Coney Hill Baptist Church
Demonstrating God’s Love Together
Tomorrow People
18I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
Intro:
Are we shaped more by the/our past than the future?
Two different television programmes make the point.
‘Who do you think you are?’ builds on the idea that we are the product of what has gone before, that the past defines us in the present.
Dr. Who on the other hand, like lots of time-travelling science fiction, play’s with that continual dilemma, what’s the point of being able to go back in time if you can’t change anything. In this Christmases final episode, finally facing his own mortality he triumphed over that age old restriction by making his last act returning to all the previously unresolved storylines and making them right. Suggestion that the most important thing he could do with his life was to affect the future.
The Christian faith, perhaps particularly the church, is often seen as being traditional. That it is affected mostly by its past, always harking back. In many ways it’s a profoundly conservative institution and there is a danger we can fall into the trap of thinking of the ‘good old days’, imagining that everything is on some sort of downward spiral, always getting worse.
The New Testament though is a book of hope. Drawing certainly on the events of the past it is being pulled into the future. It’s writers challenge the disciples of their day, in the light of what God had done in Jesus, to imagine just what could/would be, and live accordingly.
They were people of Tomorrow.
Revealed Glory …
A work under construction… incomplete yet purposeful…
Things are by no means complete, much cannot be seen. But it’s an exciting time, a time for craftsmen and women to go about their business, often unnoticed and certainly unappreciated.
Eager Expectation…
All of creation, its pains and its struggles are productive ….
Sufferings, groans and pains, bondage and seeming decay, frustration … All words that we can understand and apply to our present experience.
Yet they are here allied to something else, something coming … hope, glory, freedom …emerging like the birth of a child, in such a way that the pain, intense though it might be, is considered as nothing compared with what it produces.
So not only is the enormity of the change emphasised, but its extent too. Everything is included.
Conc.
To be a disciple is to be caught up in an extensive and wide ranging execution of God’s purposes. It includes our personal salvation, but goes far beyond it.
We are called to build that future glory, to be inspired by future promised perfection and so to settle for nothing less now.
It’s hard work, often frustrating, frequently seeming to go against the grain. But were not fighting some rearguard action, trying to restore some long lost golden age that never was, but establishing a future the likes of which we can only but dream of.
Office Address:
Coney Hill Road
West Wickham
Kent
BR4 9BU