Looking Up – A Different Kind of World
Dear Hope Church Family,
There are times when I read something, stop in my tracks, and stand a bit awed at the clarity and wisdom some folks seem to have. I came across a tiny bit of this larger quotation below in a tweet of all things! And I was compelled to find the larger paragraph of which it is a vital part – in the works of Lesslie Newbigin, a trusted Christian brother who served for over 40 years as an Anglican church planter in the country of India.
This is timely insight for us in the dead middle of Advent. This resonates for us as we long for the Homeland of the new heavens and new earth yet still greet it from afar by faith rather than what our eyes can see.
The Advent season should come as a reminder to us that we can never be, and should not be, adjusted to the world. We are here to proclaim the reality and the imminence of a wholly other world, a world in which different powers rule and different standards operate. We are here to make it possible for ordinary men and women really to believe this, and therefore to live in hope and readiness. But what is the basis for our assurance that a radically different kind of world is possible? It is that this radically different kind of world has already broken into this world and that its powers and its standards have begun already to work . . . We do not merely – like Old Testament prophets – speak about an unknown day in the future; we speak about a known person who has already come, in whom Advent has begun. We speak about a new world whose powers are already at work in our own experience. What we look forward to, therefore, is not a wholly unknown event; it is the completion of what has already been begun in the coming of Jesus; it is the victory of the powers which are already at work in this world, grappling with the powers of evil; it is the public manifestation and acknowledgment of the reign of Jesus at the right hand of God which is now hidden, an object of faith but not yet of sight.
Holding out for the Homeland with you,
David