was gonna get me, she was somewhere, she was gonna get me. All I wanted to do was get to my parents’ room. The problem was to get to my parents’ room, I had to get out of my bed and make the long journey down the hallway.
And down the hallway, there were three doorways, two bathrooms, and another bedroom between my room and the parents’ room. So the witch had several places, four doorways, because there’s one to the hallway that went out into the living space. So there were four doorways.
And you know, you know, we all know that witches and goblins and evil creatures hide under children’s beds. And so the witch had plenty of opportunity either to grab my ankle when I got out of bed or to jump out at me through one of those doors in the hallway.
And, and so, but to stay there, I couldn’t stay there. I had to get what I had to get the security that a child experiences from their parents, presence and comfort.
And so I would jump out of bed far enough to get away from that grasp, just in case she was there. And then I would sprint down the hallway to try to get past each of those doors before she could reach out and grab me.
Then I would spring into my parents’ bed, and hopefully they weren’t spooning because I would try to land between them, at which time my mother would comfort me. And my father, I trust, was praying because he would say the Lord’s name out loud as I landed next to him in bed.
So,
I trust he was praying for me at that, at that moment. But what did I want? I wanted the safety of being between my parents. I’m no longer a slave to fear. I have been adopted. I’m a child of God.
And the Bible is full of words of encouragement. Not that God will take away the pains and struggles and sufferings of this world, the witches are still out there, but that it will be well and all will be well, and he will protect us from now onto eternity.
And so, dear ones, we have been adopted.
Second, we have the glory. Israel experienced God’s glory at least several points in their history. Oftentimes to an individual as Moses saw the burning bush, as Moses experienced on Mount Sinai, the glory of God. As Abraham experienced this incredible dream in Genesis 15, where God’s glory comes to him and seals the covenant with him. There are several instances where there is glory.
But perhaps the one that is most known and the one that is most broadly experienced by Israel was in Solomon’s dedication of the temple when Moses.
Very similar to when another place, they experienced the glory is when Moses finished the tabernacle and said the glory of the Lord came down. They couldn’t even enter the tabernacle.
And so Solomon then finishes the construction of the temple, and they make all these sacrifices and they dedicate the temple. And the glory of the Lord came down, and the priests could no longer perform their function. And the picture is just. Everybody is just knocked on the floor. It’s like we can’t get up. They experience God’s glory oftentimes.
Isaiah and I have been studying revivals, and often. And we were talking last week about revival phenomenon. You know, things that happen during revivals where people have physical manifestations. They cry, they laugh, they fall, they shake. And that’s a way human flesh responds to the glory of God when God’s glory is experienced powerfully.
You know, people make fun of Charismatics. They say, oh, you pray. Come, Holy Spirit. Well, the Holy Spirit’s already there. You know, he’s already. Yes, we get that. We’re not stupid. We understand that.
But what are we praying when we say, come, Holy Spirit? We’re praying, God, that you would remove the veil even more between heaven and earth, and we would experience in our bodies, in our present lives, the manifest presence of God.
Yes, we acknowledge he’s omnipresent, and yes, we acknowledge he’s always with us. But we all would say, there are times when I know God is with me, but I don’t. What do we say? I don’t feel him with me. But there are other times when we do feel him with us.
And that’s what we’re praying when we pray. Come, Holy Spirit. Lord, manifest your glory. Guess what Paul says. We, in fact, whether we experience that manifest glory or not, we, in fact, are all moving from glory to glory with the presence of His Spirit in us.
So Israel experienced His glory. What’s His glory? His glory is what we experience with His presence. We’re reading the book on heaven. A lot of glory there. You know, there’s a lot of luminosity. There’s a lot of light, there’s a lot of brightness. There’s a lot of joy.
There’s a lot of overwhelming affection and love. And so Israel experienced his glory, but we experience his glory and can experience his glory on a regular basis.
We move from one degree of glory to another degree of glory as his Spirit lives in us and as we grow in Christ and we experience his glory.
The covenants. You have the covenant that God made with Noah. I’m not going to drown the whole earth again. The covenant he made with Abraham, the covenant of circumcision. You will be unto me my own special people.
I will mark you as a people for myself. And you will have the covenant of descendants, Abraham, and the covenant of land. You will have a people, and they will have a place. Place to be.
The covenant he makes with Moses. The covenant he makes with Moses. That this is how then you live in relationship with me. If you live in relationship with me according to this covenant, there will be great blessing. But if you violate this covenant, there will be great judgment. And so the covenant of the law.
And then finally, the covenant he makes with David. That from your line, David, because you are a man after my own heart, from your line will come a Messiah whose kingdom will not end.
And those are the covenants of the Old Testament. And they point us to the covenant that we are in. Jesus said on the night he was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it. He gave it to his disciples. And then he took the wine and gave thanks to his Father. And he said, this wine is my blood.
It is the blood of the what? I’m making another covenant. Just like I made one with David, just like I made one with Moses, just like I made one with Abraham, just like I made one with Noah. I’m making a covenant with you.
And in this covenant, as you put your faith in me, your sins are forgiven. And it includes all the elements of the old covenants, just as he promised. No. I will no longer destroy the earth, so I will not destroy you. You will not come under my judgment.
You will be set free from that. You will be my people. And I will give you a people and a land, the new heavens and the new earth, and part of God’s forever family. You will live in covenant relationship with me. I have gracefully delivered you from bondage, from slavery to Egypt, into my fellowship and into my promised land and into my temple, into my tabernacle. And my presence will be with you forever.
And you will have a Messiah, King Jesus, who will rule over you forever and ever. And I will be your God, and you will be my People. And we have the New Covenant sealed in the blood of Jesus, which is superior to the old covenants. It’s a covenant of amazing grace. What we could not do for ourselves, God has done for us.
And we enter into the covenant through allegiance and faith to Him. And it is an everlasting covenant. It will not end. Israel had the law again, the Mosaic covenant, how to live in community with God and each other. We have the Spirit according to Jeremiah, who does what.
He writes the law on our hearts. And the law that the Spirit writes in our hearts is not 613 commandments which God gave to Israel. It’s two. It’s two. Where all the commandments fall under these two. They fit perfectly. This is the purpose of those 613 commandments. This is the purpose of what God desires for his people. And the Spirit then writes on our hearts, love God and love people. The law was written on tablets of stone.
So, tablets of stone or something external to you, you can look at them and say, okay, it’s like reading instructions. I need to do A, B, C, and D, and I’ll get these outcomes. But the New Covenant is different. The law that now is written on our hearts is the indwelling Spirit of God. So now we don’t need a code written out there.
We have the God of the universe living inside of us, teaching us, instructing us, prompting us, guiding us, leading us, growing us into a love relationship with him and a love relationship with one another.
And so, as we trust in the Lord with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding, in all our ways acknowledge Him, He will make our path straight.
6 in all your ways know him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:6, CSB)
Not from an outward code anymore, but now from an inward system. He’s guiding us from the inside out. And we have this new law that is written on our hearts by His Spirit.
And then he says, Israel has the Temple, and the Temple, that is where they made sacrifice to make atonement. We have the atonement of Christ, who is the perfect priest and the perfect sacrifice.
Typically around Easter time, around the time of the Passover, a lot of churches will hold Seder meals, which I think is great. It’s a great teaching opportunity about the Exodus leading up to the Last Supper. And people will say, oh, man, I was so moved and so powerfully touched by that Seder meal. Good. It’s a great biblical example.
But I want to tell you this is simpler and yet infinitely more powerful and profound than the Seder meal. This is what it points to, the atonement of Christ. We no longer need the Lambs. We no longer need the goats. We no longer need the bulls. We no longer need the animals. The pigeons without spot or blemish. We no longer need a priest. Priests to make sacrifices for himself and to go into the holy of holies to make sacrifice for all the other people. We no longer need to send the scapegoat off into the wilderness.
Israel had that whole process to illustrate how God wants to dwell among his people. And though they’re a sinful people and he’s a holy God, that process then pictures how he can do that without. Like he told Moses, I’m going to have to kill him. I’m going to break out against him. And Moses is like, don’t break out against him. He makes intercession.
And then the priestly practice is how Israel continued to make intercession so God could dwell among his people.
Now Christ has made intercession once and for all so God can dwell among his people. He continually makes intercession for us. He continually, for all eternity, is our mediator. And so the atonement of Christ is our temple. Christ’s body on the cross is our temple. He is the temple. He is the priest. He is the sacrifice. He is the sum of it all. And how often does he have to do it? Once and for all. It is finished. It is finished. The atonement has been made.
In the old temple, there was a curtain that separated the rest of the temple. You know, the temple was a series of separations. You had the temple, the court of gentiles, the court of women, the court of men, the holy place, and then the most holy place.
And it’s a progression. Who could get to go to each place? But now the very center of the temple, where God’s presence and mercy is seen to dwell at the top of the Ark of the covenant between the cherubim.
That curtain that separated people from God has been torn down by the sacrifice of Christ. And now, when we come before God, Hebrews 4 says, we come before the Father, and we find grace and mercy for every time of need.
Because Jesus represents for us the temple and the temple sacrifice, the atonement that God has made for us. Israel had the promises, and their promise was that the Messiah is coming. There’s going to come a day.
We have a promise. The coming kingdom, dear ones. There’s going to come a day.
We just read about it in Revelation 21. No more crying, no more death. No more pain. The old order of things has gone away. The new has come.
God has come. The Messiah has come. And so his kingdom, the kingdom of Jesus, has come. And it is overcoming and conquering the kingdom of Satan, sin, and death, where those three things will no longer reign, but Christ will reign as king.
We live in the now and the not.
Yet we live where those things are being manifest on increasing. That when you came to Christ, the kingdom of Satan was defeated in your life. When somebody else comes to Christ, the kingdom of Satan is defeated. When we pray for somebody’s healing and they get healed, what happens? That’s the advance of the kingdom of God. The kingdom is advancing on the earth. And he says of the increase of his government and kingdom, there will be no end.
Daniel talks about this kingdom that comes and smashes the powerful earthly kingdoms that have reigned in terror over the earth. It starts as a small pebble, but it grows into this mighty mountain.
Jesus uses that same picture of a small seed, and yet it grows into this great plant, and a little bit of yeast, and yet it spreads throughout all the dough. That Jesus’ kingdom came when Jesus came. And it’s been expanding on the earth forevermore. One day it will be completely consummated. We’re in the in-between time.
Is the kingdom of God here? Yes, it is. Is Jesus reigning as king on high at the right hand of the Father? Yes, he is. Are we his subjects? Yes, we are. Has the enemy been defeated? Kinda.
I talked about Memorial Day and I talked about D Day in a very real sense. When D Day was accomplished, when that beachhead was established in France, the Germans were defeated because they were surrounded. The Russians were advancing from the east. The Allies had already conquered the south of Germany and were advancing there.
And now the Allies were coming from the west. You didn’t need allies in the north because the north was the North Pole. It was just frozen up north. But basically, Germany was surrounded.
Whenever an army has been surrounded, whenever a kingdom has been surrounded, ultimately they’re in the noose. And so, in a very real way, World War II was decided, was won in 1944, when the Allies on June 6 made a successful landing on that beach and began to press forward toward Berlin. Russians to the east, Allies from the south and the west.
However, some of the worst fighting of World War II occurred between D Day and VE Day. The Germans did not give up ground easily. They fought back. They didn’t want to admit defeat. So you had the Battle of the Bulge and other battles that took place. It was very bloody. That’s where we live in spiritual history. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead was our D day. Sin, Satan and death were defeated. They’re a defeated foe. But yet now we are occupying that victory and those things still fight.
We’re in the now and not yet. But we have what the great promise. Israel had the promise of the Messiah. We have the promise of the kingdom and ultimately the kingdom consummated, and that will last forever.
Israel had the ancestors, faithful witnesses of the old covenant. That’s two thirds of your Bible is the story of the ancestors. We’ve been grafted into that tree. We have the same ancestors. Abraham’s a part of my story. Abraham’s the father of the children of faith. He’s my father just as much as he’s Israel’s father.
Moses is my Moses just as much as he is the Jews. Moses David is my king David just as much as he is Israel’s King David. We have these heroes. They’re a part of our faith witness. They’re a part of our tradition. We’ve been grafted in. We have the faithful witnesses of the old covenant, but we also then have the faithful witnesses of the New Covenant. We have Apostle Paul here breaking our hearts with his passion to lead the Israelites to Christ. Oh, that I would be accursed that they would know the Gospel.
And so we have these faithful witnesses of the New Covenant. We have the stories of the Acts of the apostles and Peter and Philip and Barnabas.
And we have these stories of the early church and the apostles. And we have the stories of Jesus. And then we have even more than that.
We have the faithful witnesses who have been living out the New Covenant for the last 2000 years. We have the history of the church. We have the St. Francis and the John Wesleys. And so we have these people who have the Billy Grahams.
We have faithful witness. You and I have faithful witnesses in our story. People who came along our path and were powerful influences for Christ in our life. And so we have these great ancestors. And the Bible talks about that. We have this host of witnesses in Hebrews 12. This great host of witnesses.
We have now been. That’s part of our heritage. That’s part of our family. That’s part of who we are. We have faithful witnesses, both Old and New Covenant witnesses. It’s a good thing to study the Old Covenant.
It’s a good thing to study the New Covenant. It’s a good thing to study church history. I love church history, and I love reading about faithful witnesses.
Again, as we’re studying through revivals, one of the things that saddens me about church history is when people would have different theological opinions in the past. They would kill each other over it. Alright, they would kill each other over it.
I preached this morning in Bremerton. I’m ahead in Bremerton. I preached the second half of Romans chapter nine. And I preached what I would call an Arminian Wesleyan view.
Romans chapter 9, not a Calvinistic view in Romans chapter 9, is kind of the big Calvinistic proof text of the whole New Testament. And I went after it. I didn’t go after Calvinists personally, but I went after it.
I have a friend in the church, he’s a Calvinist. Guess what? We didn’t come to fisticuffs afterwards. We were laughing and talking afterwards.
Well, what changed? I’ll tell you one thing that changed is as the Catholics killed the Reformers and the Reformers killed the AnaBaptists. You know who the AnaBaptists killed? Nobody. It’s very interesting.
After that, those kinds of church persecutions ended. Who ended it? I think there’s a powerful statement to be made that the faithful suffering of the AnaBaptists, who refused to return in kind, ultimately finally destroyed that spirit that had been plaguing the church and been a bad witness to Christ throughout history.
So by the time you get to the First and Second Great Awakening, John Wesley, an Arminian, and George Whitefield, a Calvinist, were the best of friends and honored one another in the revival of the First Great Awakening.
We have the ancestors. We have the faithful witnesses, and we walk amongst the great cloud of witnesses, and we are a part of that. And finally, Jesus, the Messiah himself. The physical descent of the Jews, the complete fulfillment of the old covenant. Jesus is Yahweh, present in the flesh with his people, concealed, but present in the old covenant.
He shows up, right? He shows up. Joshua 5. I’m the captain of the Lord’s army. Well, who is he? Gideon, the angel of the Lord. But he receives a sacrifice from Gideon.
We all know that no angel, pure angel, would receive a sacrifice from a human being, a blood sacrifice. But this angel of the Lord consumes the sacrifice. What does that mean? That angel of the Lord who appeared to Gideon was the Lord. The messenger of the Lord was the Lord. The burning bush. Whenever Yahweh shows up physically in the Old Testament, who is that? It’s Jesus. He is concealed, but present in the old covenant and revealed. Present with us now and forever in the New Covenant.
I think when you get to heaven, you’ll see the Father. I don’t know what the Father is going to look like, but you’ll see the Father. I think you’ll see the Spirit. I don’t know what the Spirit is going to look like, but I know who you’ll recognize first. I know who will greet you first. And you will recognize it will be Christ, the Messiah. Jesus, our hope. He is now with us forever. His Spirit lives in us.
And so we have inherited all these blessings that God gave to Israel. Paul says these are great benefits that God gave to you, have now been fulfilled, completed, and fleshed out for us in Jesus Christ.
Dear ones, we are the inheritors of adoption and the glory and the covenants and the law and the temple and the promises and the ancestry and the greatest gift of all, Christ himself. Christ himself.
You cannot overstate the greatness of the salvation that is ours. It’s impossible. It’s too big, it’s too good. It’s too all-encompassing.
It’s too gracious, it’s too merciful, it’s too powerful. But it’s too true. It’s the hope we have as Christians. And I hope that that hope encourages you tonight because life is. We talked about it. Life is hard. It’s not easy, right? There’s struggles. But dear ones, we’re playing a game we’ve already won. We have inherited a hope beyond our wildest imaginations. We’re walking in it now and we will walk in it forever. Dear ones, you’re not going to lose this game, man. We’re going to win it together.
We’ll be up. We’ll be in the new heavens and the new earth one day, and you know, we’ll be talking about it.
Remember those days in Poulsbo when, you know, just a handful of us were in church, and we were talking about this stuff and praying with one another? Man, the glory of God was there, the presence of God was there, the truth of the Lord was there.
And we were advancing His kingdom in this town. We’re opening up gates for God’s goodness to invade North Kitsap. As we sang his songs and gave his name, praise and prayed for and loved one another. And so, dear ones, it’s yours. It’s all contained. It’s all pointed to in this simple meal. All of it.
This simple meal points to all of it. It points to us as adopted. It points to the glory, it points to the covenants. It points to the fulfillment of the law and the writing of the law in our hearts. It points certainly to the atonement and to the promises of the coming Messiah. It was celebrated by our ancestors.
It was foretold by the Passover, and it’s been celebrated now by Christians. When we take this meal, we join 2000 years of Christian history. A couple across every denomination, across every stripe. We join them at the Lord’s Supper, and we celebrate and have fellowship with Christ, the Messiah, who’s with us and invites us to his table. So, dear ones, come, take and eat.
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