When We Are Complete Series

Warning! I’m Under Construction – What We Will Be Like When the Building is Complete - Revelation 21:1-7

Today we are finishing up a series that we've been doing called "Warning! I'm Under Construction". The first week we considered how God builds our character.

Then we looked at how God builds our faith. Last Sunday Pastor Jan spoke to us about How God Build Relationships. This week, as promised, we're going to consider what the building looks like when it's completed.

One day we'll no longer be under construction, one day we'll no longer have battles to face. All of the complexity of our lives, all of the messiness and strife in the world around us, all of the unanswered questions and queries we have, will cease. Until then, we’re under construction.

These things will cease, but you will not cease.

1 Corinthians 13 says: 8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears…12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

There’s a now and there’s a then. There’s the PART that we’re living now, but then completeness will come. And the PART that we’re living now, God wants our full engagement in. He wants us to care.

Now, something you used to hear was that Christians are so heavenly minded that they are no earthly good. It is still believed that to have a belief in anything after this life, somehow that belief distracts us from living this life well. From caring as we should.

But you don’t have to look very hard with an unprejudiced eye, to see how people who believed deeply in the life after this one helped to transform this world in critical ways.

William Wilberforce was largely responsible for the abolition of slavery in England. He was a Christian.

Abraham Lincoln, who through out his life became more and more convinced of the Christian faith, brought about as one of his final accomplishments, the end of slavery in the U.S.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American civil rights activist, lightning rod and leader who worked for the desegregation of schools and of society in general, the dismantling of the social barriers, rooted in racism, that remained a hundred years after the American civil war.

There are hundreds, thousands of examples of people who were committed Christ-followers who understood that the living out of their faith involved tackling the evils in this world that did not reflect the values of God’s Kingdom.

So we are and we’re called to be ‘earthly good’. And in fact, the way that we are, and the way that we can increase our commitment to making a true difference in this world, is by having our hearts set on heaven. More than that, it’s by realizing that...

Who here has a passport? If you’ve travelled to the U.S. in recent years of to any other country at any time, you have a passport. What does that passport say about your citizenship?

It probably says that you are a citizen of Canada. That’s a fair assumption to make...although if you’re from elsewhere...we’re glad you’re here!

Well, our passports, if we have them, or for whenever we may get them, reveal something of the tension that we live with. Our passports say that our citizenship is in Canada, or in some other temporal place. The Bible says that our citizenship is in heaven.

Philippians 3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.

What this means is that if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, your true home is not here. Your true home is in heaven. Heaven is your home, and currently, we are all what’s called ‘sojourners’ on this planet. Not “just passing by”, but we’re here on purpose, by God’s will and design, to do the works he created us to do.

“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Ephesians 2:10

But, what will it be like when we are, when you are, complete? What will the final state of our existence be like? Once God has completed his work on our character, once He has built our faith, once our relationships are sorted out?