Almighty God, in the midst of all the changing words of this generation, help us now to hear your eternal Word that does not change. We ask for the blessed pleasant presence of your Holy Spirit that we might hear you rightly with faith, understanding and obedience. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. The 24, 44 to 53, he said to them, this is what I told you while I was still with you. Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms. Then he opened their minds so they could understand the scriptures. He told them, this is what is written. The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day in repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. Your witnesses of these things, I am going to send you what my father has promised, but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high. When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. They stayed continually at the temple, praising God, the Word of the Lord. Now we continue in this series that I am calling facing the risen Christ, reading now from the book of Acts, chapter 1. As you know, we have been looking at a number of stories from the earliest church that show the reality, Christians believe, of Jesus among us, of risen, but in and through the church, really showing that he is alive. We read some great stories, the story of Saul, the story of Tabitha or Dorcas. Today we look at the story of the ascension of Jesus and how that is so foundational to why we believe this, beginning in verse 1 of Acts chapter 1. In my former book, Theopolis, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach, until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of 40 days and spoke about the kingdom of God. In one occasion he was eating with them and he gave them this command, do not leave Jerusalem but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. So when that together they asked him, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them. It is not for you to know that times or dates the Father has set by His own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Al Jidea and Samaria to the ends of the earth. After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes and a cloud hit him from their sight. They were looking intently into the sky as he was going. And suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. Men of Galilee they said, why do you stand here looking into the sky? It is saying Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven. This is God's Word. Recently I heard two of my children playing in another room and my voice can be pretty competitive when they start to play. They were playing a game of crazy bones, if you are familiar with that particular sport. And as they were playing, things started heating up, moving along, I won't give any names here as to who said what. But I heard the flip of the crazy bones. The fierce competitive move was made and then I heard a child say this. You are the weakestly. Goodbye. And I thought where do they get that from because I know they have not watched that show with me. There is a thing in which though isn't there that whether it is the weakest link or survivor, part of what is in our culture right now is the celebration of strength, perseverance, the survivor. Which makes this day really a day that is very important to understand because it is the day where we celebrate the ultimate survivor. It is where we celebrate the link, the total complete victory of Jesus Christ. And it is interesting that in the very text you get an idea that people often misunderstand this because the very first disciples standing there were told they are looking intently in the wrong direction and actually get rebuked by angels going, what are you doing? You don't understand what has happened here. What I want us to do this morning is say how are we supposed to understand it? How are we supposed to rightly see? How are we to be intently looking and understanding what the ascension of Jesus means for us? I want to make just a few points as we talk about it. First of all let me say this. I think to rightly look intently at the ascension of Jesus first of all you have to know where he went. You have to look at this story and you have to see where he went. And to put it simply what the text tells us is that he went up. He went up and then the angels give us a little more data at the very end of the reading and they tell us that he went to heaven. Now this is very important to understand. C.S. Lewis and his mere Christianity describes this little scenario this way. There was a short vertical movement then vague luminosity. That's what a cloud presumably means. And then nothing. Now it's important that you not misconstrue this because the ascension can be one of those very difficult to believe stories, sort of like one hearing about, yeah, Muhammad died, then he hopped on his horse and he flew across Arabia, hit the rock and Jerusalem and off he went. And there's a sense of which we hear those kind of cosmic astronauts flying under the third power kind of story and you think, that's not believable. I was supposed to envision Jesus as some sort of astronaut with his heat shield going out into space. And what I would submit to you is that this is a true story. It's a literal story and it's not as hard to believe as you might think. If the idea isn't that heaven is some space, you know, 40 billion miles away that Jesus had to do a little space travel to get to, we just had bigger telescopes so we could find it. But actually, it's a truth. Actually, the sign that these disciples see is a truth that fits with, honestly, the truth thing we know about the universe, which is that reality is multi-dimensional. You know, if you're a student of physics and you read things about, you know, string theory and all this sort of thing. If you're a student of physics, acknowledge that they haven't figured it out, but it's that reality is more multi-dimensional than what we can see and what we know. And what you, in fact, see in this description of the ascension of Jesus is Jesus moving in the plainest, most simple way into another dimension. If you're going to go to another dimension and if you're going to go to the infinite, which way do you go? You don't go down. You go up. I mean, you know, still at the most visceral level, if we want to talk about infinity, it's up there. He goes up, but he doesn't go flying through the air. He disappears. He goes into another dimension. And that dimension he goes to, the text calls heaven, which is God's space. This gets at the biblical teaching that reality is multi-dimensional. And in Scripture, heaven is God's present, but unseen reality. It's not a reality hundreds of millions of miles away from the earth. It's actually, this is the great irony of it. This place where God is is simultaneously so near, you can taste it. And yet so far that we ache for it. It is transcendent from our space and yet it intersects our space. Beauty, truth, love, all these things that we are hardwired for, that we cannot suppress, that we long for, and try to find in all of our favorite idolatrous sins, all of those point to the glory that is God in the fullness of his dimension in heaven. We see it. It's everywhere around us, and yet though it's so close, it's totally elusive. It's the place where Jesus goes, it gets to heaven. Where God is fully Lord. Now, if you ever get a chance, you should read CS Lewis's space trilogy, because in one of the books of the space trilogy, it's called Out of the Silent Planet, he tells a story about a philologist, someone who studies languages, who's sent on a team to go to Mars. And sure enough, they get up there and guess what, there are Martians, and they get to know the Martians, and the philologists has got to decode the language so they can communicate. Well, when they get there, he discovers that the Martians do not have a word for bad. There's just simply no word for everything having gone wrong, you know, being totally bad. They just don't, it's not never a capillary, so this philologist comes up with a word to translate it bent. The way he translates badness, okay, fallenness, wrongness is bent. And I love it because Satan, at the end of the book, is called The Bent One. There you go, he's the great bent one. But actually, get that picture in your mind. You begin to get the idea of why the idea of heaven seems so near and so far to us. It's because we live in a world, the biblical picture of the world you live in, is that it is, in fact, a good world gone wrong. That it is a world that stumps and hides face of the glory of God. In beauty and our deepest longings, in art, you see it everywhere, but the face is hidden. It's bent. And because of bentness, there's a sense of which life in this world is never, ever, really full. Life in this world, even if it's best, and, by the way, some of the most oppressed people are the people who have what? Everything. They drink, they drink it in, they drive truckloads of the stuff into their heart, and they begin to realize it's still bent. Still doesn't fill me up. It's bent. So God's space and our space are separated. And that's by the way, the biblical story of the fall, Garden of Eden. What do you see in that story? There was a time where God's space and our space were one, where God was more to this universe, heaven and earth, and the earth just as heaven danced in obedience to its creator. It knew it, people knew that they were. The world was set right. And when sin came, what happened is we were cast out of God's space, so that God's dimension and our dimension become separate and we're bent. Now, I want to read you something. This is trying to understand heaven what it is. Tom Wright is a theologian writing today in his book, Following Jesus, he says this, I want to read this to you. He says, the Christian hope is not, despite popular impressions, that we simply go to heaven when we die. As far as it goes, that statement is right. After death, those who love God will be with him, will be in his dimension. But the final Christian hope is that the two dimensions, heaven and earth, at present separated by a veil of invisibility caused by human rebellion, will be united together so that there will be a new heavens and new earth. Heaven isn't, therefore, an escapist dream to be held out as a carrot, to make people better behaved, just as God isn't an absentee landlord who looks down from a great height to see what his tenants are doing. And to tell them that they mustn't. Heaven is the extra dimension, the God dimension of all of our present reality. And the God who lives there is present to us, present with us, sharing our joys in our sorrows, longing as we are longing for the day when his whole creation, heaven and earth together, will perfectly reflect his love, his wisdom, his justice, and his peace. As Christians daily, we pray, the our Father, we pray the Lord's prayers, part of our prayers, and as we pray that, what is it that Jesus tells us to constantly be praying? Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. You see that vision of heaven and earth, wrongly separated, but Jesus mission ultimately to bring them back together renewed, is to be on the very tongue of every Christian when you pray. That's how you're supposed to pray. Lord, bring it in. What are you saying? Lord, I pray that in that dimension, when I think of you in heaven, where you are Lord, and there's all the blinders are off, everybody there who knows it, your glory is unleashed, everybody sees it in there shouting it. I want that to break into my life. I want you to come in as king, and I want to know what it is, to fully be your servant. Your kingdom come, come into me. That's the prayer of the Christian, but it doesn't stop there. Your kingdom come means, not only come into me, but come through me. I want you, Lord, to bring your reign, not only into my life, but bring it into the world that I live in. I want to see the first fruits around me of Jesus reigning over the whole universe. That's the prayer of the Christian. Now, you see why it's important. You're going to see this right. You got to see where Jesus goes. He goes into God's multi-dimension, all right? He goes into God's dimension, but he goes there because his purpose is to bring them back together. This is the first fruits of that. I think it's also important to look at this and not only see where Jesus goes, understand God's space that he goes to heaven, but understand who it is that goes there. You got to understand where he's going, but you also got to understand who's going there, and namely the fact that it's Jesus who's going to God's space. Now, why is that important? Well, because Jesus, friends, has just gone to the cross. He's just been raised from the dead, and he is going back into God's space as one of us. You must understand this. By the way, this is one of the most, you know, there are a lot of common heresies that float around the Christian Church that well-meaning Christians believe. A heresy, you know, a really, really, really horribly wrong doctrine. And one of them goes like this, I believe Jesus is God. And I believe he came into the world and he became a human being, and he lived, you know, a lowly human life, and then he died on the cross, and then he became God again, and he went back to heaven, and now he doesn't have to worry about being a human being anymore because now he's God. That's heresy. And it's not what the Bible teaches at all. In fact, if that were true, you would not be saved. It would be impossible for you to be saved, because the Christian gospel is wrapped up in this truth. That God, in his glory, in his eternity, in his dimension, when the universe were belled against him, in the spaces were separated. That in Jesus Christ, God broke a hole in the pittiest worlds in the world. He re-entered the world and he took up human flesh once and for all. And in that flesh, Jesus Christ, for you, lived the life that you should have lived, as someone created in the image of God and to be in covenant with God, Jesus fully lived. Up to every requirement God would have ever had for anyone in this creation, he fully lived it and then he laid down his life as a sacrifice for all the ways you and I have marred it. For the ways that we've marred and defaced his creation, shunned him, turned our back on his glory, he paid the price. But if you come to him and believe in him, you know this, that he paid the price for you. And when he was raised, what God was doing was the very first fruits. He was pouring glory into the flesh that had gone rotten. He took the flesh that had gone rotten, he took it out and in the death resurrection of Jesus Christ, he poured his glory back into the flesh. And don't you see? The only way that can be possible for us to be saved is that Jesus then takes glorified humanity and he takes it from this dimension back into God's dimension. He takes us humanity back into God's space and says this is the beginning. This is the great reversal. Don't you see? This is the link that guarantees once and for all that there will be a new heaven and a new earth and it is the link that guarantees that if you come to me, I will pour my glory into your life and Sunday I will raise you up and you'll be just like me. It's the first verse. He takes our flesh, he takes our humanity and he takes it into God's space with a guarantee, as the angel said, this same Jesus. What Jesus, the glorified human Jesus, this same Jesus will return. The prophets just dreamed about it and what does it mean when he returns? Everything bit will be made right. All the rough places the prophets say will be made smooth. All the hills may level, all the valleys may level. What does that mean? Jesus ascension is the first step of the great reversal that turns everything right. It means that this world and this life is not a joke, it's not just an illusion that has to be endured and then we'll flitter off the heavens someday, but it means that your life, your flesh, this world can be redeemed and it can resonate with the glory of God. Do you see why the rebuke came to these guys? They're standing there and they're still wrapped up in nationalism. When is this real going to get it? They still, after all this, they still don't get it. Which should encourage you by the way that Christians don't get it by and large. If you hang around us long, we can be kind of stupid, we can be very dull and yet here's Jesus spirit. You see how patient Jesus is with stupid people because this is their going, come on, when do we get our kingdom? When do we put our curtains in the white house? Jesus is actually the Holy Spirit is going to come to you and you're going to be about witness all over the world. Remember that part? Then the vertical move and he disappears. The angel, and they're doing, come on, they're doing what any of us will be doing. You'll be standing there going, wow, but the angel say, now wait a minute, why are you looking this way? You want to know Jesus? You want to know the kingdom? Why are you looking up this way? Because what was the last thing Jesus had just said to them? Go into all the world, teaching up and make disciples baptizing, teaching them whatsoever things I have commanded you and I will always be with you. What is he saying? Listen, you want to look at me intently? You want to look at me rightly? Don't stare off at the skies. Look at your world. Look at your neighbor. Look at your life because that is what I'm coming back to make new and I'm going to be with you even now to begin the renewal to begin the power. Remember what we read at the very beginning, Acts chapter 1? What does Luke tell us about these acts of the Apostles? That this, of theophilus, are these things I have written to tell you about the things that Jesus began to do and teach while he was among us. The idea there being what? That Jesus is continuing to be present and the teaching in the New Testament is that that presence now for these men there on the mountain shortly after the day of Pentecost and for us now is that Jesus himself continues to be present and at work. Here are these words from John chapter 14. See, Jesus says this about someone who's a Christian. Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing and he will do even greater things than these because I am going to my father. Did he hear that? What is your vocation as a follower of Jesus? He will do what I have been doing and he says the reason it will be even greater because you're going, gee, I'm not greater than Jesus. Well, duh, but that's not what he means. The point is this because I go to my father. What has happened? Jesus has begun the great reversal. He's taken our flesh, our humanity. He's redeemed it on the cross. He's been raised to guarantee the great reversal. He's gone back into God's space and then he infuses us with the spirit of God and as the spirit comes in, what is the rumble? What's greater? What's greater is that now that the spirit of God brings the personal presence of Jesus into the world. Now the presence of Jesus is not just confined. You see, to that body that walked the earth for three years, but it is now unleashed and humiliants. Jesus said, I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. He wasn't talking about the second coming. There's plenty he says about the second coming. He was talking about what's going to happen in a few days when the Holy Spirit comes. I'm coming to you and I'm going to be working. Don't you see the glory of the ascension? Is that Jesus now takes the human into God's space and guarantees that the reversal has begun, which means he's at work now in cosmic ways through the smallest things in your life. As some of you know what I'm talking about, now when a Christian simply takes the time and Jesus's name to care enough to encourage somebody, all right. What we believe is that Jesus Christ Himself personally, spiritually present in you will reach out and encourage that person. We believe that by the way. Some of you have experienced that. You have ever lost perspective and you're just about to lose it. You're on your way out and somebody comes and maybe not even in a super articulate way, they come and they just tell you that they love you and they put their arms around you. Have you ever had that feeling of just being lifted up out of the pit your hand and sat back on your feet? It wasn't there. It was Jesus through them. He's really there. Don't you see this brings all new potential for the glory of a casserole. Halfway decent can be given and can actually bear witness to a transcendent love that people are dying to know. That's all this congregation before. I say the reason I'm a Christian is because of corn. My parents were not Christians and the fact was there was a man who we would have kind of out west of here kind of out in the country and there was a man on our street who was a minister, a retired minister, a little church who was dying of cancer and he had corn fields and relentlessly he gave to my family. You know, that you know out in the country it could be kind of hard to break in if you're new to town and he refused to let it be that way he embraced my family in every way that he could and because he wasn't focused on his own problems. He loved them. My parents saw, what did they say? They saw Jesus. They saw that it was real that he was alive and that's what brought them into the kingdom. Don't you see the glory this means for your life? That you, your story, your life can now become an instrument of the glory that Jesus wants to unleash in the world as part of making the whole thing new again. Let me just close and I want to tell you a story and I guess I want to focus this to encourage those of you who are graduating because I know there's a few of you out there. It's easy to get cynical because you know parents have on the one hand they give you great expectations for life and you've been around adults who had great expectations for their life and they've been disappointed. Don't you say that if this, if the ascension of Christ, if devoting yourself to bringing glory to God, that becomes your life vision that nothing to disappoint you. If your career falls apart, you're not disappointed. If your dreams fall apart, don't you see there's still, there's still this unfailing reality you've attached yourself to. But I want to encourage you with this, is this, God has made you as an individual, he's been in charge of your story and it's you give yourself to Jesus Christ. What you can be guaranteed of is that he wants Jesus in your life to make you an instrument of nothing less than unleashing his glory. The glory that exists in his dimension being brought by the spirit in and through you into the lives of other people. There's glory for you. I'll tell you a story. I just came across this by the way. I told a little short story by J. R. R. Tolkien. Now some of you know Tolkien, he's the writer of the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien had writer's block for years, couldn't, couldn't write the thing. And finally, he sat down and he wrote a little short story and the short story is entitled Leaf by Nigel. And you can find it in any of the Tolkien collections, but if you look at it, it's, it's a very short story and it tells the story of this poor artist named Nigel. Nigel was hired by the town he lived in, small town he lived in, to paint a mural on the post office wall. He had a vision of glory. And the glory he had, the artistic dream of his life was of this beautiful tree. He lived for this glory, but he began to paint the mural and he got to this leaf, started on a leaf, and he poured all of his life into that leaf, perfecting it. But he was frustrated because he could never paint the whole tree. All I can do was paint the leaf and of course the people who were paying him to do this, as the years went by, I said, you know, hey, we paid for a mural. And all we're getting is this leaf, who argue? What's your problem? Well, it gets worse because then Nigel dies, having only completed the leaf. And now the story you find Nigel riding on a train on his way to heaven. You know, see, it's a list of people on trains going to have it. So apparently he's riding a train going to have an and he looks out the window and he sees on the hillside something that absolutely he can't believe. And he pulls the cord, demands to get off the train, he gets off the train, he races up the hill, he goes up to the top and there on the top of the hill in resplendent glory is the tree that he had always seen and believed in and there at the corner of the train was his leaf and all of it's beauty. You know what, Tolkien wrote that story, realized at that point that his riders flock was because he thought that he could just be the greatest artist to reveal the glory. When he realized he was going to get a leaf, he sat down and he wrote the Lord of the Rings. What are I trying to say to you? Give yourself the Christ and you get a leaf. Give yourself the Christ and you become a part of the glory that he's going to bring to birth in the universe. Let's pray. For Jesus Christ, we want to look intently at you and see you all right. We need to see you in your heavenly glory. We need to see that you have a story that you've taken up us and you've taken it back into God's space and you've committed yourself to make things to be on hand on earth just as they are in heaven. We long for that and this morning as we come for the table, I ask that you would feed us and strengthen us and draw us personally to commit our lives to that vision. We pray in your name.