The Lord says, “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be remembered or come into mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in that which I create; For b...
Pastor: And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains. God’s Children: We have come to worship God! Pastor:...
Call to Confession: The prophet asks the Lord’s people, “But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner's fire and like fullers' soap.” ...
Luke 24:1-12, Luke 15:11-32, Acts 7:54-60, John 21:15-19, Matthew 25:1-13, Revelation 22:12
Even as we eagerly await your return, Lord Jesus, we must confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart, with our entire mind, nor with all of our strength. We have loved our rituals and our...
Leader: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. All: And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of he...
1 Peter 5:8, Ephesians 6:10-11, Romans 12:11-12, Philippians 2:14-16, Hebrews 10:23, 1 Thessalonians 5:6, Matthew 25:1-4
Sisters and brothers, if the torch of your faith is lit right now, it might fizzle out within fifteen minutes of leaving here today. So refill the oil of your faith. Trim the charred ends away from yo...
Leader: Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, All: by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, t...
May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you grace and peace. Now you have every spiritual gift you need as you eagerly wait for the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will keep you strong t...
Having therefore, brothers, boldness to enter into the holy place by the blood of Jesus, by the way which he dedicated for us, a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh, and ha...
And having a high priest over the house of God; Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pur...
We may say that in the possession of the Spirit we who are in Christ have a foretaste of the blessings of the age to come, and a pledge and guarantee of the resurrection of the body. Yet we have only ...
Acts 1:9-11, 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17, Philippians 3:20-21, James 5:7-8, Revelation 22:20, Luke 21:27-28, Matthew 24:42-44
The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities awaiting Christ’s return. They gathered in Eucharist for, among other reasons, ...
[Faith] sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands. It sees in him the future of the very humanity for which he died. Tha...
All we could ever imagine, could ever hope for, He is... He is the Prince of Peace whose first coming has already transformed society but whose second coming will forever establish justice and righteo...
God is not going to abolish the universe of space, time and matter; he is going to renew it, to restore it, to fill it with new joy and purpose and delight, to take from it all that has corrupted it. ...
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (ex...
Ephesians 1:9-10, Romans 13:11-12, Matthew 13:39-43, Revelation 22:6-7, Luke 21:24-28, 1 Corinthians 10:11, Psalm 98:7-9
Early Christian writing has the ends of the world upon it, hence its emphasis on fulfillment, fullness of time: the shape of the world-plot can now be seen.
...left to ourselves we lapse into a kind of collusion with entrophy, acquiescing in the general belief that things may be getting worse but that there's nothing much we can do about them. And we ...
Revelation 21:1-4, John 14:2-3, Hebrews 13:14, Isaiah 65:17, 2 Peter 3:13, Philippians 3:20-21
In her book Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home, Jen Pollock Michel reflects on the nature of home in a transient age. In this short excerpt, Michel describes the central longing in both...
The church is constituted as a new people who have been gathered from the nations to remind the world that we are in fact one people. Gathering, therefore, is an eschatological act as it is the foreta...