Sunday August 14, 2022 | Greg Boyd
From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near.
In this sermon, Greg provides a big picture overview of the series on God’s final judgment and why it is so crucial, especially during this time in history.
As God’s people, we rally around the fact that Jesus is the revelation of who God is and the commitment to live in love as God loved us. We do this as a church by practicing GAPS. G stands for “Get all your life from Christ.” A means “Agree with God that every person you encounter has unsurpassable worth.” P represents “Pray for your enemies.” And S is for “Steward well the Earth and the animal kingdom.”
This focus on the revelation of Jesus gives us the ability to see rightly what is going on in the world. We do not get our life from the successes that we might experience in the progress of human achievement. Instead, we recognize that the world as we know it is moving toward an end, a kind of death. On the other side of this death, Jesus will restore all things and purge all evil so that love might fully reign. God’s people are called to live with an expectancy, an eager expectation that God will bring an end to this current world order and usher in a new heavens and a new earth.
We do not know when the end will come, as we are told that it will come like a thief in the night. The urgency that we should have is crucial for living faithfully in a world that is pervaded by evil. God’s justice will come fully and change the world as we know it, and we are to look forward to this coming.
In our time, we see the old world order unraveling, which points to the fact that this world is coming to an end. The foundations are breaking apart. These things point to the time when the current world order will crumble and Jesus’ coming will reveal the truth. This unraveling should cause us to open our eyes to the need to be living in eager expectation for the coming of Christ.
In the midst of this crumbling world, we need to learn to live in love and let go of judgment or we will bring on the end of the world as we know it. If we don’t love, we will become consumed by our own actions and bring down creation upon us. Our job is to prepare ourselves for the future, which is a life of love. We either get ready for this now or our own actions will fall upon us. Only love will remain. All else will fade away.