Because of Jesus, the Best Is Yet to Come

Well, good morning, Cities Church, and merry Christmas to you all!

I am especially grateful to be here and behind this pulpit this morning as it will very likely be the last opportunity I have to preach to you as one of your pastors. As many of you have heard, a few months ago our family announced that we are moving back to Washington State in the Spring of 2021 to pursue God’s call on our lives to continue doing gospel ministry in a region we know well and love dearly. We are excited and eager for what God has in store, that’s true. But as our time remaining here decreases with each passing day, our sadness over leaving grows. We, our family, and I, as one of your pastors, love you, church. And God has been very, very kind to us in our time here. So, it is an immense privilege to step into this pulpit again and open the very word of God with you all.

A quick note on this morning’s message, especially for those of you who are new to Cities. We love preaching through whole books of the Bible here. This year alone we’ve had the joy of working through Exodus, several Psalms, and just last week we finished up our fall series through 2 Timothy and Titus. Next Sunday we begin a new seven week series in Revelation, preaching through the seven letters to the seven churches, and it’s going to be awesome! That means I have the happy job of preaching one stand-alone sermon, which may sound easier than being assigned a passage; but I actually find it more challenging because 1) the Bible is huge and filled with a eternity’s worth of incredible passages to study and 2) I don’t have the benefit of riding the coattails of the guy who preached the week before me nor the comforts of knowing the guy preaching next week will be able to cover over my mistakes. For your purposes, that’s really here-nor-there, other than me wanted you to have a heads up that this morning we’ll be jumping around a little bit more than usual, looking at a handful of passages in the book of Hebrews and beyond.

The primary passage, the one Mike just read for us, is where we’ll spend the bulk of our time. In particular, I want us to consider the question that comes from verse 14, “What does it mean to seek the city that is to come?” That’s a good question for us to ask, especially this time of the year, for obvious reasons. New Years is a great time for reflection, setting goals, making resolutions, and starting fresh. And after the past year, who doesn’t want a fresh start?

So, my hope for us this morning, is that we leave here with our hearts reoriented to Jesus, our feet set on a trajectory that leads us towards him, and our hope fixed on the bright future he has promised. For those of you who like a roadmap, the point of my message is simple: “Because of Jesus, the best is yet to come.”

Let’s pray: If you came to our house, one of the first things you would have noticed would have been a large piece of artwork hung in the center of our living room with the text, “The best is yet to come.” Now, admittedly, I usually have a hard time with optimistic catch-phrases like these. No offense to any of you, but I can get a little nauseated in the aisles of Hobby Lobby seeing all the “Live. Laugh. Love.” or “Let the world hear you roar!” (complete with a graphic of a T-Rex) signs. And, to my chagrin, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen several “The best is yet to come” signs, posters, and otherwise at both Hobby Lobby and Target. But, ours was custom ordered and made because this phrase, trite as it may first appear, means something profound to us.

About six years ago, our life was a wreck. In some regards, they were the most exciting days of our lives. We’d just recently welcomed our first child, Judah, and also set out with the founding team to plant Cities Church. They were also really stressful days. I was working two jobs and attending school part-time, while Hilly was also working overnight shifts. We were like ships in the night, rarely seeing each other, overly tired, and not communicating well. We made it in survival mode for about a year until things finally let up and we were able to make changes to sync our schedules and have more time together. It was then, in the wake of the storm, that we really realized how much damage that previous year had done. We’d changed so much, not only in becoming parents, but also by living for so many months on opposite schedules that in ways it felt like we didn’t really know each other. And getting to know each other again, to rebuild the relationship it felt like we once had, seemed at times like an insurmountable task.

I remember several conversations where we’d be driving in the car or out on a date just going back through our history, reliving the “glory days” of our dating, engagement, or first year of marriage; then, in frustration, asking one another how in the world we were ever going to get back to how things were then. We began to succumb to the lie the best days of marriage were behind us and that the task before was either to miraculously recapture some of the magic from the past or learn to merely cope and “make it work” as best as possible going forward. It was a pretty hopeless spot to land.

I’ll come back to Hilly and my story a little later, but let’s pause here because, as humans, we’re all kind of like this. We tend to romanticize the past, viewing the best-of-times all in the rear-view. We hear it in common cultural catch phrases like, “In the good old days,” or “Back in my day,” or the now classic “Make America (or anything else for that matter) Great Again.” All these phrases suggest that we had a good thing, we lost it, and the hope for the future is returning to what he had in the past.

Now, after a year like 2020, we are especially tempted to think this way. We romanticize 2019, when it was strange to see someone in a mask and common to see people shake hands. We romanticize the apparent civility of politics in 2012, when Mitt Romney graciously (so far as we can remember) lost to Obama. Several of us here are old enough to think back with lament on life before iPhones and social media, with a longing to return to those simpler times.

But if we think critically about it, the world was no better place then than it is now. 2019, 2012, and 1936 were all affected by sin and brought their unique challenges, trials, and hardships. The circumstances in each year look different and, sure, as we look back through the halls of time, we view some years more favorably than others; but there is no such thing as “the glory days” insofar as every day of every year the whole of creation has been groaning for salvation.

So, what is our hope? And how do orient to the future when, at present, it all seems so bleak?

Here’s where I’d like us to open again to the book of Hebrews, beginning in chapter 11. Hebrews 11–13 was the primary place the Lord met Hilly and I amid our marital crisis and hopelessness, and it’s the place that, on the front steps of 2021 as it were, I want us to turn for instruction.

As you’re turning there, a couple things about the book of Hebrews. First off, and this is purely anecdotal, but it’s my favorite book in the New Testament—it’s an astounding book in the way it weaves together the Old Testament to show the glory of Jesus and his fulfillment of all the Old Testament types and prophecy. Secondly, it was written to an ethnic Jewish audience who were heavily persecuted their conversion to following Jesus. The author of Hebrews is writing to encourage them with biblical arguments for Jesus’s superiority to angels, Moses, and the Jewish priestly order as well as to exhort them to hold fast to their Christian confession amid the hardships.

Obviously, our setting is a little different today. Very few of us are ethnic Jews. Even fewer of us are at risk of losing our house or our job because of following Jesus. But we’re not different in every way, and the message of Hebrews stands for us: no one and nothing is better than Jesus, so fix your hope wholly on him.

With that preface in place, look with me at 11:8-10.

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.”

If you’re an underliner or highlighter or notetaker, mark that last sentence: “For he was looking forward,” Abraham was looking forward, “to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.”

From the very beginning of God’s redemptive plan, from when God first established a people for himself, he established a forward looking plan. The Christian faith is fundamentally future oriented. It’s a hope for tomorrow that changes and strengthens how we live today. And we see this even before Abraham, all the way back in God’s promise to Adam and Eve. There, in Genesis 3, after humanity’s fall, God made a promise that from Eve a son would be born who would crush Satan and destroy death. And the whole of the Old Testament has its eye toward the fulfillment of that promise: towards the son who would finally save God’s people.

The way this promised salvation is pictured here in Hebrews 11 is with the metaphor of the establishment of a new city. A new home for God’s people. And, it’s a great image.

God willing, in 2021, Cities Church is going to begin a renovation project. We’ve been working for several months now with an architect and designers who are drawing up amazing plans for maximizing the potential of this space, and I can’t wait for you all to see it because seeing their designs and imagination at work reflects, even if only in a very small way, the mind and creativity of God. If the world as-it-is is represented by our building—beautiful and broken, glorious but obscured, and teeming with potential—imagine what the new world—the new city—he is designing and building will be like. Imagine glory realized! Now, that’s a world, a city, or to extend the metaphor, a building I want to inhabit—to make my home in—forever. And that’s the hope, that’s the future orientation of faith. Seeing the unseen by beholding in the word the designs and plans God has chosen to reveal to us and trusting that he will bring the work to perfect completion. 

With that in mind, look at Hebrews 11 again with me, but drop down a few verses to verse 13, and hear the author reinforce his point about this future hope.

“These [Abraham’s family, Noah, Enoch, Abel] all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.”

Because God’s people were looking forward, looking ahead to the fulfillment of God’s promise to give them a home with him, they lived differently in this world. They saw themselves as strangers and exiles on earth. They had no homeland, no hometown on earth they laid claim upon. They were not at home here.

Compare that to how we’re wired. Almost more than anything, all of us just want to be “at home.” That’s why songs like, “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” resonate generation after generation. We all want a place where we belong. Where we’re accepted and loved. Where we’re comfortable and at rest. Home is a place of peace, security, safety, and delight.

And yet, none of us can find a true, lasting home here in this world. We’re all looking for that place of perfect peace and belonging and love; but it doesn’t exist. Not here anyways. Not yet. And that’s because we’re made to be at home with the Triune God. We are made to feel the proud delight our heavenly Father has in us; to forever enjoy the brilliance of Jesus, our Savior; and to be overflowing with the love and power of the Holy Spirit. But here, our demonic accuser fills us with doubts about the depths of the Father’s love. Here, we’re distracted by lesser glories and are therefore unsatisfied by the greatness of Jesus. Here, our love is dulled as our flesh and spirit go to war against one another in a competition of desires.

Not to mention—as 2020 has reminded us, even the best things here are not guaranteed or don’t last. Parents die. Pregnancies miscarry. Spouses walk-out. Trusted leaders fail. Communities divide. Economies crash. This world and every possible home it offers proves to be, at best, fragile and temporary. Which is why we need a better country, a heavenly one. A home that is secure, where thieves cannot break in a steal, and where moth nor rust can destroy (Matthew 6:20). Amen?

So all of us are longing for home, and because of our family origins in Eden, we intuitively look to the past to find the home we long for. But the message of the Bible is that our home is not buried somewhere deep in the past but is being built for us by God who will himself bring us there when his work is complete.

Now, flash back to the story I was sharing about Hilly and me. I left off with the two of us feeling pretty hopeless about our future. At that point, we were stuck in a feedback loop of our felt needs and desires for comfort, and frustrated that our circumstances had changed and responsibilities grown such that we could no longer enjoy our relationship the way we once had. Stuck in the present, wishing for an opportunity to return to where we’d come from, and blind to what God was building for the future. But through these passages God started to open our eyes and lift our heads, such that we began to see him, ourselves, and our lives for what they were. The future orientation of faith changed our perspective such that we began to see that because we had this new city, this heavenly home, to look forward to our best days must be ahead of us; not behind us. And that hope, that infusion of light and beauty into our future, began to change the way we lived in the present.

But there’s more to the story and, more importantly, there’s more to Hebrews.

See, the ideas of a new city and a heavenly home can seem pretty abstract, and highly spiritualized. But we’re embodied creatures. We live in the physical, tangible world. And an un-careful reading of Hebrews has left some scholars thinking that Hebrews creates a hard divide between the physical and the spiritual. Some have argued that what really matters is spiritual stuff. Heavenly stuff. And that the physical world is wholly corrupt and will one day be done away with entirely. Like I said, this would be a bad reading of Hebrews, but many have taken it this way. They’d look at the passages like the ones we’ve just read and the one we’re about to look at, Hebrews 13:14, “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come,” and they’d say, “See! This world doesn’t matter! It’s all going to burn up. So focus on the spiritual stuff and forget the physical.” They’d discourage you from having children, getting married, engaging in local politics, or starting a new business because, “What’s the point? It just distracts you from focusing on the spiritual.”

But admittedly, there aren’t many of those folks around today. They’re out there, but pretty rare. Instead, today, we have mostly people on the other side of the spectrum: materialists, to whom there is no spiritual, no transcendental, no world beyond our own. And as such, all that matters is the business you start, degree you obtain, experiences you accumulate, and relationships you choose to engage in. “Live and let live, because there’s nothing beyond this.”

The author of Hebrews highlights how the person and work of Jesus defies both of this false assumptions about reality. And there’s two places I want to go for us to see this. One is Hebrews 13, but where I want us to go first is Hebrews 2 and the good news of Christmas.

Turn back a few pages to Hebrews 2 and read with me starting at verse 14.

“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery. For surely it is not angels that he helps, but he helps the offspring of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered when tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

Jesus, the eternal Son of God, took on flesh and blood and lived among us. He ate real food. As a carpenter, he worked with real wood. When he spoke over the enormous crowds, his vocal cords vibrated (and though the New Testament doesn’t say this, I expect he experienced sore throats afterwards). He perspired, had to clip his fingernails, and slept when he was tired. When he was nailed to the cross, his flesh was really pierced and real blood dripped from his hands and feet. And when he was raised from the dead, he was raised physically. Bodily. And, all the while, he remained God. Even now, seated at the right hand of God the Father, Jesus, God the Son, has retained his physical form. Glorified, yes. But tangible. Visible. Filled with matter.

And for us, Jesus’s matter matters! Platonic–dualists, those who see the world of the spiritual as pure and the physical world as dirty, would be horrified at the thought of God becoming, much less retaining flesh. The materialists of today cannot accept that Jesus is God because they cannot believe anything lives beyond this mortal life. Jesus, through first coming as the God-man—which we celebrate in the season of Christmas—defies them both.

And the reason he took on flesh, the reason he came was to fulfill the very promises we just looked at in Hebrews 11. He is the promised Savior, the Son of Eve, come to destroy death and the devil, and to deliver his people from slavery. He is the manifestation, the security, of God’s promise to establish an everlasting city, a home for his people; a better, heavenly country for them to dwell in. In Jesus, the promises of God took on flesh and we realized through the spilling of his blood and the resurrection of his body.

So, because of Hebrews 2, when know what it means when we come to Hebrews 13:12 and we read “So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.” This is why Christmas matters. This is why Jesus came. He came to save us. He came to die for our sin. And he rose to conquer death once and for all so that we might live by grace through faith in his finished work.

Then Hebrews 13 goes on with a direct application to us, and look with me what it says. Verse 13: “Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach that he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come.”

A moment ago I mentioned that the idea of seeking the city that is to come is pretty abstract and easy to spiritualize without obvious here-and-now applications. Hebrews 13:13–14, I think, solves that abstraction. At least it does if you believe that Jesus is no mere abstraction but is the living God who took on flesh.

See, Hebrews 13:13 isn’t merely a thought experiment; it touches on every aspect of human experience. To help you see what I mean, think about it from the perspective of a first century Jew who has become a Christian. The language of going outside the camp refers back to the book of Leviticus and instructions for sacrifices, uncleanliness, and sin. Sacrifices for sin were to be burned outside of the camp, away from the dwelling place of the Jewish community. Leapers were also to remain outside of the camp so as to maintain the purity of the community. And Leviticus 24 describes how a blasphemer is to be stoned outside of the camp for his sin. Jesus, who was accused of blasphemy by the Jewish leaders of his day, was taken outside of the camp to Golgotha, where he was hung to die a sinners death. And, likewise, the author of Hebrews is calling these Jewish converts to Christianity to leave—to leave the very real, tangible, physical comforts of their Jewish community, and to walk in faithful obedience to Jesus. Doing so would cost them their social standing, their livelihoods, their homes and material possessions, and quite possibly their very lives given the intense persecution of Christians around the time Hebrews was written.

Leaving the camp and going to Jesus wasn’t ideological. It wasn’t merely a spiritual exercise. It had a real cost. But the cost wasn’t just losses and sacrifices. It also meant seeking in real ways, physical ways, the city that is to come. It meant gathering in physical homes, writing letters and books, preaching audible messages with real words, working actual jobs and building businesses. Seeking the city that is to come meant planting churches, discipling young believers, standing up to politicians, fighting just wars, starting hospitals, forming seminaries, and advancing technologies that advanced the message and realization of the city that is to come.

First century Christians, the readers of Hebrews, were willing to lose anything and ready to build everything in order to be near to Jesus and inhabit the city that he himself is building in our midst and will one day fully realize when he comes again.

This was the realization, largely through these passages, that God brought Hilly and I to during the lowest of lows in our marriage. Yes, this world is not our ultimate home. Yes, the security and comfort and peace we ultimately long for will not be realized until Jesus returns. But that’s not a fatalistic, grin-and-bear-it until he comes message, because, as Hebrews says, and as faithful Christians have done throughout the millennia, we are to seek the city that is to come. Actively. Prayerfully. Physically. Because Jesus is King and because his kingdom is being realized as his gospel goes forth and the nations are discipled, the future is incredibly bright and we are invited to be part of its realization through faithfully going to Jesus. Thus, in our marriage and our lives, the best days are always ahead of us because each passing day brings us one step closer to Jesus and one day nearer to his return and our arrival in our final home. This means for us that, while we don’t know exactly what’s in store for the future, and while we expect hardships and trials, we know that God ultimately intends good for us — to mature us, grow us in his love, and make us more like Christ. Because Jesus is going to return, the best is yet to come. Always!

This brings us to the table.

If you are in Christ, this table — this tiny little wafer and thimble-full of wine — are a reminder to you that the best is yet to come. And that the best is coming physically. Tangibly.

As you eat and as you drink, remember the call of Hebrews, to go to Jesus. Doing so may have real costs. Testifying to Jesus may mean losing social standing in your friend group or work place. Fighting your sin may require confessing and owning up to wrong doing. Investing in his kingdom’s purposes may mean changing your career, your financial plans, or your daily habits and rhythms. But seeking the city that is to come also dignifies your work with eternal significance. If you’re an electrician, wire houses with work ethic that testifies to the ethic of that eternal city. If you’re an occupational therapist, perform your therapy with the hope of children who will one day inhabit resurrection bodies in which your therapeutic work will be completed. As a developer, create apps and webpages that show off the glory and creativity of the heavenly city. Mothers, raise your sons to be warriors for righteousness and daughters who adorn the coming city of God with the glory of their good works done in Jesus’s name. All these things and more you can do because Jesus is faithful, he is building his city, the future in infinitely bright, and until he returns the best is yet to come.

Now, as the band and pastoral team comes up, I will mention this table is prepared for the members of Cities Church, but if you have fixed your hope in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, we invite you to eat with us. If you have not yet trusted in Jesus for salvation, today he welcomes you to call upon him — to place your hope now and forever in him alone. But if that’s not you, we would ask you to refrain from partaking in the elements and I would love to talk with you more after the service.

His body is the true bread. His blood is the true drink. Let us serve you.