Thoughts After the Sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan for Eternity to Come” Romans 8:18-30

Thoughts After the Sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan for Eternity to Come” Romans 8:18-30

by Vermon Pierre, Lead Pastor

Some reminders and further thoughts from last Sunday’s sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan for Eternity to Come” Romans 8:18-30:

1. All creation is looking forward to and depending on the adoption of Christian believers as sons of God. All the renewing glory that our world is meant to experience will come in the wake of God fully completing his plan to adopt us into his family.

2. The Holy Spirit will help us along the way to that final reality. The Holy Spirit has been given to us to encourage, motivate, remind, and even pray for us as we travel towards eternity. Prayer is an especially important way the Spirit helps us, since prayer helps us to address and overcome the anxieties of life we must face before we reach the end of our journey (Philippians 4:6-7).

3. God himself serves as the guarantee that we will reach the end of the journey and live forever with our Father God in a renewed cosmos. God choose us for himself since the beginning of time, intending to adopt us and make us like Jesus. This is God’s plan. He has ensured this plan and he will most certainly complete his plan.

Thoughts After the Sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan from Eternity Past” Ephesians 1:3-6

Thoughts After the Sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan from Eternity Past” Ephesians 1:3-6

by Vermon Pierre, Lead Pastor

Some reminders and further thoughts from last Sunday’s sermon, “God’s Adoption Plan from Eternity Past” (Ephesians 1:3-6):

1. God chose you to be his son. Always guard your heart against apathy or indifference about that statement. Before there was anything, before there was even time, God set his heart and mind on the believer, determining to graciously love us to the point of death and sacrifice. He was willing to risk the perfection within himself so that we might join him in his perfection.

2. God loved us in spite of ourselves. You could say that God had the file on us beforehand. He knew how naturally disobedient and destructive we were. He knew how totally opposite were from him, preferring selfishness, ugliness, greed, and lust instead of his grace, beauty, righteousness and love. God knew all of this – and still he decided to adopt us.

3. Being in Christ means that believers have a fundamentally new identity. “In Christ” is our last name now, and will be our last name forever. This identity gives meaning and purpose to every experience of life. Those who have “weak” identities in our city (like for example the poor, the immigrant, the orphan, the single parent) have an identity that will never perish or fade, an identity imbued with all the forever blessings that are possible in this universe.

4. Being adopted by God means we now act like our God and our new Father. God choose us for himself so that we might be like him, “holy and blameless.” Certainly one example of how God acts is in how he  loved us with a gracious, predestinating love. In what ways are you choosing to graciously love people, whoever they are, or even in spite of who they are?

5. From Henry Alford, “The end, God’s end, in our predestination to adoption, is, that the glory,—glorious nature, brightness and majesty, and kindliness and beauty,—of His grace might be an object of men and angels’ praise: both as it is in Him, ineffable and infinite,—and exemplified in us, its objects.”

Thoughts After the Sermon, "What Do You Really Want?" Exodus 20:17

Thoughts After the Sermon, “What Do You Really Want?” Exodus 20:17

by Vermon Pierre, Lead Pastor

Some reminders and further thoughts from last Sunday’s sermon, “What Do You Really Want?” (Exodus 20:17):

1. Desires are normal. Desires are good. The problem comes when normal good desires become obsessive desperate craving desires. These are the kind of desires that enslave us. They lead us to spending lots of time desperately trying to attain things, people, status . And the sad truth is that what we are seeking after is not really worth seeking after in the first place! We go after things that aren’t worth what we think they are worth. And even when we attain them, we soon find ourselves with new yearnings for something more and better than what we just attained.

2. God ransoms us from the slavery of our desires through Jesus Christ. And now in Christ, we are given new and better desires. Desires for things that will last forever! We stop running the race of this world, filled with cheap pathetic prizes, and instead run the race of the kingdom of heaven, where the prizes are things like an unfading crown of glory, a powerful glorious imperishable body, and a home forever with God.

3.Desiring  after God’s eternal kingdom gives the motivation to want the best for other people. We now see each relationship as potentially being an eternal relationship through Jesus Christ. So we won’t covet what our neighbor has but rather desire God’s eternal best for our neighbor.

4. Desiring after God’s kingdom serves as the constant reminder we need to be content with what we have right now. See for example 1 Timothy 6:10-12 and Hebrews 13:5-6. Grabbing hold of and cherishing the eternal life we will have and indeed already have with God through Christ is what will help us be content during the short human life we are living right now, no matter if we have a lot or a little during that life.

5. As always, it’s ultimately all about having Jesus. In a real sense, what we must do is appreciate that we have all we need already in Jesus. What we need to do is continue holding on to him and see how he meets every need, want, and desire that should come as time goes on if we keep holding on to him. The Psalmist puts it well for us, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God [i.e. our Lord Jesus] is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” (Psalm 73:25-26)

6. From D.A. Carson’s devotional book, For the Love of God:

“Christians make their evaluations in the light of eternity. ‘The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever’ (1 John 2:17). Pity the person whose self-identity and hope rest on transient things. Ten billion years into eternity, it will seem a little daft to puff yourself up over the car you now drive, the amount of money or education you have received, the number of books you owned, the number of times you had your name in the headlines. Whether or not you have won an Academy Award will then prove less important than whether or not you have been true to your spouse. Whether or not you were a basketball star will be less significant than how much of your wealth you generously gave away. The one “who does the will of God lives forever” (1 John 2:17).