Title: Worshiping In a World Atilt
Text: Revelation 7:9-17
Thesis: Worshiping in community with others brings us the assurance that God is with us and keeps us from shutting down hope.
Clip: I Sure Could Use a Little Good News Today http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4lyjseJMG0
Introduction:
This morning I want you to know that there are two good reasons for your being here today.
The first good reason for you to be in church today is that church is the safest place to be on the planet.
• You should avoid riding in a car because 20% of all fatalities are auto accident related.
• You should not stay home because 17% of all fatal accidents occur in the home.
• You should avoid walking on streets or sidewalks because 14% of all fatalities involve pedestrians.
• You should avoid traveling by air, rail and water because 16% of all fatalities involve these three forms of travel.
• You should also avoid hospitals because 32% of deaths occur in hospitals.
You will be pleased to know that .001% of deaths occur in church. So one good reason for being here today is because it is one of the safest places on the planet to be.
The second good reason you should be here today is because it is during our time of worship that we learn, God wants us to know that there is a little good news today.
I. God wants us to know there is a little good news today.
“Before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language standing before the throne. And they cried out in a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’” Revelation 7:10
I read this week that as of April 23rd, 71% of our national households had mailed back their 2010 Census forms. If that is the case nearly three out of four households have returned their forms. However, in that our population is approaching 400 million people, a sizeable number of households are yet to be counted. It would seem that our country is a big one and that there are quite a few of us in the world. However, when we look at the big picture, think globally and do the math, we see that if the population of the world is nearly 7 billion, then there are 6.6 billion other people living on the planet with us. We see that there are 195 countries in the world and see that there are 6,700 languages spoken globally… and those stats do not speak to the numbers of sub-groups or ethnicities within every country or of the dialects they speak.
The scene that John depicts in our text leaps forward in time to envision a scene in heaven where a crowd so large that it cannot be counted; a crowd made up of people from every nation, tribe, people and language; a crowd in which everyone is dressed in a white robe and waving a palm branch; a crowd that is singing or chanting or calling out in unison, “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”
When we read the book of Revelation we are inclined to read it as a prophecy of end-time destruction. We may even read Revelation as a presage of the coming of God’s wrath and judgment. But the intent of Revelation is that John’s vision be a beacon of hope to the Christians to whom he wrote. His intent was to assure Christians of God’s control and ultimate triumph in a world of evil and chaos.
John’s intent was to bring to Christians who were living during a very dark period of history, a little good news. But the good news that he envisioned was not yet… it was good news that would unfold in the future. It was good news that was a future hope. It was not now but a hope for then. So the vision of this huge multitude singing of the salvation of the Lord was to be anticipated and give hope for the future in the present.
John wanted his readers to live with the knowledge of an inside scoop, that the “game is rigged.” He wanted Christians to know that whatever the score is now… in the end God wins. John wanted his readers to relax and live in the hope of the ultimate triumph of God and good over evil.
I recently read a series of four “An Irish Country…” stories by Patrick Taylor. The first, An Irish Country Doctor; the second, An Irish Country Village; the third, An Irish Country Christmas; and the fourth, An Irish Country Girl. This story comes from An Irish Country Christmas and the setting is a small village in Northern Ireland called Balleybucklebo.
The village doctor, Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly has been treating the sickly oldest son of a widow named Eileen. He is aware that she and her three children have no money for Christmas. So he arranges for the local Rugby Club to throw a Christmas Party and raffle a turkey as a fund raiser. He enlisted a local lad, Donal, known for being ablity to pull-off scams, to create a raffle in which the widow is guaranteed to win. On the night of the party he doctor sees that the widow receives a ticket, a gift from an anonymous donor who purchased several tickets to be given out randomly and waits confidently for the drawing, knowing that the widow and her children would have Christmas after all. On the night of the drawing Donal held the hat full of raffle ticket stubs and invited the village mayor to draw the winning ticket. The mayor reached deep into the hat and stirred the lot of them up before pulling the winning ticket from the hat. He turns it over and reads the number 4444 from the back of the ticket. The widow is ecstatic. Her children are ecstatic. The crowd shouts and applauses her good fortune. And, because she had the winning ticket and all the numbers on her stub were the same, she not only won the giant turkey but an envelope containing 75% of the proceeds from the raffle… a sizeable amount of money.
Afterward the doctor asked the scammer lad how he managed to “fix” the raffle. So Donal showed him the hat filled with ticket stubs… each of the stubs in the hat had the number 4444 printed on the back... There was no way the widow would not win the raffle.
God wants us to know a little good news today and that is this… there is no way God is going to lose this thing. One day we will win the giant turkey and all that goes with it. We will be among those who cry out with loud voices, “Salvation belongs to the Lord.”
It is important that we understand the context in which John wrote of this “fixed” hope.
II. God wants us to know that there is a little good news today despite the bad news.
“These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” Revelation 7:14
During the offertory we watched a clip featuring the lyrics of Anne Murray’s song in which she spoke of the bad news… wars, the bad economy, the need for change in policy, the devastating headlines in our newspapers, thefts, drug abuse and overdoses, violence, hostage taking and high jacking, assassinations, religious conflicts and wars, burning buildings, pollution and global warming. When Anne Murray first produced A Little Good News in 1983, I doubt she had any idea how timely her words would be today. We sure could use a little good news today.
The people to whom John wrote knew something of living in challenging times. They were essentially subjects in the Roman Empire. They knew about economic struggles, taxation, tariffs and high interest. Many lived a subsistence existence. Education was limited. Medical care was crude. Crime was high. So the Jewish people and Christians coped by focusing on two things: The first was their faith and the second was their family. By living out faith and focusing on their families they maintained some sense of normalcy.
But that of which Jesus spoke in Matthew 24 in reference to the signs of the times and the end of the age, took the stresses and struggles of daily existence in the Roman Empire to a whole new level. Eschatologists of every generation who have an interest in these things, seize on phrases like the “coming of the deceiver,” and “wars and rumors of war,” and “nations rising up against nations and kingdom against kingdom,” and “famines” and “earthquakes in various places” that all signal the beginning of the end.
In Matthew 24:15-21, which scholars say speaks directly to the subject of the Great Tribulation, the Abomination of Desolation will take place when the Anti-Christ takes over the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus says that Christians will literally flee with only the clothes they have on their backs. It is a time Jesus described as “great distress” or “tribulation” unequaled from the beginning of the world until now and never to be equaled again. And unless those days are cut short, no one will survive. Then immediately after that, “the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky and all the nations of the earth will mourn. They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds with great power and glory.” Matthew 24:29-30
Our text speaks of those who will have come out of that great tribulation… our text speaks of those who will have experienced the most appalling of life’s circumstances as all the powers of evil are unleashed against them.
And it is in the context of this, the worst of all possible scenarios, that John wants us to see a little good news… even if it is only a glimpse into the future where we will know the reality of God’s salvation.
It is important that the people of God living in any generation hear a little good news because people are a lot like the old pinball machines.
If you are old enough, you can remember playing pinball. When a player, in his efforts to keep his pinball alive, moved the table too much from side to side or back and forth or lifted it to keep the ball in play, the machine would tilt. When that happened the machine had a mechanism that shut the game down, the flappers would not flap and the sensors did not register and the player lost his ball.
Sometimes in life we are kind of like a pinball machine that gets jostled too much and eventually we shut down… it is something like being desensitized to our world to the point that we are no longer emotionally sensitive to what is going on, i.e., we shut down. And when we shut-down, we give in to the thought that nothing can be done to change things.
Just as we are making our way after having bailed out wall street investment banking companies and they are telling us that the banking industry does not need to be regulated, the Goldman Sachs fraud scandal breaks. I’m not surprised. We learned this week that GM repaid 8.1 billion dollars of their bailout loan. Now we hear that they used bailout money to repay bailout money. I’m not surprised. Celebrities get caught philandering and bounce in and out of sexual addiction treatment leaving a wake of broken marriages and dysfunctional families. I am not surprised. I don’t even blink when I read of roadside bombings in Afghanistan. And I sometimes think I am becoming increasingly desensitized to the stream of natural disasters that cross our TV screens like radar blips.
When you see and hear and experience enough bad news, you become desensitized to it. We begin to think that nothing ever changes and nothing can be done to change it or fix it. The problem with this pessimism is that when this happens not only do our senses become dulled but we can even begin to doubt God’s existence (or at least God’s presence and goodness).
God does not want us to become so jaded that we can no longer envision a new day. God does not want us to become so calloused that we can no longer hope. That is why he gives us a little good news today.
Out of all of this will rise a day when all the wrongs will be righted… when God will rule and God’s people will know the salvation of the Lord.
God wants us to know that there will be a day when there is only good news.
III. God wants us to know that there will be a day when there is only good news.
“…and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them. Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any heat scorching heat. For the Lamb at the center of the throne will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” Revelation 7:15-17
It is hard to imagine a day when none of the things that weary us and wear down our spirits today will even exist. It is hard to imagine a time when the only news is good news.
On Wednesday a convenience store clerk named Chris Shaw held the winning Powerball Jackpot ticket… he won 258 million dollars. When he won the lottery he had less than $29 in his bank account and a pile of bills at home he had no way to pay. His immediate thought was that he could pay-off the $1,000 he owed on his truck, catch up on his utility bills, see a dentist about getting his two missing front teeth replaced and take the family to Disney World in Florida. He described his euphoria like this, “I’m just a regular guy working paycheck to paycheck… well not anymore.”
It is not my intent to promote the lottery but rather to capture a bit of what it will be like when we can say, “I’m just a guy with bills I cannot pay, kids who want and need things I can’t afford, living from paycheck to paycheck…. well not anymore.”
God wants us to know that his people will hit it big…
• We will live under the umbrella of his eternal protection and care.
• We will never again know hunger or thirst.
• We will know only the loving care of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
• We will never again shed a tear.
• We will never again experience death or mourning or crying or pain.
Every Sunday when we gather here and now, we are thinking there and then.
Conclusion
“No More Tears” has been a marketing slogan for baby shampoo that has offered millions of parents a bottle of peace. Who has not bathed a screaming toddler with soap in his eyes? Imagine a promised time when there will be no more tears, no heartaches, and no grief.
When we gather here in this room every week we are rehearsing for that day when we will gather around the throne of God celebrating the God of our salvation. When we gather to worship in community we are reminded that God is a present and there is hope. It is this regular assurance that God is with us and for us that keep us from shutting down in despair in a world gone all atilt.
Our worship today is a precursor of that time when we will be living a little good news… the salvation of God.
