Finally: God’s Permanent Answer to Our Greatest Need

Through the blood of Christ, God has finally provided a permanent answer for our greatest need.

We are a church located in Rochester, Minnesota.  Our Mission is to glorify God by making disciples of Jesus who live out passion for Christ and compassion for people. Learn more at www.calvaryefree.church

Well, I have the honor of introducing this morning my good friend Brian Farone. Brian serves as the superintendent of the North Central District of the EFCA, which is our district. And actually, you all probably have good reason to thank Brian later, if you see him after the service, because I first met Brian when he was an elder at a church in California that was very close to calling me to be their pastor, and Brian voted no. Yada yada yada, here I am. He also led the expedition up into the Alps, where I nearly fell to my death twice. You know, now that I’m saying it out loud, it’s less friendly, I think. Do you feel like someone’s out to get you? No, I’m just kidding. I love Brian. Brian is a great leader for our district, and one of the reasons he’s such a great leader is because he loves pastors and he loves churches and he loves our movement and he serves really, really well. He’s a great joy to have. And he’s a gift to our district. So would you please join me in welcoming Brian?

We were younger when that vote happened. But God is provident, and I’m so grateful now that Kyle is here, grateful too. For those of you who don’t know me, I imagine it’s many of you, as Kyle said, my name is Brian Farone and I’m here with my wife, Terry. I serve as district superintendent. And, really that boils down to being given the privilege of pastoring and caring for pastors, church leaders, and churches. And it’s been the great joy of my life to serve in this way. And over the years, I’ve gotten to know your congregation well, and I’m so grateful for that. Grateful to be here again. Grateful for the good things God is doing here. And my hope today is to do two things. One, quickly, in the beginning I want to just share a little bit about the family of churches that you’re a part of. Just so you can remember, like the Christian church, never intended to be alone, always connected to sister congregations. So I want to share a little bit about our family of churches. But the main thing I want to do today, in anticipation of Easter, is remind you from Scripture about the goodness of Jesus blood shed for us on the cross, and we’ll get to that in a second. But to begin, just a few pictures, I want to show you one.

This is a little bit of the shape of our family of churches. Our district here in Minnesota is about 170 congregations. I think the official count right now is 177, but as you could guess, that number moves around a little bit. We’re about 1600 congregations across the nation, and we’re about 600 missionaries around the world. And all of us are doing the same thing that’s happening here today.Loving the gospel, embracing the scriptures, seeking to reach the lost, those who are far from God, seeking to disciple the found, those who have put their hope in Jesus Christ. And you’re part of a big family that’s doing that all over Minnesota, all across the nation, in fact, all across the world. I’m going to skip a bunch of pictures, just a bunch of stuff I would have talked about. Guys like me can talk and talk and talk. So I’m trying to be brief. But the other thing, two other things I want to show you for sure is a picture of our team. As you could probably guess, 170 churches don’t get helped by one person. It takes a team to serve, support, help, and encourage. And so we have this beautiful team of 16 leaders who have devoted themselves to being a part of a church like yours, to loving churches like yours, to building expertise in areas that we have found over the years churches need help with and they love you and are here to help you in any way they can. They are under heaven, easily the best resource we have to offer. And they’re here not just for Kyle, but they’re here for your church leadership team, for your elders. And we’re available to you as well. We are here to serve churches.We love churches because it’s Jesus wife. It’s the bride of Christ. And we love the church and we’re privileged to serve churches like yours.

A final picture I want to show is of our infographic. We do this every couple years. We’re about to produce a new one. And this really flows out of the reality that, people are helped by pictures and sometimes bored by text, right? If you have long written descriptions of who you are, in fact, I’m a first gen Christian, as you’ll hear today, and I was trying to figure out how to describe our family of churches to even my parents and my family who aren’t believers. And so we developed this tool to just help you get a feel for who we are as a family of churches. And some of the things that God is doing among us. That picture on the screen is a little dated. You can go to our website and I think you’ll find this one for about two weeks. We have a new one that’s about to be shared, but one stat I’ll share from the new one that’s just so fun and it helps emphasize the good things that are happening. In the last year, in 2025, is the counting year for our 2026 infographic, we baptized across these 170 churches, more than 1100 people. So more than 1100 people publicly declared that they had put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation within our family of churches. And I heard that, and I just thought, what a beautiful picture of what’s going on week in and week out in these churches that you are like siblings with, like siblings with. All right. That’s a little bit about our district. If you want to know more, please come and find me. I would love to share more about what God’s doing in places like Worthington and Grand Marais and Thief River Falls and all over the Twin Cities and everywhere in between.

But now I want to invite you to pray with me as we begin to turn our hearts toward God and His Word in worship, continuing in worship. Father, we do in a simple prayer, we turn toward you. We, say to you what you know of us, we need you. We say to you what you know of us, we came into this room and all kinds of places. We say to you what you know of us, it’s our desire, Lord, that the distractions go away and you would, in your grace and in your power, help us to turn our attention towards your word, that we might hear you, that we might hear you, that we might be reminded afresh of what you’ve done for us, that we might be filled for the week ahead for discipleship and service that we might, as this Easter week comes, remember the lost. So help us, Lord, to hear. Give us ears that work and hearts that will embrace. And hands that will act as if we’ve heard. It’s in Jesus name. We pray these things and for his sake and to his glory. Because our King Jesus is so, so good, we pray in his name. Amen.

I want to begin this morning my sermon with a question. Have you ever waited for something? Have you ever wanted something? Have you ever hoped for something, needed something, something you longed for but the answer never just seemed to come? It’s the beginning of baseball season, and the Minnesota Twins seem like a good answer to this question about wanting and waiting and hoping. It was about four years ago or so that my wife, Terry, and I decided we were going to go all-in on the Minnesota Twins. We’d moved here from California. We’d never been really baseball fans all that much. And we were looking for kind of a shared hobby and we thought, well, maybe the Twins, we did not know what we were signing up for. But it was midway through the season, I had enough money to subscribe to what was then $100 channel. It’s gotten much cheaper now. It’s very exciting for me, and we just started watching the Twins together, and we discovered it was kind of like watching reality TV. It was sort of like a version of survivor, and you would see who’s on the island this week and who’s going back to Saint Paul next week. And we got kind of just excited about it. And I have, because I’m a pastor and I’m paid to talk, people heard about this story. In fact, some of my pastor friends would say, how did you get your wife to love the Minnesota Twins? And I would say step one I neglected baseball for 20 years and they were usually out after step one. It didn’t sound like it was a plausible like what step two was. But it’s become this thing that we love. And so our board of directors in the district was two years ago, decided to give us what they perceived as a gift from people who loved us. They gave us Twins passes. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this, but you can get a Twins pass, which means you have on your phone a ticket to every game that happens at Target Field. And so we went all-in that season, decided we were going to go. Our rule was, if we can go, we’re not going to think about it. We’re just going to go. And so game one was awesome. Game one was a blast. It was good weather in April, which we’re supposed to have today, right? It was one of those days. Although I know it’s not April. I wish it was April. I know it’s not April. Games two, three and four were fun too. And if you’ve ever been there, you can see like the glowing under the heat lamps. If you’ve been to Target Field when it’s real cold. The next eight games were pretty exciting and we were actually winning and we were in first place. It was just an amazing…in fact, the next 16 games were just fabulous. They were fabulous. And, actually, I think there’s 18 on there and one where my wife was alone and I was with an elder board who was going through a thing, which is sort of what I do for a living. And in fact, I remember being, this was the summer Kyle and I went hiking, and he was a fan of the then pathetic Detroit Tigers. And I remember distinctly, I thought he was going to bring this up, but he chose to bring yet another embarrassing thing up for me. I remember then making fun of him about mid-summer because they were like 12 games back and they had no chance. And this summer, in September, they managed to blow like a 12 game lead. And, it reminded me of this verse I put on the screen. Proverbs has this verse. Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick, right? And my heart was sick. And it gets at this idea of a thing.

Remember I asked you in the beginning, a thing you had longed for, had wanted, had waited for, but never really seemed to come. Well, with small things like the Minnesota Twins, which I affirm, even though I don’t always remember it, they are a small thing, with small things like the Minnesota Twins it’s not that big a deal. But what about the biggest things? What about the important things? What about the biggest things we have in life, or the biggest problems we have in life? Or if you’re like me, you long ago discovered your biggest problem in life was your you problem. And you hope and you wait and you want. Well, today, today we are going to talk about a place in God’s Word that addresses this hope deferred makes the heart grow sick problem that we all have and our longing, each one of us, for a permanent solution to our brokenness problem, our me problem. And we’re going to see in this passage today that it’s through the blood of Christ, through the blood of Christ, that God has finally provided a permanent answer to our greatest need, to our biggest want. And we’re going to see that by doing really two things. One is this sermon that I’m preaching today comes from a series that I was part of in my home church, and it was, we were working through the book of Hebrews, and the book of Hebrews has a lot of teaching on the New Covenant, and the New Covenant is the permanent solution to our biggest problem.

So we’re going to briefly review sort of a summary of what the New Covenant is. These promises we’ve been given through the blood of Christ that change everything for any who would put their hope in Christ. We’ll do that quickly at the beginning, because really, I want to focus on the passage that was read this morning. And in it we’re going to see four finally truths, four longing truths, four waiting and receiving truths on this topic that come from this passage. So briefly, here’s the six New Covenant promises, this is a a summary of Hebrews teaching on the New Covenant by my friend, Pastor Kevin Block, one of the pastors at my church who preached the week before I preached this one, and his summary was so good I just want to walk you through it and remember, help you remember what it is when you see the word therefore, in the beginning of our passage, it’s referring back to this body of teaching. So in the New Covenant and what and what God has provided for us in Christ, we have six things. One, we have big F forgiveness. Brothers and sisters, you and I in the New Covenant have been given absolute, total, full, complete forgiveness for all our sins past, present and even future if we put our hope in Jesus Christ.

A second thing the New Covenant gives to us is a new heart. We become alive in Christ. Though we were dead in our sins before, our spirit becomes alive in Christ. In the New Covenant, number three, we are given the Holy Spirit to indwell us, to live among us, to empower us. God present in us, his spirit residing in us and among us. Number four, we are given through the New Covenant, I remember this when I became a Christian i didn’t think this was possible, my heart desires changed. They changed. They didn’t become perfect. But I started wanting things, good things I never could have imagined wanting. I started desiring change. I never could have imagined desire. I started finding love inside myself for others that I could not manufacture. Through the New Covenant, number five, through the New Covenant, this is wonder of wonders. It’s not just that God removes our guilt or satisfies his anger toward our sinful acts or rescues us from judgment, we become his children. We become his children, adopted siblings in the family of God. And then finally, in six, and we can’t miss this. Even in this broken world, we have increasing intimacy with our God. You know, when I talked in the beginning about that longing, people long for a solution to their me problem, but even more, they long to be connected. We long to be connected. Don’t you long to be connected to your maker and through Christ?

As we’ll see today, you can be connected to the King of the universe, the creator of every atom that was ever formed, the one who made the skies and the sea and the land. And you can be connected to him, increasing closeness with your creator. So those are the six new Covenant promises we’re going to pivot to for final truths. I put them all on the screen at once, but we’re going to work through them one by one. And the first truth I want you to see in the first part of the passage that was read is this. Finally Jesus death established. That’s the word, established a better covenant. Look down at your Bibles with me. I want to I want to read the passage again, chunk by chunk, as we go through, just so you can hear, especially as the book of Hebrews is kind of related to a culture, not our own, a very Jewish culture. I want you to hear again how this passage says that Jesus death, unlike how the last covenant was established, got established. It says this in verse 15, therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance, since a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions committed under the first covenant. For where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established, for a will takes effect only at death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive. Since the one who made it is alive.

Let me walk you through how these verses show the way Jesus death established, got started, put in place, this better solution. Notice the word mediator up at the beginning. A mediator is someone that acts as a go between, and the passage is reminding us here that Jesus is the is the mediator between all the good that comes from this new covenant that God has given us, and us, and he’s the mediator between us and God. The passage references an eternal inheritance, which is where it brings in the idea of a will. It pictures all those things that I shared as this great and glorious inheritance. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I had these inheritance fantasies. Like what would happen if I inherited a ton of money? What would that be like? And the passage is tapping into that desire that almost everyone has. What would happen if a windfall came? And the passage is likening Jesus death on the cross and what it provided as the thing that brings the windfall into our life. And it does it through the idea of a will. Most of us know how a will works, right? A will before the person dies is merely a piece of paper with instructions on it, right? And it details how the possessions of an inheritance are doled out, are given out, are used after the person dies.

But before a person dies, a will is merely a piece of paper with a signature on it. And the signature actually isn’t the thing that puts the will in force. It’s the death. And the passage is likening here Jesus death to the process of a will enacting an inheritance. And it’s saying those good things that came, they came for sure. They were established for sure when Jesus died on the cross for us. His death establishes it like the death of a person with a will establishes that will. Now, in a minute, we’re going to see what it removed. Because he established a new covenant, removed an old temporary, ineffective solution. And that old solution was Israel’s practice of animal sacrifice to atone for their sins. But I just want to take a moment to acknowledge here when we trade in our temporary solution for Jesus permanent solution, the New Covenant, we aren’t trading in animal sacrifice. That’s not what we do to atone for our sin. In our culture, our temporary solution to this permanent problem is much more like this. In fact, when I was growing up, I was taught by my culture. I’m a first generation Christian that people were saved pretty much if you’re a good person. Like I hope I’m a good enough person. I hope my good outweighs the bad. Brothers and sisters, I just want to suggest that’s not our culture’s answer right now. Our culture doesn’t think much of God, though that might be changing, but our culture in general tries to establish that they’re good enough, or that we’re good enough, or that I’m good enough merely by saying others are on the wrong side. We live in this so massively polarized culture. And do you know who the sinners are in our culture, though we don’t use that language? It’s them. It’s they. It’s the other. You know who the righteous are, the people who don’t need a solution or who have already found a solution. In fact, we tend to justify ourselves in our culture by being on the right side of certain ideas or morals or politics. And I never in all my life seen a culture more divided or more convinced that if you were on my side, whatever my side is, our whole culture, every edge of our culture does this. Says, if you’re on my side, you’re on the right side, and you’re a good guy or a girl. And if you’re on their side, you’re on the wrong side and you’re a bad guy or girl. And that’s how we seek to justify it. The Bible here is reminding us, the Bible’s teaching, that all this us and them stuff that’s going on in our culture is so different from the Bible, because you know who the good people are in the Bible. There aren’t any. Everybody has this problem. It’s an all people problem. Every single person, the Bible says, has a temporary solution that will not work until they embrace Christ’s permanent solution and find real forgiveness. And one of my heartbreaks right now is that people have become so convinced that the other people are wrong, that they’re starting to forget that they really have a need, that they really have a longing, that we, that I am lost apart from Jesus Christ and deeply need him. So that’s the first part. The first part talks about how it got established.

The second part, number two. Finally, Jesus blood, his blood provides better purification. Look back down at your Bible. It’s in a passage that talks about how the first covenant got established. And then it makes this statement at the end about the better purification that comes through Jesus blood. Let me read it for you again. God’s very words. Therefore, verse 18. Not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For when every commandment of the law had been declared by Moses to all the people, he took blood of calves and goats with water and scarlet and hyssop and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, this is the blood of the covenant that God has commanded you here. The first covenant, the old covenant. And in the same way he sprinkled with blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood and without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sin. This section talks about why Jesus purification is better. In the book of Exodus, if you were to roll it back to Exodus, you would see that God gives the Old Testament law to his people through Moses, and at that time he, through Moses among his people, established tabernacle worship in atonement through the Old Testament sacrificial system, the blood of bulls and goats over and over again. And that system was started with blood. And it was done every year over and over again. We will sacrifice these animals. And the cycle went like this. We sin, we fall away. We experience shame. We do the sacrifices. We have a temporary solution. We sin, we fall away, we experience shame, we do the sacrifices, we have a temporary solution. And they knew and we know that that never really worked. It never really worked. But it was started, not unlike the second covenant, with blood, different blood, ineffective blood, blood that didn’t provide enough purification, and it never really worked. In fact, what it was intended to do, in fact, one of the reasons they had this bloody culture, you know, one of the flaws in our culture, if you can believe it, is that we hide from all the blood.

Churches used to have cemeteries. We actually own one of them right now as a district because churches don’t want cemeteries anymore. But, you know, it was pretty helpful to have a cemetery out there because you would remember, oh, we’re going to die. We, do you know, you might think, oh, I’m glad we don’t sacrifice animals like they did. Do you know how many more animals our culture kills than their animals? If you’re wondering about this, go to Costco and go all the way to the back. But it’s tidy. They wear white. But all the blood was intended to tell them, and it should tell us, and to our detriment, we’re so tidy from it, we forget all the blood was intended to tell them that sin is serious. It’s deadly serious. That sin leads to physical and spiritual death always. And that some better purification is needed than this over and over again solution. That solution, as the passage says and will say, was looking forward to the real thing. And Jesus blood is the real thing. It’s the real thing. Let me give you an illustration to help you think about the difference between temporary cleaning and full cleaning. Our culture likes temporary fixes. I like temporary fixes sometimes. Have you ever heard this phrase? Sweeping it under the rug. Sweeping it under the rug. What does it mean? It’s when you kind of push stuff out of the way.

Maybe in a conflict or a fight or a difficult situation. Let’s just pretend it’s not there. Or sometimes, if you’re like Terry and me and you have people coming over, you literally sweep stuff under the rug, right? If you come to my house, you will find it sparkling clean, except for the places you’re not allowed to go. Right? And I’m not alone in this. Right. Because we’re a culture of sweep it under the ruggers. Or how about this? Have you ever heard the phrase painting over rust? Painting over rust. A superficial covering intended to hide a serious problem. If you have a rusty chair, you can paint it, just don’t sit on it, right? It might look good, but it might not be safe to bear your weight. Or what about this phrase? Putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The metaphor literally, imagine someone who’s been shot, and you go put a little Band-Aid on it. But what we really mean is a serious problem, covering over with a little bit of nothing. So maybe it doesn’t look like it’s that big a deal. Like it’s that big a deal, a quick fix, a temporary solution, a halfway measure. Have you heard the phrase lipstick on a pig? Lipstick on a pig. Turns out pigs are ugly, right? I mean, we can say that I think they’re okay with it.

That was how they were made. If you put lipstick on them, do they get prettier? Not much, right? Not much. Right. And that’s the point. We need real cleaning. Real purification. There’s a third thing, Jesus death established it. His blood provides better purification. And then third, his sacrifice was one time for all. Not over and over again. Let me read the third part for you. It says this. Thus it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has entered not into the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself. Now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself up repeatedly as the High Priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own. For then he would have had to repeatedly suffer since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he appeared once for all at the end of the age to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. These verses emphasize the true, once for all permanent nature of Jesus shedding his blood for us to provide us with the new covenant that we’ve been given. They picture Jesus not going into the old temple, which was a representation of what really needed to happen, but going into God’s presence himself and offering himself up just one time, not over and over again, not over and over again.

A perfect sacrifice that did the trick. That went the whole distance. This little phrase once for all. Christians have long contemplated it and felt the power of it. And I just want you to ponder what it means because it’s one of those phrases, too, we say so much. Sometimes it doesn’t mean anything, but I think it has two intended distinct play on words meanings. He died once for all, the once part. His death was a permanent solution. It doesn’t need to happen again. It accomplishes. Things that are done are finished. It’s all the way. But the for all peace. I mean, it could be just an emphasis of the once for all peace. But I think it means for everybody. That’s how believers in many times in many places take it. The Jewish people to whom this book was written, helping them understand the transformation that had happened in their faith. They were God’s special people. But it turns out everybody can be God’s special people, only through the cross, can anyone be part of God’s forever family, be rescued by him permanently. It is available to anyone. And again, think about our culture. Our culture does not believe everybody can be redeemed. It doesn’t. It says the goods are okay and the bads are unredeemable, but not so with the Christian faith.

The Gospel of Jesus Christ, as the book of John says, John 1:12 says that all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God. A permanent solution. So one little story to help you understand the difference between an over and over again and a permanent thing. There’s a crack in my living room. It’s high up on a high wall that I can’t reach. It’s probably part of why it’s still there. Terry and I, when we moved here from California, we barely owned coats. Like literally, we lived in. I worked in a garage in the winter that had no insulation. Imagine it. Right. Crazy. We get here. We were a little afraid we were going to die in our house because we didn’t know how to stay warm. Turns out we were a little paranoid and naive. We were very naive. So we bought a new house and we’re like, oh, good, it won’t have any problems. Which is kind of a funny thing. When you buy a new house, you discover that is not true. And one of the things you discover is they get it mostly perfect, and then it breaks a bunch and then they come back and fix it again. That’s part of the new house buying experience. And this crack formed and they’re like, hey, in about a year, we’ll come back after your house settles.

It’s been settling low these nine years, but after your new house settles, we’ll come back and we’ll fix it. And they did. These guys came in and they fixed it all right. And I’m like. And they painted it. You couldn’t tell it happened. I’m like, oh, it’s awesome. And then you know what happened? A year later, the crack came back. The crack came back. And, and I’m like, well, I think I’m outside my, my little magic window of free fixing. So I’m going to have to fix this myself. And I’m, I’m the son of a contractor, so I can fix this, right? My dad was a professional, so I probably know how to do it. And so I get up there, and I kind of, I do a pretty quick job, because I’m like, what if a bad fix would work? Right? And it worked for like six months. And then my crack came back. And so I thought, oh, you know what, I really ought to do it, right? And me and YouTube know exactly how to do this, right. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but YouTube knows a lot about the problems in my house and we. I widened the crack a little bit. I put some of the tape stuff on, I did it over again. I sanded it a little better.

I got it all ready and this one lasted about a year. But then you know what? The crack came back. It was worse. It’s widening. Right. And I keep trying to fix it and it keeps coming back. And this last time I fixed it, I thought, okay, maybe I need different material. Maybe there’s a magical flexible thing that’ll fix it and work right? It didn’t work. I’m thinking about lipstick. I’m like, right there going, what would my living room like with a big red line of lipstick? Would that work better? It’s not going to work better. Why? I don’t know how to do it. A permanent solution. All I need, all I know how to do is over and over again. You and I, when it comes to our junk, our mess, our mirror problem. Same. Try as you might, you cannot solve your you problem, Cannot solve your them problem. You can’t solve your us problem. But Jesus can. And he did it once for all. A final truth in this passage that we should not miss, that we cannot miss is in verses 27 and 28. And it says this and hear this. And just as it is appointed for a man to die once, and after that comes judgment. So Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

I just want to remind you of two simple truths, brothers and sisters. One is, it is the great, abiding, enduring hope of the Christian faith that Jesus who saved us, will come back. He is returning. He has not forgotten us. Sometimes when people become Christians, they feel all those New Covenant changes begin to happen. But sometimes they’re like, is this all there is? And can I remind you? No, it is not all there is. The Bible promises that Jesus will return and fully restore everything. In fact, in a moment, I’m going to read a passage that reminds you what you should be longing for along these lines. But can I also remind you this passage didn’t flinch from it. We shouldn’t either. Everybody dies and each of us faces judgment. And in Jesus second return, he isn’t coming back to die again, to once again offer to people this new salvation. He is coming also in judgement. It is true, and that everyone in this world has an opportunity now. An opportunity, as the book of Hebrews would say today, to receive the Lord Jesus Christ and to escape the judgment that will surely come when our sins, when my me problem, when our US problem catches up with us before God. And I honestly, I know of no better illustration of this than the end of the book. If you have your Bible, you can turn there now.

But I would actually just encourage you to listen to two passages. They’re just, they’re not super long, they’re long enough, but they should be passages that you should contemplate frequently. They are paradigm shaping passages about this idea that it’s appointed to each of us to die and experience judgment and that Jesus is coming back to complete our rescue and to restore all things. So I’m going to read them both. The first passage is in Revelation 20, almost at the end, just pages away from the end of your Bible in verse 11. In my Bible, it’s given the heading judgment before the Great White Throne. Brothers and sisters, the Bible tells us this will happen. And we should warn people that it will. Even if it’s not polite, even if it makes us feel strange. It was my destiny before I put my hope in Jesus. It’s everyone’s destiny before they put their hope in Jesus. It says this. Then I saw a great white throne, and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it.

Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the Book of Life, he was thrown. He was thrown into the lake of fire. There’s not another sacrifice coming, but there is a day of judgment. It’s coming. We know it’s coming. But you know what else there is? There’s a new heaven and new earth. Because this passage puts the emphasis on Jesus rescue for each of us. So here are these words. You should read these words very often. They should become the center of your thought life. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the dwelling of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. Listen to verse four. He will wipe every tear away from their eyes, and death shall be no more.

Neither shall there be any mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away. This passage reminds us at the end that Jesus made a perfect covenant. Permanent solution. His blood is the best purification. It’ll wash you white as snow. His sacrifice was once for all. It is done. It won’t happen again. And when he returns, it’s going to be to rescue those. To complete the rescue of those who put their hope in him, who’ve been cleansed pure by his precious blood. A final illustration just to tie up the loose ends. In the beginning, I said, through the blood of Christ, God has finally provided a permanent answer to our greatest needs. I quoted this verse in Hebrews. Hope deferred makes the heart grow sick. The second part of that verse is, is this but a desire fulfilled, it’s like a tree of life. You see, I have been happy at Target Field. I have. It was the year before. It was 2023. Terry and I were about midway into our Twins habit and they were in the playoffs. And I’d been told they hadn’t won in the playoffs like forever. It had been decades. And we went to this game and they won a playoff series. And in Minnesota any playoff series win is World Series-ish, right? We need to own it as if we’re champions because that’s pretty much what we’re going to get.

And I remember this sweet moment with the Twins rushing the field and saying Twins win. It was just like a little taste of that thing I always longed for. That thing I always hoped for, that thing I had waited for. And moments like this remind me. They remind me that through Christ, my me problem, my biggest problem I’ve ever had, has been solved. It’s been solved. Our us problem. The biggest problem we’ve ever had can be solved. And my future problem. It’s not going to be judgment, but that there is a day coming for me when I will stand in a new heaven and new earth where righteousness reign. And my God, your God, if you put your hope in him, our God, as we put our hope in him, he’s going to wipe every tear from our eyes, every tear. Let me pray. Father, we, it’s Easter week and we need the resurrection so very bad. And we are so very grateful for what you’ve done among us. And I pray for my brothers and sisters here that we would not become distracted, that we wouldn’t think of earthly things, that we would put our minds on gospel and Scripture, life and death, the blood that restores, the son who rose again and all these things. I just pray we walk with you today and tomorrow in Jesus name, Amen.

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