Play

Download mp3

We’re in the final week of a five week series I’ve called “We were meant to live.”  We’ve talked about how the Bible talks about the eternal quality of life as the life you were meant to live.  Jesus described eternal life as a relationship with God that begins in this world and extends to the next.  When Jesus came on the scene, he announced that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, that the reign of God was accessible to all who would repent.  Once we’ve entered the kingdom, we become agents of the kingdom, working alongside God to restore our creation, to make right what has gone wrong – bringing peace where there is strife, justice where there is injustice, truth where there are lies, healing where there is pain and disease.  As we do this, we show people the world as God intended it and as it one day will be.  I hope the past four weeks have given you a glimpse into the life you were meant to live.

In week one I spoke of the tension that exists between this calling we have to come up higher and live a life of significance, and the reality that we constantly fall short of our ideals.  We see this on an individual level – you can have a deep passion to help build a church that is all God intended, but this passion is rivaled by an equal passion for sitting on your butt and watching TV.  This tension also exists in the church, between all that God intends and all that is possible and the reality of what we make of the greatest story ever told.  You get a church that wants to be save the whole world but can’t figure out how to love the person who lives next door.  And there is a tension in this world – for every Mother Teresa and Desmond Tutu, there is an Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong il.  For every team of people working to bring clean water to villages in Africa, there is a group of billionaires looking to get richer off without a care to the disparity in wealth in the world.  For every teacher trying to raise the quality of education in Hartford, there are drug dealers trying to get rich off of the misery and addictions of others.  The good news of the Bible is that this world is not the end, that one day we will truly live the life that we were meant to live.  One day the tension will disappear and we will live that eternal quality of life, life to the full.  One day God will set everything right in the world, and we will live in perfect relationship with Him.