Waiting For Restoration

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

I had a wonderful finish to my week. I got a chance to travel down and visit with my brother. And then Friday morning got up and drove up to Burlington, Vermont. Had a great meeting with one of my clients and picked up my second oldest daughter, Nora. Drove back through the Adirondacks, landing in Syracuse.

My oldest daughter Ella returned home. Other kids are all together. Just really wonderful. Some of those moments that remind you that the world we live in is good and beautiful and filled with love and awe and wonder. And that's what God tells us creation is meant to be. That that fullness is supposed to be existing all the time.

The challenge is we also live in a world that is filled with brokenness and sin and evil and injustice. And so those two worlds exist together right now. We're in the midst of the season of Advent and what Advent is all about is seeing that what God has done in the person of Christ is a promise, is an inauguration of the future This future in which the evil and the sin and the injustice and the brokenness is done away with forever.

And the restored world, one that is filled with joy and goodness and beauty, reigns forever. Today we're going to look at a passage in Isaiah, and it's a passage that Jesus reads at the beginning of His ministry. It's the way He announces His arrival. And the passage is all about restoration. And this is what we wait for.

This is the question we've been asking. What are we waiting for? Both as a question as well as a statement with an exclamation. Like, hey, let's get after this. And Advent teaches that what we're waiting for is God's restoration of all things. But what are we waiting for? Like, hey, let's get out there and live with a sense of anticipation towards this restoration.

And the passage that Jesus reads from Isaiah 61 talks about how that God will come and will heal the brokenhearted, will set free the captives, will be good news to the poor and the oppressed. And so what we see is that God promises to bring restoration to people. And that's good news because you and I, we know that the world is not right.

We have experienced broken hearts ourselves. In the midst of loss of relationship, loss of job, loss of loved ones. These things, they rattle around inside of us. And so we have this sense of broken heartedness. And God says that he's going to come and restore the broken hearted.

Our world is a world that's filled with injustice. That has people who are oppressed and captive. And God's going to set all of those things right. That's what we're waiting for. We're waiting for God's restoration. But it's people who believe that in Jesus life, death, and resurrection, that that promise of future restoration that is coming, the fulfillment of it, that that has already begun.

It's already breaking into our lives today. And so the church is to be a people who restore people, or to carry and pick up God's work. So we too are to be people who restore people.

How do we do that? Well, we bring restoration in a variety of ways. I love the song by Noah Kahn, Young Bloods, and in the midst of it, one of the lines is this, is that at night he goes home and tries to re- stitch the loose threads of his soul.

And that's what the church is to be. The church is to be a community of people who help re- stitch. Stitch the loose threads in people's souls. We do that in a variety of ways. We do that by caring for one another. As we like to say around here, we travel through the messiness of life together. We travel through death and brokenness and sadness, but we offer up restoration in that we don't let anybody go through that alone.

Through our local partners, we care for those in need, those who have experienced oppression and feel held captive, that we come alongside them and offer them food and support and shelter.

And so the future restoration that we're waiting for is the restoration of people. And the way we live now is in anticipation of that. Being people who restore people through relationship, through, through kindness, through care.

And so my encouragement to you is to connect to the ways that you've experienced restoration. And then go and do likewise, bring restoration to others. The second thing that we see in Isaiah that God promises to bring is restoration to the physical place. See, the nation of Israel has been in captivity to Babylon, and they're going to return, and in their return they're going to rebuild the temple.

They're going to rebuild the city, they're going to rebuild those things that are in ruin. And what we see is that God's promise of restoration is not just a spiritual promise, but it's a promise of a restoration of the physical world. And that's great news because the physical world we live in is filled with wonder and beauty and we're reminded that the physical matters.

God shows up in the person of Christ because the physical matters. And so we should care about the physical too. And so as people who wait this future restoration, we seek it now by being a people who seek to engage the physical world all around us. I love it when I see in Syracuse a company that takes a building, buys it, and makes it their headquarters, breathing life back into the city.

I'm excited about the I81 project where they're going to take that out of the city. Because physical place matters and that divides up a community. See, restoring the physical world around us is holy work. So we should be a people who are looking for ways to restore the physical world around us. In our church, in our neighborhood, in our workplace, in our cities.

Because we're a people who believe that the physical is good. And that God will bring restoration to it. So God is bringing restoration to people, to physical place.

And the last part of Isaiah, in this little section, he talks about restoring joy. I love that. He says that the joy will be restored, that oil will run down people's beards.

Makes me think of a donut shop in New Hampshire that I visit, and they're fresh, and when you bite into them, the oil sort of drips. And there's just a sense of joy that comes with that. We're waiting for that full joy to be restored. When there's no more evil, there's no more death, there's no more sin, there's no more brokenness, there's no more injustice.

We'll be able to really rejoice in it. But it also teaches us that we are to be a people of joy. Because of the hope we have, because of the love we've experienced in Christ, we are to be a people who celebrate. I think sometimes we're not really great at this, that we sort of stay in this place of either grumpiness or responsibility.

We don't let ourselves go and rejoice in the good world around us. But joy is the emotion of restoration.

As a kid, we would always watch The Christmas Carol with Ebenezer Scrooge and George C. Scott as the main character. And at the end of the movie, you see him overcome with joy because he's been restored. His life is not over. He has another shot. And so he lives with a spirit of generosity and a spirit in which he just rejoices in the wonder of the world all around. And so that's a lesson to us, that in the midst of this Christmas season, that we would find those things and we would rejoice. We would rejoice in the future to come, but we would rejoice in the future that is breaking in now, the things of joy that are all around us.

While it's true that you and I have loose threads in our soul, God promises to bring restoration to the whole world, to the people in it, to the physical creation, and to take our sadness and restore happiness and joy. So what are we waiting for? Let's go live as people who bring restoration to this world.

Hope you have a great week. I look forward to celebrating Christmas Eve with you this coming Sunday. Go in peace. Have a great week.