Foundations 3: Where Do We Live? (Isaiah 52:3-4, Acts 1:6-8) - Calvary Baptist Cobourg

 Scroll down for full message

This week I want to ask the question 'Where Do We Live?' 

We don't only exist simply to exist. We are not, as some would have us believe, only on the planet to keep the species going and to propagate our genes. We are here for a reason. And we are here for a reason.  

The God who makes us all unique and makes us all united gives us the opportunity to do his work in the world to work alongside him, where he is already doing his work of redemption and his work of truth in our world. And for us to understand what that work looks like—what it is we are supposed to be doing—it helps if we understand where we live: what is our culture, what is our world, what is our context? What are the needs that are within reach? And what are the resources that God has provided for us to meet those needs on his behalf?  

We live here. And we live not-here. 

I'm going to start with the heavenly answer; we live ‘not-here.’ Most of us gathered in this room, most of us who will be watching online, we call ourselves Christians. We are followers of Jesus as God. I think it's safe to say that most of us are looking forward to what we call “going home.” We sing songs like, “One glad morning when this life is o’er, I'll fly away,” and we sing hymns like, When We All Get To Heaven. “What a day of rejoicing that will be.”  

When Isaiah wrote chapter 51 of his book, he was writing to a particular group of people, living in a particular time, in a particular place who were also looking forward to going home. Isaiah writes, “...For the Lord will comfort Zion and will look with compassion on all her ruins. He will make her wilderness like Eden and her desert like the garden of the Lord.”  

When Isaiah is talking about Zion, he's talking about Jerusalem. And when the Hebrew people talked about Jerusalem, they were talking about home.  

The people of Israel had always been a people of the land, right from the beginning. From the earliest days of God's covenant with Abraham, his promise largely involved the idea of land, and having a homeland. God kept that promise and brought Israel to that land. And until fairly recently, Isaiah's audience, the people of Israel, had been living in that land—in God's holy city, on God's holy mountain. 

In Psalm 48, the song the Sons of Korah wrote, “Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise, in the city of our God, in his holy mountain. Beautiful in its loftiness, the joy of the whole earth.” For the people of Israel, Jerusalem was the centre of the earth and the temple in Jerusalem was the centre of the centre of the earth. It was the place on earth where Yahweh God was most closely and immediately met. 

The people who were reading Isaiah's words, the people who held those words close to their hearts and repeated them to each other, and repeated them to their children—those people, were not living in Jerusalem. They were not living in the land of promise. They weren't even living in the ruins of the land of promise. They were far from home. They were captive to an enemy force. They were surrounded by the worship of a false god. They were hearing stories of the devastation of the city, of the destruction of its protecting wall, of the looting of their beautiful temple, of the burning of their homes, of the suffering of the people who had been left behind in Jerusalem.  

The people who heard Isaiah's words that day and read them over and over again—they did not want to be living in Babylon. They wanted to go home.  

So God made them a promise. To these broken hearted and displaced people, these prisoners of war, God's promise was, “I will take you home. But it's going to take a while.”  

And I think many of us can relate. Many of us sometimes feel stuck where we don't belong. We feel stuck in a broken world. I don't know what you think the greatest evil is on earth, whether it's war or the devil or man-made climate change or mosquitoes or stores that sell Christmas decorations and Hallowe’en decorations at the same time. Whatever you think it is, I think we can all agree that the world is not as it should be. We do not feel at home here.  

But however broken the world is, however far from home we are, there is good news. There is the news that God keeps his promises, and that his promise will be kept. There is the good news that Zion isn't going anywhere. Zion is being held in trust for those who are faithful, and God's people will return home with joy, with gladness, with thanksgiving and singing.  

In the same way, Christians look forward to walking the streets of that Eden Garden City that is described in the book of Revelation, and feeling on our faces the light of the sun that is God himself, in the company of those who have gone before, and those who will come after us.  

We look forward to going home. 

But in the meantime, we do live here. We live not-here; we live here.  

We live in these bodies. We live on this planet. We live surrounded by stuff and things and people and systems, political and economic. We live here, on and in a broken world. We are part of this broken world and we are, as human beings, just as broken.  

As I said, Isaiah's people held those promises close to their hearts. They repeated them to each other, and they repeated them in hope to their children and passed them on from generation to generation. Because they were in Babylon for generations. In captivity for generations. In slavery for generations. Every single morning they would wake up in their strange homes, in their strange cities, listening to their strange neighbours speak a strange language as they practiced strange customs. Every single day they would be treated as outsiders, treated as inferior human beings. Their day-to-day concrete reality was of not being ‘at home’ and not belonging, and of having only reliance on each other and on God's as yet unkept promises.  

God's promise to them was not just, “Someday you will be out of here. Someday you get to go home. Someday things will get better.” God had other promises—and demands—for the people of Israel while they lived in Babylon. There were several prophets who spoke to Israel around this time, spoke to Israel about this idea. One of those other prophets was Jeremiah.  

Jeremiah had things to say to the people of Israel from God as well, and this is one of those things. 

In Jeremiah 29:4-7, God gives this message to the people of Israel through his prophet: “This is what the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel says to all the exiles who were carried away from Jerusalem to Babylon. “Build houses, settle down, plant gardens, eat what they produce, get married, have sons and daughters. Let your children get married so that they too may have sons and daughters. Multiply in Babylon and do not decrease. Seek the prosperity of the city to which I have sent you as exiles. Pray to the Lord on its behalf. For if it prospers, you too will prosper.””  

God knew that his people were in exile. He knew that they wanted to go home, but he had told them that they were going to be there for a while—for generations—and his command to them was not, “Create your own little enclave and go hide in the corner until it's all over.” It was not, “Just sit and wait for deliverance because God's going to look after it. You don't have to do anything.” God's command to them was not, “Keep your bags packed by the door and hope and pray that Babylon implodes so you can escape through the cracks.”  

God's command to them was, “Look around. See where you live? Get invested in your community, be part of your community so that you can be a blessing for as long as you are there.”  

God's command to Israel was, “This is where you are... So live!”  

God's expectation for the church today is no different. We are not living in the world we would choose. Some of us are not living in the country we would choose and I think (with winter coming) we can probably all agree that we do not live in the climate that we would choose. But God's expectation of us is the same as his expectation of Israel: “Look around. Live where you are!”  

...If we are believers in Jesus, if we are loving him by obeying his commands, focusing entirely on the ‘someday’ is not an option... 

We are a group of individual human beings, each uniquely formed by, uniquely loved by, uniquely accountable to the God who speaks, the God who moves, and the God who never fails. We are filled with his spirit, who is building us together into one spiritual nation, sharing one heart. And we are citizens of heaven and citizens of our broken world. 

To hear the full message: