Resurrection and the Kingdom of God
Acts 1:1-11
Pastor Bob Hiller
6/5/2011
Acts 1:11 "Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven."
1. On the Festival of the Ascension we celebrate the good news that Jesus is both ___________ and ____________.
2. If Jesus is with you in your ____________, you will most certainly be with Him in His ____________.
3. To have Jesus as Lord means that these troubles and trials do not __________ over you, ____________ does!
Scripture Readings
Acts 1:1-11
1 Peter 4:12-19, 5:6-11
John 17:1-11
Take It With You!
Here we will offer thoughts and meditations on the message to help us as we contemplate and discuss and wrestle with what we are hearing.
One day... the Jesus who is right now the central figure of God's space - the human Jesus, still wearing (as Wesley put it) "those dear tokens of his passion" on his "dazzling body" - will be present to us, and we to him, in a radically different way than what we actually know. The other half of the ascension is that Jesus will return, as the angels said in Acts 1:11.
At this point some of the regular prayers, in my tradition, let us down with a bump - which is actually the wrong metaphor because what they do is to say, in effect, "Jesus has been raised to heaven, and we pray that we may be raised there too." There is indeed a sense in which this is true, as in Ephesians 2:6 and Colossians 3:1-4. But when people hear those prayers today (speaking of Jesus being exalted to heaven and of us going in heart and mind to be with him forever; or speaking of the Holy Spirit as the one who will exalt us to the place where he has gone before), they are almost bound, within today's muddled worldview, to be reinforced in their view that the whole point of the Christian faith is to follow Jesus away from earth to heaven and stay there forever. And the New Testament insists, on the contrary, that the one who has gone into heaven will come back. At no point in the Gospels or Acts does anyone say anything remotely like, "Jesus has gone into heaven, so let's be sure we can follow him." They say, rather, "Jesus is in heaven, ruling the whole world, and he will one day return to make that rule complete."
NT Wright, Surprised by Hope
