Looking Backward and Forward

This is the last Sunday of the Christian Calendar. Next Lord’s Day is the beginning of Advent. Some of you are already preparing for your family Advent celebrations, and beginning the following week, we will begin having Advent services on Wednesday evenings. Advent dwells particularly on the themes of God’s coming. It remembers that God has come in judgment and salvation in the past in events like the Exodus. God came to the aid of his people through raising up particular judges and kings and delivering them out of the hands of their enemies. When the people sinned, God came in judgment on Israel and Jerusalem. God came in salvation returning the exiles from Persia through the decree of Cyrus, and God finally came in the incarnation, being born of young virgin woman. God came at Pentecost and gave birth to the Christian Church through the Holy Spirit, and God came in judgment once again on Jerusalem when she rejected his Messiah, and the city of Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed by the Roman armies in 70 A.D. To celebrate Advent is to celebrate the fact that God has come again and again in history and of course in the fullest sense, God has come to us in Jesus Christ, the God-man, Emmanuel, God with Us. To dwell on all of these comings is to gird ourselves with strength for our battles, our enslavements, our exiles, and our failures. If the Lord of the Covenant has come again and again to the aid of his people and raised up a horn of salvation, he will surely come again for us. He will come at the end of all human history and raise us up in new and glorious bodies to live and glorify him forever. That is glorious, but we are called to live in faith now. And this means living before God fully expecting for him to come and act in our lives, to come and save us from our sins, deliver us from our follies, and rescue us from our enemies. This meal is one of those Advents. Here our God promises to be present. He assures us that we are forgiven, that we are his, that he fights for us, and that he will win the victory. As we finish the last Sunday of Pentecost, it is fitting to look backward and forward, remembering that it is the Holy Spirit that came at Pentecost to be God with us at all times and in all places, and it is this same Spirit who feeds us here with the body and blood of the Lord Jesus. The Holy Spirit is God who is perfecting us, sanctifying us, conforming us more and more to the image of the Son, in whom the Father is well pleased. So come and feast, you are the sons and daughter of the Triune God, and you are most welcome.