Restoration Now and in the Future

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically from the audio and may contain small errors.

A few weeks ago, a man by the name of Lauren Cope lost his bid for the governorship of Washington. This is just a few weeks ago. And the same day that he lost his election, he also lost his job. You see, he was the police chief in a very small town called Republic, Washington. And so Lauren Kulp, days before the election, the City Council of Republic had decided in a secret meeting to move the funding away from his job as the police chief and toward the sheriff's office. They posted the meeting notes of that secret meeting the same day that Kulp lost the election. And when they asked Lauren Kalb about, just kind of how it all felt, he just had a very familiar phrase. He says, it feels like a knife in the back. We've all been hurt by people that we trust sometimes. Maybe it's an accident, right? Maybe people, they let one of our secrets slip or they stood us up, they forgot a meeting

or something like that. But sometimes it's on purpose. Sometimes people that you trust lie to you. Sometimes they talk behind your back. And sometimes they vote you out of office when you're not looking. And so when it's on purpose, there really is no other expression. There's no better expression to say it feels like a knife in the back. And I imagine that the friendship between Lauren Kulp and the city council members, it's incinerated. nowhere to be found. And I don't really blame him. When I'm vulnerable with people and I feel betrayed, my first and most common instinct is to write those people off. I imagine that some of you have been in a very similar position where people that you trusted have betrayed you. And maybe that's why, whenever we're reading the Minor Prophets, as we've been going through our Body Bullets series, listening to the 12 prophets, these are the Minor Prophets at the end of the

Testament. And when we read them, it sounds like, at least for part of them, it sounds like God is writing them off. Like He is building a case to leave them. He's tallying their sin to show why He should just cut them off, write them off. However, as we learned last week, That is the exact opposite of what's going on. Last week we discovered and remembered that God's character is that of a restorer, a reviver. God likes to make dead things come alive.

And as we've seen that, there's more today, right, that God delights in restoration. It's in His character, his plan is not to write them off, but to bring them back to life, to restore them. We have followed this plan, we talked about God's plan, and we've been talking about this all through our Bite the Bullet series. And when we say Bite the Bullet, that expression, I'm gonna bite the bullet, it means I'm going to do something that's difficult but necessary. It means I'm going to bear down and endure something that I know I need to endure. And so in that same spirit of biting bullets of enduring something difficult, God has a plan, right, that follows according to that. Step one we learned a few weeks ago. Step one of God's plan is to wake his people up. God uses alarming words. He uses harsh illustrations to get their attention, to wake up. In fact, Hosea is the first book

that we've been mainly saying in Hosea through our whole series. But in Hosea, God opens up by saying, my people have committed great hordom. They have played the whore. And he uses that word several times. And we've gone through and talked about how that a woman cheating on her husband is similar to, it's a great illustration for what God's people have been doing to him. And so his first step is to wake them up by using harsh words and illustrations. Step two, after they are wake, he needs to help them grasp that betrayal and so he brings justice. He brings justice to all that they did. And remember, we looked at this last week, sin was rampant. There are layers of wrongs that are being done. There's generations of, he did this to me and then I did this thing back, and it was just so much piled on to each other that really what God does is he uproots the entire thing. He uproots

particularly their religious systems to uncover the fact that their hearts are far from Him. So they're making sacrifices but their hearts are far from God and then God finally says, and through many of the minor prophets, quit making sacrifices, quit singing songs to me, quit pretending like everything's okay, everything's not okay. And so these are the first two steps, right? Today is our last step. After they have been woken up, after they have seen the betrayal and received justice, step three is nothing less than the complete restoration of His people. Last week we saw hints of this as blessing follow judgment. When you look in the Minor Prophets, you see a lot of judgment, but if you read it all in context, if you read more than just the scary parts, and there are scary parts, you will see that God is bringing blessing following judgment, that the judgment doesn't last forever.

It needs to happen, but it doesn't last forever. And today we're gonna be looking deeper into that blessing that follows judgment, deeper into God's plan to restore his people completely. And this should interest us because it's not a small thing. This is not like restoring an old building or an old chair. This is dealing with an entire nation of people. This is dealing with perspectives, histories, lives, motivations, families. How is God going to go about restoring his people whenever things are so far gone? Well, we see it come out in two parts. We're gonna take them one at a time. So we're gonna turn to the 12 prophets and we're gonna look at Zechariah chapter 13 verse two. Okay, in Zechariah 13, this is whenever God begins to talk to his people about restoration. 2 Zechariah 13 2 And on that day declares the Lord of hosts, I will cut off the names of the idols from the land, so that they shall be remembered

no more. And also I will remove from the land the prophets and the spirit of uncleanness. So remember through idols people were kind of shaking their fists at God and saying, you will not provide. So I need to provide for myself. I need to pray to these fertility gods, or these harvest gods or these rain gods or whoever, to make sure that my future is prosperous, to make sure that I have what I need. And so if they're trying to do that, if they're acting out of insecurity, if they're not trusting God, but kind of trying to shore up their own stuff, what God says he will do in Zechariah 13 is personally, he will personally come in and wipe out idolatry by removing all the idols. In fact, when he says, I'm even going to wipe out the memory of these idols. God is going to come in and clean house personally. We also see this in Joel two, we find a very vivid picture of this restoration

and it's a lot to read, but just try to picture it as we read. Okay, I'm gonna read it out loud. This is verses 23 through 27 of Joel two. Be glad, O children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God, for he has given the early rain for your vindication. He has poured out for you abundant rain, the early and the latter rain as before. The threshing floors shall be full of grain. The vast shall overflow with wine and oil. I will restore to you the years that the swarming locusts has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer and the cutter, many, my great army, which I sent among you, you shall eat in plenty and be satisfied and praise the name of the Lord your God who has dealt wondrously with you and my people shall never again be put to shame. You shall know that I am in the midst of Israel and that I am the Lord your God and there's no one else and my people shall never again be put to shame."

I want you to focus right there on verse 25. Verse 25 says, I will restore what has been taken. I will look at all the devastation that the Swarming Locusts ate, all the harvest that's lost, everything, I will restore that. I will bring it back to you. I will fix it. And we see this all over the minor prophets that God has a plan to restore his people right now in their lifetime. That God wants to intervene personally, remove their punishment, reverse their damage. And after the shame and the judgment has come, right? All this judgment has come. What's going to happen right after that? He's saying, never again will you be put to shame. I have made my people suffer shame to bring justice to what they had previously done But now now that they have endured it they will never again

Endure that shame God is saying I will make this right personally I will restore you in your lifetime. You will see All these things taken away from you. You'll see them brought back But you find something more as you continue to read in the Minor Prophets. In the Minor Prophets, talking about this restoration now idea, very often you can almost pick a book between Hosea and Malachi and find a place where God is talking to his people about fixing what's broken, about restoring the damage done. But as you continue to read, there's more than immediate restoration. There's more than restoration in the now. We see something else. And to do that, we're actually just gonna continue reading Joel, so we left off in Joel 2:27, but when you continue reading Joel 2:28 and 29, you get this fuller story, starting in verse 28. And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.

Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions, even on the male and female servants in those days, I will pour out my spirit." What God is doing there in verse 28 and 29 is different than what's happening in verses 23 through 27. In 28 and 29, and notice it begins with this idea of afterward. So when a certain amount of time has passed afterward,

something else is going to happen. So the restoration comes, the damage is reversed, but then something happens that will go further. And when you start to look at that, it's things that aren't happening what we see in the Old Testament. God doesn't pour out His Spirit on just random people. God only shares a word, a divine word with people. He rests His Spirit upon people. So you see this with David, you see this with King Saul, you see this with prophets, lots of different times. Moses had a particular, like a special kind of relationship with God, and you see that all through the Old Testament. But in Joel 2, 28, 29, and in many other places, we're looking at Hosea 2 in just a minute, but in Joel 2, 28, 29, the idea is that even Even male and female servants, so even the lowest members of society, in other words, everybody, it doesn't matter who you are, God will pour His Spirit upon you.

People are going to be dreaming dreams, they're going to prophesy, they're going to have access to the Spirit of God in a new, unprecedented way. And you see this is Old Testament. We're not in Acts, we're not in the New Testament right now. This is Old Testament. And you find this idea, this picture all over. So I want to go into Hosea chapter 2, and I want to read a couple of verses 16 all the way through 20, and it's a lot. But as we go through it, I want to kind of walk you through, we'll watch the turn. So there's a way that we're going to begin, and then you'll see the turn happen in the middle of it. We go from restoration now to restoration in the future. Okay, let's read. Hosea 2 16 through 20 and in that day declared the Lord You will call me my husband and No longer will you call me my ball For I will remove the names of the balls from her mouth and they shall be remembered

By name no more now what you're seeing here in these verses is similar to what we read in Zechariah 13 to where it says God says, I'm going to personally come and wipe out all those foreign idols. The ball is a foreign god, it's a false god. Okay, verse 18. You start to see the turn here, but not fully. He says, I will make for them be coveted on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds, the heaven, and the creeping things of the ground. So that is supposed to make us remember and think of creation, right? Beast birds and creeping things. That's straight out of Genesis chapter one. And he says, and I will abolish the bow, this is the middle of 18, I will abolish the bow, the sword and war from the land, and I will make you light down in safety. And now here's a big turn here, verse 19, I will, and I will betrothe you to me forever. I will betrothe you to me in righteousness and in justice,

in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betrothe you to me in faithfulness and you shall know the Lord. This is a big deal. God is saying, I'm gonna remove those things, but then there's gonna be this moment when I'm going to make you mine in a new way. I'm gonna betrothed you in righteousness and justice. In other words, I'm not gonna tell you to be righteous. I'm not gonna tell you to act justly. He's still going to do that, but what he's going to do is just take the matters into his own hands and clothe his people in faithfulness. Clothe his people in justice and in righteousness and in steadfast love. Is it verse 20? I will betrothe you. I will put faithfulness upon you and you shall know that I am the Lord. shall know the Lord. The idea is that they right now are kind of stumbling forward trying to figure things out, but God is saying there will come a day

whenever something new is going to happen. God's plan here is to restore his people in the future. He's talking right now to these to these minor prophets. This is roughly 400 to 800 years before Christ, before Jesus is born. So this is 800 to 400 BC. His plan is to restore his people in the future. So in Joel, I'm going to pour out my Spirit upon you, not just priests and prophets, everybody. In Hosea, I will betrothe you to me forever. God is putting a fine point on it and if you'll remember from the previous service that we looked at in Hosea 1 where Hosea the prophet is marrying Gomer the whore, the town whore, Hosea is marrying her and saying I'm I will be your husband, you will be my wife and we're going to make this work. I'm going to stay faithful to you." At one point in Hosea, he buys her out of slavery again.

He marries her, she cheats on him, she goes away, she falls into slavery. Hosea buys her out of slavery and is going to be faithful to her. And so God here is putting a fine point on it And with that, just like Hosea marrying Gomer, the faithless wife, what God is saying to us, what God is saying to his people here, he's saying, my faithfulness to you will far exceed Hosea's faithfulness to Gomer. Because Hosea cannot make Gomer clean. Hosea cannot make Gomer be faithful. All Hosea can do is be faithful. What God is saying is my faithfulness to you will go beyond that. I will make you clean. I will clothe you in righteousness. I will clothe you in justice and faithfulness and steadfast love. I know God is saying to us, I know you are a whore, but I love you anyway. I will. I will make you mine. What a powerful love. What a faithfulness that goes beyond whatever we deserve.

This future restoration that God is talking about has prevention in mind. It addresses the deeper issue of betrayal in His people and it makes dirty people clean without their participation. This is what many theologians and scholars call the scandal of the gospel. of the gospel. There's a quote by R.C. Sproul Jr. and it just illustrates the point really well. He said, had Hitler truly repented at the last moment, this is Adolf Hitler, right, that Hitler, had Adolf Hitler truly repented at the last moment, he would indeed now be enjoying the blessings of eternity. Not, however, because his sins would have gone unpunished, but because his sins would have been punished on Christ. God, even here, even in the Minor Prophets, God is bringing the gospel to life. That God here in the end of the Minor Prophets, at the end of the Old Testament, is foreshadowing what will happen, that God will finally fix

our hearts. And yes, I mean, God is going to handle restoration now. He's going to make unjust things just again. He's going to right wrongs. He's going to wipe away tears. All that's true. But the absolute core of what causes all of our injustice, all of our pain, all of our loss is the broken hearts of people. The broken relationship between people and their Creator. All these broken, heartbroken relationships, they keep looking for joy, keep looking for meaning in places other than God. God has a plan for ultimate final restoration and we call it the gospel. In the gospel of Jesus, God says to us exactly what he's saying here to his people in the Minor Prophets. So how do we reckon with this? How do we, how do we bite the bullet on God's complete and utter restoration of us, His people, who do not deserve this kind of restoration? Well, biting bullets quite simply, and it's kind of

obvious, it means that we give ourselves to that process. It means that we understand that God is bringing us to restoration. And so it means that we just, we simply give ourselves to that process. We talked about this a little bit last week with repentance, just the idea that we are saying, okay, God, our life is yours. Do what you must do, do what you have to do. And so in the same way, he invites us to this restoration. Now this restoration, because it is twofold, right, because there's, it is restoration now, and it is also restoration in the future. or binding the bullet then takes on a two-fold approach. If we're gonna bite the bullet, if we're gonna endure the difficulty and embrace this thing that God is doing to us, right? If we're gonna embrace that, if we're really gonna cooperate with that, which we still have a choice to cooperate, you know, God invites us to this,

we choose to embrace it or to not. And so how do we embrace it? How do we latch onto this restoration that God is bringing in us? So the first way that we'll talk about corresponds with restoration right now. What does that look like? It means restoration right now means we walk with confidence. We walk with confidence in Jesus's restoration. Although we know we are prone to stray, we get it. We will not perfectly cooperate with what the spirit God is doing inside of us. However, we can't bank on the fact that Jesus himself is actively working to restore his people. And let me just be real clear, I'm not talking about a health and wealth prosperity gospel where all of your problems can be prayed away if you just have enough faith and you can have everything you need, but you need all the faith you can. What I'm talking about right now is actual, actual restoration,

promise from Jesus. And what this means, and I want to be super practical right now, what this means is that when you or I come across a broken marriage, either our own or other people's, when we come across a broken marriage we can confidently say, I say broken, I don't mean divorced, I mean a very difficult situation between married people. When we come across that kind of situation, we can say with confidence that Jesus himself is working to restore that marriage. And when we have sharp disagreements and fights with other people, we can say with confidence that Jesus through the Holy Spirit is working to mend that relationship. Jesus is working that restoration in the here And now when we meet other people who have seemingly insurmountable problems, we're talking about addiction, poverty, joblessness, homelessness. I mean, we look at that and we go, I don't even know where to start.

What we can do, what we can do, we can say with confidence that Jesus is working to solve those problems in each person, not just the problem generally, but in specific people's lives. Now, I can say with great sobriety that confidence in the midst of pain and frustration is not easy. Confidence in the middle of helping somebody with a lot of problems is not easy.

It's actually easier to give up. It's easier to look at where people aren't to kind of weigh it on the worth it meter and just to go, I mean, it's just, it doesn't hold up. It's not worth it. It's not worth the trouble. So whenever we're looking at that, you know, whenever we're looking at potentially helping or being involved in helping somebody grow spiritually, inevitably, we're going to come across these problems. And when we do, we need to have the confidence to say Jesus is at work. This is how we encourage it. We don't encourage by saying, hey, all of your problems are going to end up just fine. No, they won't. You know, we live in a fallen world. You're going to have problems that are going to persist. And some problems are going to persist even well after you're long gone. However, what we can say is that Jesus is actively working in those issues, those problems.

He's actually working to restore it, to mend it, to solve it, and we can work with that. It's also easier to be on the other end of that, you know, to, when you have a lot of problems, when you have seemingly insurmountable problems, I don't know how we're going to fix this. It's easier to say, hey, you know what, just don't get your hopes up. Don't get too excited about something good that happened, right? However, this flies in the face of what we see in the mind of prophets. It flies in the face of what we see in the gospel. Because there are many of us, in fact, I don't really know anybody's testimony that follows a different pattern than this. I don't deserve to be where I am in my life. For example, I don't deserve to be preaching right now. I don't deserve it. I am a worse sinner than most people I know. people I know are better people than me. And now that sadden me, that frustrates me, I

work against that, I struggle against that. However, however here I stand, called by the Lord to preach and I am in the process of being restored. You and I are in the middle of our restoration. I don't know if you've ever seen a table in the middle of being restored, it's super ugly, right? I mean most of the finish is, you know, the old finish is chipping off or it's half scraped. There's a smell of chemicals potentially that have been used to strip off the hard spots. Maybe there's a whole lag that's detached because the nails were bad. You got sandpaper scratches, maybe you got a little primer on there, right? It's ugly, but it's not there yet. It's in the process of being restored. The reason that you go through that whole process with the table, why you take legs off, why you pull bad nails, is because you are putting it back together. Many of us,

right, our lives are not something where we would just put it on display. Very few people put their real lives on display and it's because, right, we're self-conscious about the fact that we are in process, we are in the middle of our restoration. But let me just say, what is the Lord doing to restore you right now in your life? What area needs some extra chemical remover on it, right? What's one of those hard to get off spots for you? Are you pig-headed? Are you weak-willed? Are you insecure? Are you prideful? Do you love comfort more than you love the Lord in how you conduct your life? Whatever is going on, let me assure you, number one, you're not alone. We're all in the middle of it. And number two, if you're in Christ, that is part of your restoration process, is to struggle against those things. Maybe Maybe even some of you are thinking, well, hey, that's great, Drew, but that's a little

too late for me. I'm a little too far gone. Either I'm too old or I've done too many bad things, whatever the excuse is. That's exactly what it is. It's an excuse. My response, quite plainly, is that if Jesus has not taken you home, then you are in process. If Jesus were done with you and you are in Christ, He'll get you onto heaven. I'm not worried about that, but if the Holy Spirit of God is still speaking to you, if you are in Christ and you are alive, then the Holy Spirit is working on you, in you, through you, whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not. I want to encourage you, our church right now in the midst of a pandemic, it's tough for a church to do anything, but something that we have done is our life groups. And so our life groups have been great. Really all our life groups are is an attempt to embrace the restoration that God is doing

in your life. It's an attempt to do that and then help other people do that. You're embracing this ugly restoration. We're not just sitting here waiting for heaven, right? We're helping each other bind bullets. And so binding bullets for the restoration that's happening now means walking confidently, in Jesus' restoration. So that's for now, but what about the future restoration? What about when, when it happens in the future? What about something that we can't see yet? And this is the second approach that corresponds with that future restoration that we are, we can't see yet. And that is just to suffer well as you wait. To suffer well as you wait for Jesus' restoration. It is a giant comfort to know that the things that you suffer now will one day be put away. I imagine that the older that I get the more of a comfort that that will appear to me. Still, even today, you know, I'm relatively

young and in good health, right? It's still a comfort that hits home. When I suffer at the hands of another person I can just rest in the fact that there one day will be a just judgment when all things would be made right again when I suffer indignities when I am passed over when I am chided when I'm jeered I know that that one day my faith will be made sight one day I will be cleared of all charges, I will be shown that I was on the right side of history the whole time. And not because I'm great, but because Jesus is writing history. He knows which side to be on.

When I hurt physically, I mean just plain old aches of paint, I know that one day I will be be able to enter that rest. It is a great comfort to know. And it's a true, it's a real comfort to know that everything that I'm suffering now, every way that I'm suffering now, will be made right, will be worth it in the end. This is something that you and I can hang our hats on. Maybe for some of you, this is the first time you've heard any of that stuff. This is the first time you've heard any of it. You've never really understood, you know, maybe you thought the Old Testament or even the whole Bible was just full of God's judgment, but it's judgment then blessing, it's judgment then restoration. This judgment happens because God is making wrong things right again. He is bringing justice to situations that are unjust. However, in the midst of that, He invites us all to be restored in Him fully.

And if you want to be restored in him fully, we invite you to take that step. We have a connect card that you can fill out online. And whenever you fill that out, that'll be a way for us to be able to contact you and help you take whatever those next steps are. In the midst of a pandemic, when everything's a little crazy, everything's a little unsure, it is a great time to take stock of your life and to say, how have I been living? How's that been going for? What's next? I'm gonna encourage you, take God up on his plan of restoration. Let's pray. Jesus, we thank you for your restoration in us. We thank you that you will help us to know

that one day you're gonna make all things right and that right now and that you're now, you are healing us, you're restoring us in real time. Jesus, we love you and thank you, and it's in your name that we pray. Amen.