Welcome to the River City Church podcast and a message by our
lead pastor, Jason Powers. Our prayer is that this message
would inspire and encourage you, build your faith and point you
to the life changing love of Jesus.
May you enjoy the goodness of God as you follow Him today.
That table, the Lord's Table, is one of the great sacraments of
our faith, is one of the two sacraments we believe, Communion
and Baptism. They are unique expressions of
grace, and our confession that we say each week is rooted in
that table. And Jesus is remembrance, his
command to remember him. It is a remembrance, but it's
more than a remembrance. It is a picture of the Kingdom.
It is a picture of the reality that those disciples at that
table were there by their invitation only by Jesus
invitation only. None of the disciples came to
Jesus and said, hey, you know what Jesus, I think I'd be
pretty good at your table. In fact, everybody that we see
in the New Testament that came and kind of recruited themselves
to Jesus side. Jesus said, no, no, you go back
to where you came from. You go back to your city and you
tell them there that table was at Jesus's invitation.
The table is grace. That is our confession.
Say it with me each week. Our confession is that we are
badly broken. See, that is what gets us to the
table. It's grace.
It is our brokenness. Jesus didn't invite you here
because he was compelled to. There wasn't someone out there
going, right? There were sometimes kids and
you know, my kids, elementary school class were the birthday
party invites, right? There was always the kid that
they didn't want to leave out. And I'm like, you're not leaving
them out. You're not going to invite 28 of
30 kids in your class to your party.
You got to bring them all right? No one compelled Jesus.
There was no standard of of decorum that he had to invite.
He just invited you because He loved you, invited you because
He has something specific and unique for you.
So we believe this whole idea that we've been walking through
is that God purposely forms and fills for His purpose.
That means that He purposely and intentionally formed you and
filled you for His purpose. That's quite a story.
That's quite a reality. If it's true that he knew you,
that he knows you, that in this place, wherever you're running
from, wherever you're running towards, he has a plan and a
purpose for you. He has something that he wants
to do in your heart and in your life.
And it has something to do with what he's been doing since the
beginning, creating order in this chaos.
But this table, this confession that we make, that we're badly
broken, that we're deeply loved and our confession isn't, I am
badly broken. I am deeply loved.
Our confession is we are badly broken and deeply loved, and in
a room like this, that almost certainly guarantees there's
somebody here who is just as badly broken as I am and also
just as deeply loved. That's the thing about the
Communion table. It confronts me with the reality
that Jesus invites more people than I do.
Jesus's guest list is longer and more varied than mine.
There is more diversity in the guest list of the Holy Son of
God than mine. Here's the reality about the
table. I mean, when we look at the
communion table, right, like Jesus extends the cup of G of
fellowship to Judas. He's like Judas, will you like
last minute? Will you like be deterred?
He looks at Peter. Now Peter's standing there
going, I'll die for you, Jesus. Don't do whatever you tell me to
do, Jesus, wherever you want me to go, I'll do it.
And Jesus, what does what he rebukes him.
Here's the reality. If I'm at that table, I'm giving
Judas what Peter got and Peter what Judas got, right?
I'm not Jesus. That is the beauty and the
scandal of the table. That is the beauty and the
scandal that confronts us. The reality that we are we, we
have smaller lists than he does. We're more exclusive than Jesus
is. We are more willing to look
deeper into the hearts and reject or push somebody away
than he is. But what I'm confronted is Jesus
doesn't stop confronting us. Jesus doesn't just go, it's
fine, everything's fine, we're all fine.
Jesus doesn't whistle past the graveyard.
When a difficult conversation comes up, Jesus doesn't change
the subject. He goes, great, let's talk about
this, but he always does it from the table.
He always does it from a place of fellowship and intimacy.
Jesus doesn't send a text message because he's worried
about it getting uncomfortable. He says, let's share a pork
chop. Probably wasn't a pork chop, but
listen, it's the new covenant. We can do that now, right?
Let's have steak, Jesus says, and let's talk about these
things that keep us from each other.
He just welcomes us. We've kind of been hash
rehashing this pattern for the last two weeks, this Lent
pattern. We've seen it.
The idea is, and there's just so many refrains for all the way up
to Easter, we're just going to hear a few things just over and
over and over again, this idea that God initiates fellowship,
God calls us to the table. We see it in the garden.
God orders, God forms, God fills, and then he places us in
that presence to know and experience His goodness.
His heart is to be at home with us.
We see it again after we say no, we distrust this holiness.
We move away from that. We move into the wilderness
where we're kind of fighting for our lives and for survival.
Father again says, I want to be among you.
I want to be with you. Home is where we are together.
So he says, build me a Tabernacle, a place.
And again, he gives us this, these opportunity to obey, an
opportunity to follow him. Here are these instructions.
Here's how holiness and brokenness and sin can dwell
together in atonement. And we go and we form this
Tabernacle. And again, God's desire is to
dwell with us. And so he comes into that
Tabernacle. But over and over and over
again, just as often as the Father is unfaithful to invite
us, we are just as consistent in our distrust of His Holiness.
We see holiness, we see His difference from us.
We see the way that He loves everyone.
And we go, maybe if He loves everyone, he doesn't love me as
much. Maybe He loves them more than
me. And so we got to keep him at
arm's length and them at arm's length.
We're reaching for control. We want to decide what is good.
We want to decide what is best. That was the fruit, the
knowledge of good and evil, so that we wouldn't be subject to
whatever He wants. So that it would be about what
we want. So that cycle over and over
again, he initiates, he forms, he fills, we distrust, we
redefine goodness and we back into exile once again, creating
a space in the wilderness. Everything that we've talked
about is built up to this, the Tabernacle, God's presence in
the wilderness. It's all been pointing to this,
the wilderness, the wars that they fought, the wars of
conquest in Canaan, all of the waiting for all of the years
through the period of the judges, through the period of
Saul's leadership, through the period of David's leadership.
It's all been pointing to this God's desire to be with his
people. And now we pick up in the story
of First Kings and the temple is ready, the sacrifices are ready,
they have been offered, the space is consecrated, it is set
as part, it is now holy. And we read in First Kings
chapter 8, verse 10, when the priest came out of the holy
place. Remember last week we talked
about that sanctification cleanse consecrated.
When the priest came out of the holy place, the cloud filled the
Lord's temple. And because of the cloud, the
priests were not able to continue ministering.
What's the cloud? We're going to talk about that
in a second. But whatever it is, this cloud
fills the space so much that the priests who have been offering
sacrifices, the priests that have been offering bulls and
goats, and it says before this there was so much sacrifice,
they just lost count. Who knows how many it was?
The priests were not able to continue ministering, for the
glory of the Lord filled the temple.
Then Solomon the king said the Lord said that he would dwell in
total darkness. I have indeed built an exalted
temple for you, a place for your dwelling forever.
Folks, this is good news. This is what we've been waiting
for. The presence of God again is
with His people. Once again, the glory is able to
dwell. And what we see is this cloud,
and it didn't just reside in one place.
It didn't just fill up like a little space over there.
What it says is it filled the temple.
And the Israelites knew that cloud.
This was a familiar cloud. They had seen it in Exodus
chapter 13, starting in verse 21.
The Lord, When had this just come out?
They've just crossed the Red Sea.
They've just seen this miraculous provision and
deliverance, and verse 21, the Lord went ahead of them in a
pillar of cloud to leave them on their way during the day and in
a pillar of fire to give them light at night so that they
could travel by day or night. The pillar of cloud by day and
the pillar of fire by night never left its place in front of
the people. This cloud is the visible,
tangible presence of God among His people.
This is what we've been waiting for.
This is what all that obedience is about.
And what it says is it says it filled the temple.
It says it covered every space, every square inch of real estate
in this Jerusalem temple was filled.
And what happens now is when this building gets filled with
the cloud, it's not just a building anymore.
It's not just brick and mortar. This is God inhabiting his place
among his people. He found us in exile.
He came to meet us here, and what it says is when that cloud
filled the temple, when God's inhabitation came with us,
right? Notice what they were doing
before all the sacrifices. This is the religion stuff they
were doing, the religious stuff, they were being obedient, they
were preparing for the Lord, right?
That's what we do when we talk about obedience, What it's all
pointing towards this Lord. If we'll follow you, you'll be
with us. If we'll walk with you, you'll
walk with us. But something crazy happens and
it's good news. When the Lord descends, they
stop ministering. What it says in some older
translations is they could not stand.
And this isn't like, oh, I couldn't stand it anymore.
This is literally they fall down on their faces in the presence
of the cloud. When God shows up, it's no
longer about our sacrifice. It's about worship.
It's about it's experience of him.
It is about him being with us. And again, this is good news
because holiness prepares a space and this was a extravagant
ritual. This was such an expression of
obedience. They're like, Lord, you said we
could take a bowl and it would sanctify you can said we could
bring a goat and it would sanctify the place.
You said that if we just had these little things.
Well, Solomon's like, well, we're just not going to stop.
We're just going to keep doing. This is extravagant worship.
This is not a tithe of 10%. This is it's all yours, every
bit of it, every moment of my day, every word of my life, we
will obey you. And then when he shows up, when
the holiness, then he just get to enjoy his presence.
And this indwelling, this filling of the temple, this
cloud that comes and invades our space, it kind of brings out one
of two responses in US. The first one should be awe.
It is real. Our God really will dwell with
us. He really does fill this space.
Holiness really does prepare us to experience His inhabitation.
What this really means is that He's accessible.
One hand. We see this and we go, God, it
is true and we can trust it. And This is why we obey.
This is why we say no to the things so that we can say yes to
you. This is why we trust you.
The other side is just, it's about freaking time.
There's this almost sense of entitlement.
Look at all we've done for you, Lord.
Look at how much we've sacrificed for you.
And you make us wait. All this time, Lord, you gave us
the atonement in in the wilderness. 40 years we
wandered, hundreds of years of judges in the first stages of
the monarchy, and finally you show up.
It breeds in us something like resentment.
Oof. But the reality of the story in
this moment is that glory had inhabited this space, that
obedience prepared. What we can take from this story
of the indwelling is that God fulfills his promises.
God does what He says He's going to do.
And when He did that, when he fulfilled this place, their
posture shifted. You see it, They went from work.
They went from from doing the things right.
But when the Lord showed up, when his presence, when His
presence comes, they move from work to rest.
This is a picture of the garden. This is a return to Eden in the
wilderness. We're not working to keep his
presence. We're obeying to experience his
presence. When we are, when we can
cleanse, we walk in obedience. We walk in holiness so that he
can fill our space and fill our hearts.
They'd simply exercise the authority that God had given
them. God said in the Garden of Eden,
be fruitful and multiply. In the Tabernacle, he said,
build this space for holiness. The architecture of holiness, he
told Solomon, build it this way so that the temple and the
Tabernacle look very similar. Build it this way.
And what they did was what they were supposed to do, what they
were told to do. They walked in the authority
that God had given them. But make no mistake, and this is
good news, He didn't need their sacrifice.
God wasn't up there going. You can read all about this in
Psalm 50. It's a great verse.
Go like God, where God calls the nation an Israel test.
He's like, do you think I'm hungry?
You think I've got like a hunger pains I need like I need your
beef, you know, a little veal on the side.
He's like, I don't need your cows.
I don't need your sacrifices. What he desires is holiness.
And this is an important thing for us to understand if we're
going to take this kind of Lenten movement, this movement
and Lent from from the garden back to restoration is this idea
that our preparation is not leverage.
We don't get to force the hand of the Almighty God because we
have done our quiet time or given our tithe or shown up to
work. Obedience prepares a space.
What obedience does is prepare us.
Obedience creates a temple in our hearts.
Obedience prepares our space for his presence.
But obedience never, never gives us a, a right to demand his
response. And I and I listen.
First of all, I just want to say this.
I hated writing this message because I know, right?
Like I would never like Lord, I would never do that to you.
But guess what? When my tire goes flat after
I've had really good quiet times this week, I'm like, what do I
say to Lord? What's even the point?
Why would I even do that? When I give faithfully, when I
give my money to the church and I give faithfully to do that,
and then my washing machine breaks down and I don't have
enough money anymore, where do I go?
Well, forget that, Lord, I keep my end of the bargain, and you
don't keep your end of the bargain.
I am so sinful. I want my obedience to
manipulate the hand of the Almighty God, but preparation is
not leverage. I don't get to force God to do
what He wants. And the reason that I get to
that place, the reason that I end up in that entitled space,
it's the same story in the garden.
I just distrust His Holiness. I think something that good must
be holding out on it. And so here's what happens,
right? This is what this what it looks
like. There's this crazy verse in like
in the Old covenant in Deuteronomy where he just says
like the sins of the Father will be passed on to the third and
the 4th generation. Here's what that looks like.
I watch my sense of entitlement bear fruit in my children.
I watch my children learn to distrust holiness, my fear, my
anxiety, my where are you God? When I've done all the things
that I think He now owes me His presence.
I can see that around It passes from person to person, from
generation to generation, until it infects.
Everything that we do, every place that we go, everything
that we build together becomes infected by that sense of
entitlement. If I just do this, then God is
obligated to respond to me. So much so that we see this
centuries later. Now, the temple had been there
for centuries. It had been operating day after
day, week after week, year after year.
This priesthood continues to come bring the sacrifices,
continues to make atonement in the holy space, continues to
bring that atonement out to the people, to declare God's favor
among his people. And we get to the book, Second
Chronicles chapter. You probably haven't spent a lot
of time in Second Chronicles, right?
Second Chronicles chapter 36. This is the very last chapter of
this book in the history. And we read this in verse 15.
Centuries after this cloud descends, the Lord, the God of
their ancestors, sent word against them by the hand of his
messengers. Do you see this cycle over and
over again? The Lord initiates, He sent by
the hand of his messenger, sending them time and time
again, for he had compassion on his people.
God's not God, they're mad. God built an entire system to
deal with sin because He knew that sin was part of our
problem. There is a way that we could
deal with it every single day to have the assurance that it was
removed for us, that we were made new.
God send word by his messengers time and time again because He
had compassion on His people and on His dwelling place.
But they kept ridiculing God's messengers, despising His words,
and scoffing at His prophets. Listen to this until the Lord's
wrath was so stirred up against his people that there was no
remedy. Now we hear that and we go, God,
how could you? Over and over and over again,
God initiates a call back to his people.
Just come back. Just let this atonement be real.
Don't make it on the surface. Let it cleanse your heart,
restore. Come to me.
Remember that I want to dwell with you and I want to dwell in
you, and I want to dwell among you, and I want to change
everything about you. God says, I want to make a
garden in the wilderness. Just come back.
And the people's response over and over and over again was,
that's dumb. You can't do that.
He keeps initiating. They keep ridiculing.
And for all of these years, the sacrifices didn't stop.
What did stop was that sense of holy awe at the indwelling
presence of God. What happened is atonement
itself became leverage. The mindset of the people became
why in the heck would I obey when I can just bring a bull and
have it all forgiven? Why would I submit myself to
your instructions about money or about sex or about work or about
forgiveness? Why would I walk in that?
I can just come to you and ask for forgiveness, right?
We've got atonement. We've got the mechanism.
We've got the system. That is what it looks like to
grasp at sovereignty. Remember we talked, Eve in the
garden. Before her hand ever reached her
heart had settled, before she grasped that fruit, she knew.
I'm going to do what I want. I want to decide what is good,
and I want to decide what is real.
And again, that last line, there was no remedy left.
That is a sobering thought to me.
If I want like I wrestled with this all week, I start writing
on Monday and I was just like, man, maybe we can just talk
about self esteem this week or something like that.
This is a hard thing, right? Does it mean that God gave up on
his people? No, Listen, I love you so much.
Listen. When we lose a sense of all at
what our atonement costs us, it's not that God doesn't want
us back, it's that we stop wanting to come back.
We think, why would I need that confrontational holiness when I
can just go through the motions and God has to respond because
he said that he would. It's scary the idea that when I
just say I'll walk in this sin for today and then tomorrow I'll
repent, tomorrow I'll turn around more often than not.
The reality is the longer I walk in that the less likely I am to
want to come back. The less likely I am to suddenly
remember the goodness of the presence of God.
And what happens? Is this what happened in Israel?
When enough people, when there are enough individuals who stop
caring about coming back, when enough people just go, we'll go.
Listen, Day of Atonement, it's in a few weeks.
We'll handle it all then. But for now, we're just going to
do what we want. I'm going to, I'm going to walk
my own way. I'm going to make my own rules.
I'm going to get what I can get. I'm going to walk where I want
to walk with who I want to walk and do my thing.
I'm going to build my business. I'm going to and I'll do what I,
I need to do and we'll just go take care of it.
On the Day of Atonement, we'll bring the sacrifice.
And everything happens when enough people stop caring about
coming back, everything in that culture begins to shift.
That's what we're going to look at the book of Ezekiel now.
And Ezekiel was a prophet, and he was a prophet in exile when
the people of Israel had been forcefully expelled from their
place. Now, listen, when you read in
Ezekiel, there's a lot of weirdness.
There's a lot of really weird images that go on.
And those could be a sermon series in and of themselves, but
we're going to not do that. But what I want you to hone in
on, like as we talked about this, watch the cloud.
Do you remember what the cloud is?
Watch the cloud. Ezekiel chapter 10, verse 3.
Now the cherubim, these are angels.
These are heavenly beings. The Angel, the cherubim were
standing to the I'm going to have to do this.
I didn't think I was going to. The cherubim were standing to
the South of the temple. So now we're at the temple where
God's presence was, the South of the temple when the man went in
and the cloud filled the inner court.
This brings us back to First Kings 8.
This is a picture. This is continuity.
We're seeing what Solomon brought in, what all of that,
what happened, right? We're seeing this.
The cloud filled the inner court.
Then the glory of the Lord rose from above the cherub to the
threshold of the temple. The temple was filled with the
cloud, and the court was filled with the brightness of the
Lord's glory. God is in His temple.
This is status quo. This is what the people had
expected. This is just the way that it's
supposed to be. Now we go down to verse 18.
Then the glory of the Lord moved away from the threshold of the
temple, and he stopped above the cherubim.
This thing, this cloud, this presence that knocked the
priests down the first time it showed up.
It rises up and it moves to the door, and it camps out by the
door, and it kind of takes one last look around the temple.
And in verse 19, the cherubim lifted their wings and ascended
from the earth right before my eyes.
The wheels were beside them as they went.
Listen. And the glory of the God of
Israel was above them. And it stopped at the entrance
to the eastern gate of the Lord's house.
What was what once filled the temple, moved to the doorposts,
and now it is no longer in the temple.
It is above the temple. And that is an important
preposition. I'm going to make English majors
of all of you. A preposition is like a
location. It talks about where we are and
what once filled. The temple is now above the
temple. Temple is not primary.
The temple is not inherently the place of God's dwelling.
And what happens is when we take atonement lightly, when we make
lightly of holiness, when we insist on leveraging whatever it
is that God gives us for our own good, on our own path, in our
own way. When we watch that, what happens
is that God is not diminished. God is not made smaller.
God does not lose authority. When we grasp at the Apple, we
are cloud has moved on. You know, the scariest thing
about this picture is temple still stands.
Sacrifices go on and on and on. The rituals go on and on and on,
day after day, year after year. And the Spirit of God had left
the building. It's wilderness again.
It's a building and work and toil without fruit, just like
life outside of the gate. How do we go from holiness?
How do you go from the physical dwelling of God among people?
How do you go from a presence so rich and tangible that it
literally knocks people off of their feet to outside to it's
gone and we don't even know it? Scary stuff.
The way that we get there is familiar familiarity with
proximity. We just get so comfortable being
close that we forget that it's not obligated to us.
That obedience that allowed First Kings to happen, it just
slowly erodes. We just, we kind of stop
thinking that holiness matters. I mean, at first, when we have
that moment right where we experience the Lord's presence,
we just know, Lord, I'll do whatever you want.
I'll go wherever you can. We have tears and we have big
promises, but over time, we just get comfortable with it.
We read the Bible, we do the thing and we just keep walking
in it and it walks away and it goes away.
We'll do what we want and we'll just bring the sacrifice later.
We'll just ask for forgiveness later after I've done what I
want and gotten what I want. We don't think that holiness is
going to produce the things that we want.
I don't think that if I love my neighbor, I'm going to get the
kind of life that I want. I don't think that if I forgive
people that people will stop hurting me.
And so we grasp that control. We do what we want, and we claim
on authority again, to redefine goodness.
What we decided to say is it is better for me to ask forgiveness
later than to submit my perspective on people, on life,
on money, on sex, on my identity.
It's better for me to do what I want and just trust in
forgiveness than to trust that he actually knows what made life
good. And let me just say again, the
theme throughout this thing is we don't actually have the
authority to redefine what is good.
That is not part of our delegated authority.
And that is the area of the fracture.
That's what keeps us in the wilderness.
The fracture has always been over.
Who ultimately gets to define what good is?
And as long as we insist that it is us, we will continue to meet
his initiative with distrust. His forming was skepticism.
And again, the temple didn't fall.
In fact, 600 years later, there's another version of that
same temple standing when Jesus walked in the courtyard.
For 600 years they were building and sacrificing and offering,
and no one knew the Spirit. The cloud never came back.
There was never another feeling and nobody knew.
They kept the form, they kept the the the rituals.
They did the things thinking that they could just leverage
that. In fact, the Pharisees are a
picture of that. The reason we hate the Pharisees
so much in the story is because we see them manipulating
atonement for control, manipulating righteousness to
control people. They're not interested in
partnership. They're not interested in a God
who changes the agenda. You know why I know?
Because when Jesus came and they said that's not what it's about,
they killed him. They aren't actually interested
in the presence. A danger in this story for me,
for me, is that I just because this sucks.
The danger is that every part of me just wants to leave this on
the page of some nice, neat historical lesson.
I just want to look at this about a thing that happened back
then to them and not to me. The danger is that I'll read
about this, and I won't read my own wilderness rhythm into this,
but I won't stop that I'll lose all at what righteousness means,
that I'll lose my sense that of all at what atonement means.
I do it all the time When I am numb to the suffering of others.
When I rationalize first hand accounts of pain and struggle
and suffering because I am afraid of losing something
that's fracture. When I define freedom in a way
that means I never have to be inconvenienced or bothered or
confronted by the needs of another person.
When freedom means that I can do what I want regardless of what
happens to you, that is fracture.
When I imagine that dignity and care for the alien and the
foreigner is subject to modern economic speculation or reality,
that is fracture. When I worship in order to keep
God on my side or to demonstrate that he is on my side instead of
to submit and to get myself on his side, it's fracture.
When it's more important to me that I'd be right, that I win,
then I demonstrate loving presence to my neighbor who is
very different from me. It's fracture.
It's wilderness. It's life outside of the gate.
We've seen it with sex. We redefine it for our purposes.
We see it with work. We redefine it for our purposes.
We see it with community, redefine it by our purposes.
We build our own tables and set our own places and invite our
own guest list. And we redefine good that way.
And now atonement itself, the very provision that God has made
for us to be with Him, We have repurposed everything.
I don't want to just keep singing and find out 100 years
from now that the Spirit left the building.
I don't want to keep raising my hands, proving to myself that
God is on my side and find that He's not here, that this is just
me doing my thing to make someone else believe that I'm
something. This story isn't a new story,
not about me. It's not about it's not just
about them, it is about me. It's about today.
It's about how intentionally and deliberately and even violently,
I make my home outside of the gate rather than imagine what it
would be to live inside the gate.
We began today by remembering the presence of Jesus.
We began today by remembering that Jesus is with us in his
broken body, in his blood. We said do this as often as you
drink it. We took, we took his body into
ourselves. We again we together in this
room and those outside watching and listening.
We reconstituted the body of Christ again in this place.
We came here to remember that that remembrance should change
us when we remember that his body is us, the things that
Jesus did are the things that we should do that changes us.
This isn't a new law. This isn't something God said.
You got to go do this or I'll never I'll be mad at you
forever. It's a thing that transforms us
by his proximity when he's with us.
When I remember how Jesus invited the zealot and the tax
collector and he sat them together.
It's a neat little party games like let's see how this goes.
When I remember that Jesus brought enemies to the table and
he sat him into his presence, I gradually find myself inviting
people to my table that maybe I wouldn't have before.
I set a place for outsiders. I set a place for enemies and I
invite them. When I remember that he shared
his table with a betrayer. When I remember that he
knowingly sat with Peter. Heck, he gave Peter authority,
man. He made Peter like the boss,
right? And when I remember how what he
did with, well, that was Judas, right, but also Peter, right?
All of them. When I start to remember how
Jesus treated the people that treated him so terribly, What
happens is over time I begin to find forgiveness welling up
before retaliation. I find letting people go rising
up. That becomes my primary instinct
before getting even. When I remember how Jesus loved
Judas, I remember how Jesus loved Peter.
It sets me free so that I can spend less time trying to prove
that I'm right, because now I know that I am deeply loved,
even though I am badly broken. Those two things aren't at odds
anymore. Both are true.
In the presence of Jesus and nowhere else in the body and the
blood of Jesus, the presence of our King is still among us.
He is still at the table and we are still invited.
We're invited to inhabit this partnership.
When Jesus talked about the Kingdom right in his prayer,
what do you say? Your Kingdom come, your will be
done on earth as it is in heaven.
That's the garden. When we look at Revelation, when
it comes exactly like He wanted to, it's the garden that now
fills the earth as it was intended.
It's a partnership. And His desire has always been
to dwell among us and to dwell with us.
And so he invites us to inhabit that partnership where all the
goodness of His Holiness dwells with us, where we have access to
all the omnipotence and all the absolute power of God, and we
get to simply walk. And what He has prepared for us,
the good works that he has prepared for us to do, is how
Paul describes in an Ephesians chapter 2.
The table is still set. The question is knowing who he
invites and how he invites them. The only question that remains
is whether or not we will join him.
Jesus, I hated writing this because I see in my own heart
how much I want to manipulate you to make my ends your ends.
And Jesus, I confess how many times I take atonement lightly,
how many times I just presume upon forgiveness because you're
holy and you're good. And you've told me that you love
me. And so Jesus, I just pray that I
would learn to trust that if you love me, then your desire for me
is good, that your command for me is good.
Jesus, I want to remember you, or I want your dwelling to be
with me. And Lord, I want your church to
be that dwelling, and it is. Anywhere around the world where
there is justice, the church is close by.
Anywhere around the world where there is healing, the church is
close by. Or I believe that your church
and Iran is moving in a way that we don't see it on the news.
But I have heard from many, many sources, the church and Iran is
vibrant and alive and underground.
And Lord, I pray in a time like this that you would rise it up,
shine a light on it, let us see it.
Lord, lift up our brothers and sisters and Iran because they're
at the table too, and they need your spirit and your power and
your presence. Jesus, I pray that we wouldn't
take atonement lightly. We love you, we thank you.
And Jesus, we ask these things in your name and for your glory.
Amen. Thank you for joining us today.
River City Church is all about experiencing and expressing
God's love in our lives and community, and we hope that
you've been able to experience that today.
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May the Lord bless and keep you in all grace and peace.