A Short Summary (Revelation 1:4-6) | Pastor Jake Sweetman

In this powerful sermon, we delve into the profound themes of faithful witness, grace, and peace from the book of Revelation. Reflecting on the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, we explore the courage and conviction required to testify to Jesus with our whole lives. This message examines how the concepts of grace and peace are integral to facing persecution and challenges as followers of Christ. Journey with us as we uncover the boundless grace and peace offered by God the Father, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ. Discover how history, both biblical and contemporary, offers us insight and inspiration to remain bold in our witness, advancing the kingdom of God amid trials. Join us as we navigate the 'Wonderful World of the Apocalypse' and find reassurance in the transcendent hope that life in Christ offers.

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Transcript

 How are you doing?

Better now that you're here?

Yeah, that's how I feel every single week too.

Every time I walk in here.

 I usually drive to church feeling a little anxious, but the moment I walk through our doors, I just feel the peace of the Lord.

And that's because of what God is doing in our midst and the fact that I get to walk beside every single one of you guys.

It fills me with joy.

I wanted to make a few remarks this morning about the tragedy of our week, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

We've been learning about faithful witness.

Everybody say faithful witness.

Faithful witness.

 It's a major theme throughout the book of Revelation, and that's the series that we're in right now for a while, months.

Faithful witness means that you testify to Jesus with your whole life, with your words, your actions, with your priorities, with your courage, with your suffering, even in your death if it comes to that.

 And you may not agree with every single one of Charlie Kirk's takes on every issue, but there is absolutely no question that he was a faithful witness to the Lord Jesus Christ.

That he aimed to point to Christ with his whole life, including especially his political engagement.

 And without question, many of the issues that Charlie addressed, he did so from a biblical worldview, a worldview that upholds the sanctity of every human life.

 A worldview that celebrates God's good design of humanity and making us male and female.

A worldview that promotes the vitality of strong families with healthy moms and dads.

Charlie's faith in Christ was his foundation and it was what he ultimately wanted to direct people toward.

I don't just know that from the internet.

I have several friends who knew and loved him well.

In fact, minutes before Charlie was assassinated, he literally preached the gospel.

 He said Jesus Christ was a real person.

He lived a perfect life.

He was crucified, died, and rose on the third day, and he is Lord and God over all.

What a bold proclamation on a university campus.

This is one of the things that makes his assassination so significant.

It was not just a political act of violence.

 It was an assault on a biblical foundation and a biblical worldview.

Charlie bore faithful witness to the fullest extent.

The very word witness is the Greek word martis.

It's where we get our English word martyr.

Someone who clings to the truth even at the cost of their life.

This murder was not simply an act of somebody with opposing ideas.

 That alone would have been hateful and murderous and undemocratic.

But this was something more.

This was an attack from an anti-Christ spirit.

This was demonic.

You see, whether the killer would say that he killed Charlie because of his faith or because of his political views isn't the point.

The point is that many of Charlie's political views grew out of the seedbed of the Bible.

And that got him killed.

 And the message from the killer and the message from all those who were seen celebrating on social media, we pray for them.

See it celebrating on social media this week is clear.

The message, you are not safe if you have a biblical worldview.

That's the message.

It's not just about politics.

And this is not a new thing.

In fact, Revelation 11, we'll get to this in several months.

But Revelation 11 shows the inhabitants of the earth celebrating over the suffering and the death of the church.

 They exchange gifts with one another and they celebrate as the church appears to suffer.

But then there's an unexpected twist in the story because God vindicates the church through his resurrection power and many of those who mocked Christ end up coming to faith in Christ.

Charlie's death shows us something.

It shows us the power of the gospel.

It reveals how threatening the good news of Jesus is to the dragon.

And as usual, the enemy has overplayed his hand.

 Because the church now has a major opportunity to demonstrate the way of Jesus, to continue testifying to the truth of the gospel, to the authority of the scriptures, and to the way of the cross, even in the face of opposition and hate.

You see, every time we go out from this place and we love our enemies, every time we speak the truth when it costs us

 something.

Every time we embrace faithful witness at the cost of something in our lives, every time we simply love and serve those around us, we make a way for the kingdom of God to advance through us.

The church father, Tertullian, famously said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, and history proves it true because the church advances the most in a climate of war.

 And we are here today because previous generations planted their lives like seeds in the soil of history.

And we are reaping the fruit of their faithfulness.

And now the generations coming after us must be able to look to us for that same fruit.

But that only happens if we plant our lives in the soil of the kingdom as seeds, yielded fully to Christ.

 And so many were wondering this week as faithful followers of Jesus, what do I do?

How do I respond?

What are the right words to say?

And I would just say to you today that our right response is to carry on or dare we maybe increase our boldness in witness to Jesus Christ.

 Christ calls us to yield our whole lives to him, that all of us would point to all that he is, his justice, his love, his truth, his holiness, his forgiveness, his coming judgment at the end of this age, and his call to repent and believe.

To be bold in your witness to Jesus, friends, is not just pro-Jesus, it's, for those of you who care, also pro-American.

 You see, America is a liberal democracy, which means that our utmost political value is individual liberty, individual freedom, and your rights.

And that value contains so much beauty and so much good, but only if that liberty is grounded in God.

Please understand, there is no future for a liberal democracy when God is not our foundation.

 The only way that the value of my rights and your rights don't turn into every man for himself and might making right, the only way that that doesn't happen is when our story is connected to the transcendent story and truth of the Lord Jesus Christ who reigns from heaven and earth.

Otherwise, we turn into a postmodern disaster, which is where we are.

So when you are bold about your witness to Jesus, you're not just...

 participating in the salvation of souls for eternity, you are actually promoting the flourishing of a healthy society in our day.

We do humanity no service when we privatize our faith and keep it out of the public realm.

We are called to be faithful witnesses, and that comes with a cost.

Charlie's death is the most extreme example of what that cost can look like.

It cost him his life.

And so the question that we must all wrestle with here today is, will it cost me anything?

 You don't need 10 million followers on Instagram to use your voice.

You don't need to work in politics.

You don't need to be even a blatantly political person.

You can bear witness to the gospel in whatever lane God has placed you.

And so today we pray for the Kirk family, his wife, his one-year-old, his three-year-old.

We thank God for Charlie's witness and we look forward to seeing him in the age to come.

 in the presence of Christ.

We also pray for his friends.

We pray for those who were affected by the tragic events of this week.

We pray for you, for those who were exposed to the gruesome footage of that film.

I pray that God give you his grace.

We pray that in this moment of grief and soberness that we would be stirred to fresh courage, to faithful witness.

Come, whatever may.

Father,

 We love you.

Pastor Dylan, why don't you come?

Help me pray.

We have a microphone for Pastor Dylan.

Lord, we love you so much.

And we thank you for your perfect peace.

And Lord, we want to pray for Charlie's wife and children, his friends, and we want to pray for our nation.

Pastor Dylan, why don't you pray?

 Lord, we love you.

And above all else, we say, may your will be done.

May your kingdom come.

Would earth look like heaven, Lord?

Would you use this somehow for your glory, the advancing of your gospel, human flourishing, Lord?

Would that be what grows and is produced from this moment?

 And we say we're here, Lord.

Use us.

Send us.

Lord, would you give us boldness as we encounter you?

God, would our faith be stirred because of you?

Not because we're trying to, but because we've encountered the living God of the universe.

Thank you, Lord.

Holy Spirit, would you fill us?

I thank you, Lord, that the kingdom of light is taking ground in Los Angeles, in the United States, and on this earth over the kingdom of darkness.

 Have your way, Lord.

Use us to take your gospel to the ends of the earth so that your kingdom would come and your will would be done.

In Jesus' name.

 Father, we pray blessing over Charlie's wife and children.

We pray that you fill them with peace.

Lord, we thank you for their ongoing witness to the gospel that even in the midst of this unspeakable and unthinkable pain, Lord, that even she this weekend would stand and point people to the church of Jesus Christ.

Point people to the Lord.

We bless you for your work in their lives.

And we thank you for the friends that surround her and her children.

Lord, we pray comfort upon them.

Father, would you help them to grieve?

 in a way that senses your nearness.

And Lord, when the time is right to lift their eyes and look to the future and all that you still have planned for them.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Praise God.

Well, did you bring a Bible to church?

Why don't you open it to the book of Revelation?

We're in chapter one.

 The name of our series is called The Wonderful World of the Apocalypse.

Two things are true.

It is definitely an apocalypse, and it's definitely wonderful.

We're in Revelation chapter 1, verses 4 to 6 today.

This is the main part of the Apostle John's introduction to the vision that is Revelation.

 And it goes like this, John, to the seven churches in the province of Asia, grace and peace to you from him who is and who was and who is to come and from the seven spirits before his throne and from Jesus Christ who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead and the ruler.

 of the kings of the earth, to him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and has made us to be a kingdom and priest to serve his God and Father, to him be glory and power forever and ever.

Amen.

Do you remember the last time that you had an experience that was just simply too good for words?

Maybe it was a meal or a film.

 or a hotel that was just incredible.

Maybe it was a concert that you went to and the band's live performance was just beyond anything that you ever could have hoped for or expected.

Right now, the thing that people seem to be talking a lot about is this phenomenon on Netflix called K-pop demon hunter.

 I was talking to a father of young children this past week.

He says, we literally watched it four times last week.

I said, wow, your kids must really love it.

He says, no, no, my kids haven't seen it.

That's just my wife and I. It's fun to be excited about something, to get caught up in the effortlessness of evangelizing about it.

 And when joy flows out of a person, it's fun to listen to whatever it is that they're describing.

Like Nicole and I recently ate at a Thai restaurant that was absolutely insane.

Like we actually couldn't even finish the meal before we started texting our friends that they had to come and check this restaurant out.

I was trying to describe one of the dishes to Pastor Dylan and I didn't have the words and I couldn't find the words.

And so the conversation just ended where all conversations about great experiences eventually end.

 Sometimes as humans, when we're really passionate or excited about something, we tend to overcomplicate our explanation.

And when we do, what we find is that our words fall short.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes the most esteemed critics will just step back and just say, sublime or superb?

 And it's always one of those two words.

And I get it.

They're trying not to overcomplicate something that is just so simply beautiful.

And the weight of their review stands because their reputation of great taste in film or in food is enough to make you savor something that you haven't even tasted or seen yet.

And our text today is a little bit like that.

 John has experienced something staggeringly good and he wants to tell you about it.

He wants to tell the church about the revelation of Jesus Christ, the apocalypse, the unveiling that puts everything into perspective.

 including weeks like the one we've just had.

And ultimately, he's going to give you and I the full experience.

He's going to bring us into that experience.

But before that, he wants to get you ready for it.

He wants to give you an overview of what you and I are about to experience.

And it's clear to me that John doesn't want to overcomplicate it.

Now, you might think that given the desperate state of many of the churches that John was initially writing to, that he would be inclined to try and grab their attention by saying too much up front.

 You might think that given the sensational contents of the vision itself that John would feel led to give too much away before diving in, but he doesn't do that.

He simply steps back and says his own version of sublime.

Superb.

What John offers is a simple summary.

 A captivating preview of what awaits the hearer and the reader as they ready themselves to enter into the apocalypse.

John, if you like, offers us today a review.

 He says again in verse 4, John, to the seven churches in the province of Asia, grace and peace to you.

Those of you who have read any of the apostle Paul's letters may recognize these words, grace and peace to you.

They are a standard greeting that the apostles would often use when they wrote letters to the churches in the first century.

And in a very similar way, revelation is a letter.

And it begins with the same greeting that many of the other New Testament documents begin with, grace.

 and peace to you from God.

And yet not all greetings are created equal, are they?

The effect of a greeting very much depends on the circumstances that surrounds the recipients.

And those circumstances for John and the seven churches of Asia Minor were immensely challenging.

John is in exile on an island called Patmos, which Rome used for its political prisoners.

 The seven churches are, by every practical measure, a vulnerable, tiny group amid an endless sea of Roman power, oppression, and temptation.

They were facing great challenges from moral compromise to heresies making their way into the church, intimidation, and the looming threat of widespread persecution.

And yet, in all of that, here, they are met with this greeting from the Lord, grace and peace to you.

 Grace literally means gift.

It's the Greek word charis.

It's about God's favor.

A favor, by the way, which is totally incongruous with whether or not you deserve it.

God's love in action towards us beyond what any single one of us merits.

Scholars say that God's grace is super abundant.

Yes, that's the technical term.

It's more than enough.

 God's grace is the initiator of everything good in our lives.

It precedes anything we could do to earn it.

God's grace is effective.

It is powerful to accomplish God's intention in our lives to save, redeem, heal, cleanse, and restore.

That's the grace of God.

His peace is literally well-being.

It connects to the Hebrew word shalom, which is about wholeness with God and wholeness with one another.

 And wholeness with ourselves.

This peace isn't just the absence of conflict.

It means nothing is missing.

Nothing is broken.

Every dimension of life is flourishing.

 And together, this grace and this peace, they describe the whole life that God gives in Christ, his overflowing favor that restores us and sustains us, and his wholeness that makes all things new.

And so for John's first audience, who were tiny churches in a vast empire, probably 10,000 amongst 60 million, the totality of Christianity relative to Rome,

 facing hostility, compromise, and confusion.

Yes, sure, grace and peace is a standard greeting, but here those words carry unique weight.

God's unearned favor, God's wholeness, His mercy and justice breaking into their fractured and frightening world.

And so it's more than a standard greeting.

It's a gripping depiction of what one will find in the apocalypse.

That as you enter the world of revelation...

 The first word God speaks over you is not fear, not confusion, not judgment.

His first word is grace.

And from grace, peace.

In other words, the gospel is in the greeting.

That the grace of God has come in Jesus Christ and the result is wholeness with God and wholeness with man.

 That's the golden thread throughout the narrative of Revelation that God is working for the good of humanity through the victory of the gospel, the cross, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Now, for those of you who've been steeped in approaches to Revelation that inculcate fear and dismay, this declaration at the start of grace and peace might seem odd to you.

 Especially given the following chaos that seems to ensue in the narrative.

But the kindness or the goodness, the grace and the peace that John is describing here is not the absence of hostility.

It's not the absence of hardship.

It's the presence of confident hope in amidst of an unrighteous and hostile world.

Like a garden in the wilderness that refuses to wilt under the heat of the sun.

That's the church.

 That's you, Christian.

That's you, man and woman of God, that as you make your way through the wilderness, you are God's demonstration of shalom in the world, a world that is enslaved to the chaos of sin and selfishness and Satan.

You are a signpost to the kingdom of God that is here now and that is coming soon.

 That kind of peace had long been the hope of the Old Testament prophets.

That this topsy-turvy world would be set right in the age of the Messiah.

God's justice irreversibly established in the hearts and the hands of humankind.

And John says that prophetic hope is here now in the church.

He says this is what revelation tastes like.

 And so as you make your way through the displays of evil that follow in the book and in life, John says that the taste left in your mouth will actually be one of God using all of that to bring about the destruction of evil and the establishment of his goodness all throughout the world.

I just love that, that as John steps back to consider how he can best introduce the world of Revelation, he goes, let me just think, ah, it's grace.

 So is grace and peace what you plan to encounter as you enter the world of Revelation?

I don't just mean the book.

I mean the reality of your life.

 Because Revelation insists that its world is our world.

That the same spiritual forces at work in John's day are at work in ours, and yet this is God's world, not Satan's, not Babylon's, not the system's, which means that even though it is rife with persecutions and pressures, we are invited to keep walking with a resolute joy that is born from knowing how every story involving dragons ends.

 But here's the question.

Along that path, do you actually expect to receive grace and peace?

Do you believe God's unmerited favor?

His wholeness are waiting for you in the wilderness, not just outside of it.

 Because that's the paradox that Revelation preaches.

That grace and peace are not fairy tale comforts reserved for an easy life.

No, they are God's gifts discovered in the very places of trial and testing.

That's the controlling narrative of the book.

Amid beasts and Babylon, Jezebels and judgments, God hides heaven in hardship.

 Even when the hardship in Revelation is shown to come from Jesus himself.

As some of the wayward churches in chapters 2 and 3 will painfully discover.

But it's never to destroy.

It's always to heal.

He wounds to make you whole.

 Which is why grace in all of its forms always has its source in him.

Every good and perfect gift flows from his hand.

John wants us to see that this isn't just a vague idea about God's goodness.

 No, no, no, this goodness is revealed in fullness from the Father, from the Spirit, from the Son.

In fact, notice the repetition.

Put verse 4 back up on the screen.

Not simply grace and peace from God, but grace and peace from Him who is and who was and who is to come.

And from the seven spirits before His throne.

And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

It's as if John is holding up the prism of the Trinity to the light.

 Letting the full spectrum of grace and peace shine through.

And each person of the Godhead refracts another faucet of his goodness.

First of all, grace and peace are from him who is and who was and who is to come.

This is talking about God, the Father.

Everybody say Father.

The Father has a particular faucet of grace and peace for you.

 This threefold phrase, is and was and is to come, reaches all the way back to the book of Exodus, chapter three, when God introduces himself to Moses as Yahweh.

I am who I am.

Yahweh means that he is the eternal one who simply is.

And here, Revelation intensifies the significance of that name, that he is the God of my past, he's the God of my present, he's the God of my future, the one who was and is and is to come.

 In other words, there is no time or place where God does not exist.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow all converge in his being.

And as one scholar points out, consequently that means that the grace and peace that come from him have no limits in time or space.

God's grace is boundless.

God's peace is timeless.

 There is no day so dark that he cannot find you.

There is no place so far that he cannot reach you.

And if that is true, then every moment of your life, whether past regret, present trial, or future fear, cannot escape the power of God's grace.

There is no despair, no fear, no loneliness that can ever stay the healing touch of the hand of God from reaching out to connect with your life.

 This is the faucet of grace and peace that shines when John names the Father as the one who is and was and is to come, the eternal inexhaustible God.

And isn't that just like a great dad?

That no matter where you've wandered, he knows how to get to you.

It's really good news.

And it gets even better, the last part of that phrase, who is to come, is actually better translated as who is coming, right?

 And those two phrases prompt pretty different feelings, don't they?

Who is to come sounds eventual.

It sounds distant.

It sounds like someday.

Who is coming sounds imminent.

 Sounds present.

Sounds like any minute now.

And that's the idea that John wants ringing in our ears.

That we are meant to carry anticipation in our chest like a heartbeat of God's coming.

Especially in our questions, our confusion and our pain.

The message is clear that God is already on the way and you don't need to be afraid.

It's like a child.

 who courageously stands up to a bully at the final moment, not because he thought to himself, I'm now stronger than the bully, but because he saw his father rounding the corner, coming down the street, and he goes, this bully's about to get cooked because my dad is coming.

He's on the way.

Imagine the impact of these words on the suffering churches of Revelation.

Imagine the impact on anybody who knows how terrifyingly close evil can get to your doorstep.

 It's one thing to say God is coming eventually.

It's another thing to say that he is on the way.

It's a little bit like the story of Jesus resurrecting the young man who had died in the town of Nain.

In Luke chapter 7, you know the story of the little boy in the town of Nain, don't you?

 Jesus was in the seaside village of Capernaum where he just healed the servant of the Roman soldier, the centurion.

And after healing the servant, Jesus then turns his face towards the town of Nain, which was a 25-mile walk from Capernaum.

 It probably would have taken Jesus two days to walk from Capernaum to Nain.

And yet he sets out with his disciples and a crowd are trailing behind.

And by the time this procession of Jesus reaches the town of Nain, coming out of the city gate is a funeral procession.

A widow who is weeping over her only child, her son, carried out on a bed from the city gate.

Jewish people, they buried their dead very quickly on the same day as their death.

 which means that the son would have died that day.

 And so from the mother's perspective, this is the worst day of her life.

The story is over.

But what she doesn't know is that before her son even took his last breath, Jesus had already set his face toward Nain.

He'd already headed out from Capernaum either very early that morning or the day prior, which means before the widow felt her loss, Jesus was already on the way.

Before grief arrived, Jesus says, grace is coming.

And that's the message that John wants you to grasp as you see the one who is and who was and who is...

 And the churches of Asia Minor face pressure, fear, and compromise closing in.

John wanted them to know God is already on the road.

Stand firm in your faith because the full strength of your Father is coming to back you.

So from God the Father comes grace and peace.

His grace is boundless.

His peace is timeless.

 No wonder John sums up Revelation as grace and peace.

Grace and peace are also said to be from the seven spirits before God's throne.

Seven, as a number, represents fullness throughout the entirety of Revelation.

So this is John's way of describing the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

It's not literally seven different spirits.

It's the Holy Spirit in his fullness before the throne of God.

 His location before God's throne tells us two things.

First, the association of the Spirit with the throne underscores the Spirit's equality with God the Father.

He is not some lowly spirit.

He is the Spirit of Almighty God, and that's the Holy Spirit who resides on the inside of you, follower of Jesus.

Second, His place before the throne reminds us that the source of our grace and peace is heavenly, not earthly.

 That grace is not a fossil fuel, not some non-renewable resource that will run out one day.

Rather, the Spirit brings grace and peace fresh from heaven all the time.

He is our faster than fiber optic connection to the throne of God.

And John's original hearers would have been thrilled to realize that the same Spirit who was in them was also before God's throne because that means they have an unbroken line to heaven.

The word Spirit in Greek is the word pneuma.

It literally means breath.

 And so the point is that you are never more than one breath away from the throne of God.

And God is never more than one breath away from bringing grace and peace to his church.

It even seems intentional that John places the seven churches alongside the seven spirits in this verse.

 That's a parallelism that John does on purpose.

He wants you to know that the fullness of the church has the fullness of the Spirit.

Nobody is excluded.

God is not holding himself back from any of his people.

The Spirit is in heaven and in the church, the perfect conduit of God's grace and peace to his people.

I don't know if you've ever felt like some Christians have greater access to the Holy Spirit than you do.

Friends, that is not true.

 The fullness of the Spirit is available to the fullness of the body and that includes you.

God intends for you to be filled with the Holy Spirit even to the point of overflow daily.

And if the Spirit is the means of God's grace to you, the question is whether or not you have made your pursuit of the Spirit your primary pursuit in life because everything God desires to give you, He desires to give through the presence of His Holy Spirit.

 That's why Paul told the church in Ephesus, hey, keep being filled with the Holy Spirit.

 Because you need him every day.

When you go to work, when you go to Target, when you go to dinner, you need the Holy Spirit.

When you get cut off in traffic, when that server wasn't very nice to you but you should still tip him 20% anyway, you need the Holy Spirit.

Because he is the one who empowers your faithful witness to Jesus and faithful witness is the reason we're here.

Remember what Jesus calls the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John.

He is the spirit of truth.

 And in Revelation, where the enemy's main weapon is deception, truth is critical.

 Because lies are everywhere.

Little lies that lead you into sin that promise reward but only bring ruin.

Cultural lies that justify hatred and violence.

Political lies that promise utopia but consistently yield dystopia.

The dragon's chief tactic is to distort the truth of God and God's people are prone to amnesia whether because of treasure or trauma.

And John wants to remind you be filled with the spirit of truth so you can overcome the lying one.

 And we are filled as we allow, Colossians says, to let the word of Christ dwell amongst us richly.

Through the songs that we sing, through the constant coming to the Lord's table to receive his body and his blood, through our immersion in the scriptures, in daily servanthood.

These are all scriptural practices that see to it that we are filled with the Holy Spirit.

That's how we fight the dragon, positioning ourselves to be filled with him so we don't get overcome and intimidated by the spirits of the world.

 My most valued spiritual practice lately has been meditating upon Scripture.

A Christian meditation is when you allow God's Word to saturate your mind so that it becomes like light to the darkness of your thoughts.

And so I've just been ruminating in the mornings on one or two verses at a time because I need the Spirit of God to lead me into truth.

Friends, it's not just about your thoughts.

 Wrong thinking leads to wrong living.

That's why you need a renewing of your mind, Paul says in Romans chapter 12.

How you think matters, and our thoughts are often far more formed by the world around us and by the world on this three and a half inch screen in front of us than they are by the scriptures, the living word of God, which wants to form the way you think so it forms the way you live.

For example, for several years now, I have suffered from an irrational fear of illness and premature death.

 The amount of unnecessary urgent care visits and medical appointments that I have booked myself has been silly.

At times it has been exhausting for my wife.

I spent way more hours worrying about the worst case scenario than I care to admit.

As a man of faith.

It has robbed me of faithfulness to Christ because it distracts me from my family.

It distracts me from being fully available to the Lord.

It has owned me.

 For several years.

But just this past week.

I was meditating upon Psalm 46.

And I felt like God said.

Hey Jake.

Really focus on verse 1.

That God is our refuge.

And our strength.

And ever present help in trouble.

Therefore we do not fear.

 And as I ruminated upon those words, they went from words on a page to light in my mind, and I realized, wow, God is my ever-present help in trouble.

Even when I'm lying awake at 2 o'clock in the morning convinced that I'm having a heart attack, God is my ever-present help in trouble.

Therefore, we do not fear.

 It became light to me.

And as I meditated upon those words, I actually physically felt fear leave my body.

And I sensed a victory over that fear that I've been walking in since that day.

What is that?

That's the spirit of truth bringing the grace of God that leads to the peace of God that causes you to triumph over the lies of the dragon.

He said, the lies of the dragon will want to drag you down to the dust where he has been cursed to crawl.

 But the Spirit of truth will reconnect you back to the storeroom of heaven where God has grace and peace for you.

So from God the Holy Spirit comes grace and peace.

His grace is unbroken.

His peace is heaven sent.

No wonder John summarizes Revelation as grace and peace.

 Last of all, the grace and peace is said to come from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

 The way Jesus is described here is very intentional.

It follows the order of his saving work.

That is death and resurrection and ascension.

His faithful witness is supremely shown through his death on the cross.

His resurrection makes him the firstborn from the dead, the beginning of God's new creation.

His ascension places him at the right hand of the Father on the throne of God as the ruler over the kings of the earth.

And from that story, from that Jesus, comes grace and peace to the church.

What is unique about grace and peace that comes from the Son of God?

 As the suffering servant, the destroyer of death, and the king of kings, the thing being communicated here is that the cost of faithfulness can never outweigh the reward of faithfulness.

 That God's grace and peace will reach us no matter what price we pay for proclaiming the gospel.

Even if faithful witness costs you everything, God's grace and peace can reach you anywhere, even if that anywhere is a grave.

And for people who are called to conquer in the same way as Christ, through faithfulness, through bold testimony to the truth of God regarding the cost, that is good news.

That though it comes with a cost, it comes with an even price.

 greater reward.

Friends, Jesus is the firstborn from the dead for a reason, because he will raise many more siblings up with him in the age to come, which means faithful witness doesn't just mean a willingness to die.

It means a guarantee of resurrection.

And so even if it takes you to the grave, Jesus can still get grace and peace to you, for he himself has traveled there.

 His grace and his peace makes him a grave robber and there is no grave that can hold down his church.

Death cannot separate him from us, nor can the challenges of life.

Jesus is the ruler of the kings of the earth, which would have really struck that early church as so significant because those earthly kings were the very people responsible for making their lives so difficult.

Those are the ones who were constantly oppressing them and overseeing their persecution.

And yet here Jesus rules over them.

 In other words, they have no authority.

They have no standing.

They have no place to get in the way of the grace and the peace that Christ gives to his church.

Nothing can stop Jesus from coming to the aid of his people.

Therefore, his grace and peace cannot be taken away.

 It cannot be stolen by a bullet.

It cannot be thwarted by the dragon, not by man, not by death.

Satan can't steal God's favor.

Death can't undo the peace he gives.

Even in our darkest days, the cross of Christ teaches us that he's able to reach us there with grace.

Sometimes that looks like rescue.

Sometimes that looks like refinement.

Either way, it's grace.

It's grace.

 During the reign of Queen Mary, that is, Bloody Mary, who oversaw the execution of many Protestant Christians, there was a preacher named Bernard Gilpin.

Bernard was arrested for preaching the gospel and he was taken into custody, bound for London where he was certain to be executed.

 Along the road, the guards mocked Bernard because all along the journey, he kept saying, everything's for the best.

Everything's for the best.

And at one point, Bernard fell from his horse and he was badly injured.

And the guards laughed at him saying, what about now?

Bernard, but Gilpin only replied, I have no doubt that even this painful accident will prove to be a blessing.

 And because of the injury, they had to stop and delay their journey for several days.

And when they finally resumed travel and approached London, they heard church bells ringing and crowds cheering.

And the guards asked around why the celebration.

Someone told them, Queen Mary is dead.

There will be no more burning of Protestants.

Gilpin, recognizing the connection between his injury causing the delay...

 And the timing of Queen Mary's death turned to the guards and said, see, everything is for the best.

What looked like a painful accident was actually God's providence.

His grace met Gilpin on the road.

What should have been the path to the grave became a path to new life.

But grace is not only seen in deliverance.

Sometimes it shines even brighter in loss.

 There's a story I heard from a friend of a Hindu family who lived in a Hindu village and they had converted to Christianity.

And their neighbors mocked them.

And they warned them, the gods are going to be furious with you.

Not long after that, their young son became sick and though they prayed, he died.

And from the outside, it looked like the mockers were right.

 But in the midst of their mourning, the family gathered and they actually celebrated the future resurrection.

And they declared, yes, we grieve, but not like those who have no hope.

Their neighbors were stunned.

They could not understand that kind of peace in the face of tragic loss and heartache.

 And many of them came to faith in Jesus Christ as a result of how the family responded to their pain.

This is how God often works.

 When suffering comes, grace runs deeper.

When our witness is offered, God's grace comes upon it to advance the kingdom.

Even in our weakness, in the imperfection of our offering, God comes upon our imperfection and displays his strength and draws people near to him.

That's why Christ could say, when I'm lifted up on that cross, I will draw all people to myself because they've never seen a God like that before.

He would suffer for those

 who were responsible for putting him up there in the first place.

The church's story again and again is that in the world's attempt to snuff Christianity out, the light only shines brighter.

As G.K.

Chesterton once said, Christianity has died many times and risen again, for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

And so, from God the Son...

 comes grace and peace.

His grace is unstoppable.

His peace is incorruptible.

No wonder John sums up Revelation as grace and peace.

In light of this boundless...

 unbroken, incorruptible grace and peace.

John breaks out in praise.

There are many moments throughout the apocalypse coming that signal all of heaven and even all of creation breaking out in praise like we did this morning to the triune, worthy God.

Times where John hears the singing and he remembers those scenes and those sounds so vividly.

And as if to anticipate the praise that's coming, John decides, let me just have a little praise break of my own right here at the end of the prologue.

 If you grew up in a Pentecostal church, you know what a praise break is.

A praise break is when a preacher preaches you so silly excited the crowd is already going crazy and they just have to say 15 second praise break and the whole church just goes nuts for like 15 seconds.

It's a lot of fun if you've ever been a part of it.

John has his own praise break right here.

I bet he even took a lap around the island of Patmos.

You Pentecostals get it.

 Why?

Because of the one who loves us.

Who has freed us.

And who made us a kingdom of priests.

The verbs tell the story as they often do in Revelation.

Who loves us is actually in the Greek.

Who is loving us.

It's a present tense love.

That God's love is brand new right there to meet you every single morning.

 freed us tells the story of what Christ accomplished at the cross the word freed is literally destroyed that God destroyed our sin at the cross the cross is not a work in progress it's a finished fact of history who has made us a kingdom of priests that speaks to our current priestly identity but also to our future where we reign with God and serve him

 And in that, you have a timeline of grace that were freed in the past, loved in the present, made for the future.

And so no wonder John stands and says, I just have to praise.

And you, church, you're going to want to do the same thing.

Because as we get into the apocalypse, it's going to make a worshiper out of you.

In fact, if you don't read the book of Revelation and feel inspired to worship, then you're reading it wrong.

 But if you read it right, you see that this is grace and peace.

This is mercy and justice.

This is gift and wholeness to the people of God who walk through the wilderness of this age.

So John steps back and considers the one from such grace and peace flows.

And even amid troubles and heartaches,

 And even amid persecution, he wants to say, and he invites you and I to simply say, that if from him comes grace and peace, sorry, skip to the last line, then to him be glory and power forever and ever.