New

This weekend I'm going to talk about what happens when we die. Lots of people have thoughts on this topic.

The popular folk theology is that heaven is the destination for virtually everybody and it is pretty much whatever we want it to be. Evangelicals focus on heaven and hell--some will end up in one place and others will end up in another place. Catholic theology adds purgatory to the mix. As I talk Sunday about what happens when we die I must talk about how we live. In living and in dying, God wants to make us new. Here is this Sunday's column:

Most of us like new things. I like the smell of new cars, although I have never owned one. We have these friends who recently bought a new house. I went over there one night and blessed it for them. It had a new smell to it and I could tell that they loved it. For my birthday, a few weeks ago, I got a few new toys and a couple of new shirts. I love the feel of new running shoes. The kids love new games and balls and toys. I have a feeling that you like new stuff too. We all like new stuff.

A few weeks ago Amber decided to paint some magnetic paint on one of our walls. The paint was black. She had to apply five or six coats to make it work. After that, I painted the wall the color of the room so we didn't have a black wall. After a few coats of brown, we had a magnetic wall that looked like the rest of the downstairs - except it looked even better. It had been three years since we painted the downstairs. With a 150 pound dog and two kids-ages 7 and 2-the environment has not been kind to the lower three feet of our walls. I wondered how it would look if I painted some of the spots where Georgia laid against the wall and the kids ran their sometimes sticky and sometimes dirty hands against the wall. I started with the spot where Georgia usually lays. It was absolutely amazing. I didn't realize that gradually over three years the once light brown wall was now black. Way too much time later (I have got to be the slowest painter in the world), our downstairs had a new, fresh coat of paint and one wall even had a new color. It looks better than the day we moved in!

As I was getting ready for this morning's sermon early in the week, the first thing I did was write down all the Bible passages off the top of my head that had to do with what happens when we die. I came up with about 15 or 20 and then stopped. Then I went to my trusty Logos Bible software program and did some more searching. The passage that was at the top of both lists was: Revelation 21. I read through the passage a number of times in different English translations and I even read it in the original Greek. Verse 5 kept jumping off the page at me: And the one sitting on the throne said, "Look, I am making everything new."

New. There is that word again. God makes everything new. When we are conceived, God makes us new. The day we are born, God makes us new. When we die, God makes us new. And, each day, the master painter is interested in touching up years of mistakes and imperfections making us new. Let God make you new today and know that this day can be the first day of the rest of your life because God is making everything new!

The best is yet to come...

Craig

No running today. Long day at work.