Waking up in Advent

What will heaven be like?

Actually, this is the wrong question. The Bible speaks of Jesus returning to this world and of there being a New Heaven and a New Earth.

Wer should ask: What will eternal life be like? For Jesus arose from the grave in this world. It is this world that God is making new.

The question is: what will this world be like after God has made all things new?

At the heart of the answer is Easter Day. We can think about what Jesus was like after he rose from the dead. He is the first fruit of eternity.

He was very much alive! No whispy clouds and angels playing harps. Rather, he enjoyed a bar-B-Q by the lakeside (John 21).

The Bible sometime speaks of being awake, waiting for Christ. Perhaps we could say that this world at best is like a dream. Sometimes a very pleasant dream, sometimes a nightmare. But one day we shall be fully awake, when Jesus returns and makes all things new. This world will seem like a dream. Then it will be solid, more real!

With no more pain, or suffering, or death.

What is your greatest dream for life? Eternal life, God's eternity will be even better than that!

Advent is when we wait, wait for Christ's coming. This Advent, let's through prayer and reading the scriptures, ask God to wake us up that bit more, so we are ready for Jesus' coming, when we wil be goggle-eyed awake!

The Future's Orange - no longer

Very struck by the mailing from the London Institute of Contemporary Christianity (LICC) about the new Orange ad. The mailing is entitled Who Are You? Incidentally, their regular mailings are excellent - visit http://www.licc.org.uk

The optimistic mantra that began, ‘The future’s bright, the future’s …’ has been ditched. In the biggest global advertising campaign ever launched, Orange have introduced their new litany: ‘I am who I am because of everyone.’ It’s playing on a TV near you.

For sixty seconds, the camera pans over a range of people, a disembodied voice explaining, ‘I am my mum, and my sister. I am my best friend, Mike, who I’ve known since school’ and so on. Backed by a chilled, trance-like music track, it works. It doesn’t scream the product it’s selling, it merely gives off a vibe that emphasises how important communication is.

We are surrounded by competing voices trying to shape us, not least, ironically, the advertising world. This world is the funfair mirror of our culture, taking our desires, our aspirations, and our beliefs and slightly distorting them before reflecting them back to us. The apostle Paul’s urgent plea not to be conformed to the world (Romans 12:2) continues to be relevant to all of us; if we are not on our guard, we will find ourselves unwittingly moulded by the loudest voices, the most insistent personalities, and the most forceful events.

This week Alexander Solzhenitsyn died. His writing, courage, and independence have been praised. During the time of the Cold War, he was the darling of the West – the writer who unveiled the inhumanity of the communist system in Russia. When the Politburo could no longer stomach him, they deported him. It was a shock, therefore, when in 1979, delivering a speech at the bastion of Western liberalism, Harvard University, he placed both communism and Western capitalism on the same level: morally bankrupt, because of their insistence on living without reference to God.

Prophets are never easy to live with. They seem to enjoy flying in the face of received opinion. They rarely present their words against a chilled, trance-like soundtrack. They are what they are because of others around them, and because of what they obediently allow God to say and do through them.

We are all being shaped, all being discipled. It’s just a question of who is doing that shaping. We need to assemble the different shaping voices into a proper, biblical order of significance, so that we, in our time, can accurately ‘hear what the Spirit says to the churches’ (Revelation 2:7).

Neil Hudson