Dear Friends,
It has been a strange season in the life of First Presbyterian Church. Over the last week or so, there have been glorious highpoints and sweet seasons of grace, and there have been times of deep sorrow and grief. We’ve had the joy of Easter Sunday, where, amidst a packed sanctuary, we celebrated the resurrection of our Lord from the grave. This week we will gather a group of around 200 pastors from around the country and around the world for our annual Twin Lakes Fellowship. The Fellowship is always a season of deep encouragement and spiritual growth as dear friends in ministry reconnect, and sing and pray and sit under the Word, and laugh and cry together about the challenges of gospel work. I always leave refreshed and reinvigorated for the task of ministry. So, let me take this opportunity to say thank you, First Presbyterian Church, for your love for pastors and your ministry to them, and through them to so many churches and lives around the country. Our impact for the kingdom is greatly multiplied because of your generosity in making Twin Lakes Fellowship happen. Bracketing the week will be another great joy for us in the preaching of John Blanchard. Well known and beloved in our congregation, John is an international apologist, evangelist, and author, and will be with us this coming Lord’s Day morning to open God’s Word in our worship service. Please pray for John’s ministry and for those who hear that many will pass from death to life at the sound of the good news!
On the other hand, we have had bereavements in the extended families of several of our church members, and the tragic death of Andrew Dickie, whose home-going we marked with a memorial service this past Monday. We have members wrestling with chronic sickness and others with sudden immediate medical and emotional needs. Some live in family circumstances that are less obviously but no less profoundly painful, with loved ones who do not know Jesus, others who are locked in cycles of addiction and still others struggling with deep temptations and patterns that dishonor God and enslave them.
All this has led me to reflect again on the fact that we are dwellers in “the age between.” We live, as the theologians like to say, in the gap between “the now” and “the not yet.” Two ages overlap and as Christians we exist as citizens of both. There is this present age that is passing away. It is marked by our ongoing struggle with sin. We battle with temptation and trials, sickness and sorrow and death; a world of dysfunction where relationships break down and tragedies happen. And yet we are also citizens of another realm—the age inaugurated by the life and death, and especially the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
Jewish expectation at the time of Christ was that a general resurrection would occur at Judgment Day at the end of history. But in Jesus, resurrection burst in, right into the middle of the age we now inhabit, long before resurrection was expected or looked for. Jesus brought the world to come, the world of resurrection life, into the middle of the world of sin and sorrow and sickness and death. And in the wake of his resurrection, we who believe in him already enjoy the life of the world to come, the indwelling of the Spirit, the enabling of grace to help us face down the trials and tragedies of our daily existence with perseverance and joy. The fullness of the world to come is still “not yet,” the new heavens and the new earth, the home of righteousness promised to us, remains in the future, but we have in the resurrection of Jesus and the giving of the Spirit some of its reality “now.” We live in the overlap of the ages.
And that means that this bittersweet season in our congregational life, this season of sorrow and celebration, is not so very unusual after all. It’s the way things are for children of God who are saved by grace and indwelt by the Spirit. We enjoy great blessings—real foretastes of heaven already—here, in the fellowship of the church. But we enjoy them while limping, don’t we? We enjoy them as encouragements to keep going, reminders that there is better still to come. Let’s work to harness our sorrows and struggles as reminders that we are bound for another world and this isn’t our home. And let’s use our joys to remember that glory waits round the next bend in the road, just over the next horizon, that the blessings we glimpse here are really only foretastes of the blessings we will enjoy hereafter. And let us press on!
Your pastor,
David Strain