Message: The End, New Creation
Speaker: Greg Holder
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death, or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
Revelation 21:3-4
Read
Isaiah 63, Luke 24, Revelation 21:1-5
Reflect
1. Have you ever been homesick? When? And where were you? What was happening in your life?
2. When things get hard, do you tend to withdraw? Do you get the stiff upper lip and try not to "let 'em see you sweat?"
3. Read Revelation 21:1-5. What echoes of other Scriptures do you hear in this passage?
4. What does this homesickness have to do with missing both a place - and a person?
Do
Listen to Elle Limebear's song, "Maker of the Moon." What lyrics stick out to you? What do you notice about her description of God's glory and His intimate relationship to you?
Go Deeper
Reflect on this passage Greg alluded to in C.S. Lewis' book, The Weight of Glory:
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”