Dream Awakener

  craig in action 
  Originally uploaded by Kris Kros.

Ken Davis shares this interesting story.

"A woman happened to be looking out of the window of her home one day.  She was horrified to see her German shepherd shaking the life out of the neighbor’s rabbit.  Her family had been quarreling with these neighbors; this was certainly going to make matter worse.  She grabbed a broom and ran outside, pummeled the pooch until he dropped a rabbit, now covered with dog spit – and extremely dead.

After a moment’s consideration, the woman lifted the rabbit with the end of the broom ad brought it into the house.  She dumped its lifeless body into the bathtub and turned on the shower.  When the water running off the rabbit was clean, she rolled him over and rinsed the other side.

Now she had a plan.  She found her hairdryer and blew the rabbit dry.  Using an old comb, she groomed the rabbit until he looked pretty good.  Then, when the neighbor wasn’t looking, she hopped over the fence, snuck across the backyard, and propped him up in his cage.  No way she was taking the blame for this thing.

About an hour later, she heard screams coming from the neighbor’s yard.  She ran outside, pretending she didn’t know what was going on.

“What happened?” She asked innocently.  Her neighbor came running to the fence.  All the blood had drained from her face.

“Our rabbit, our rabbit!”  She blurbbed.  “He died two weeks ago, we buried him – and now he’s back!”

What manner of rabbit is this?  But it wasn’t really alive – just a fluffed up dead rabbit."

There’s a whole lot of people in our world who are desperate for hope, including people in churches, who fluff themselves up to look okay on the outside, but inside their hope has died.  But if you let your hope die, and you end up living kind of like a fluffed-up dead person. 

Paul’s hope was in God’s future – the glory to be revealed to us. His hope was in the redemption of all of the creation.  Paul says in Colossians 1:20 that “Christ came to reconcile all things to himself, whether things on earth or things in heaven.” The reason Paul continued on his mission to plant churches was because he had an unwavering hope that God the Father, Son and Spirit would bring the world towards its intended purpose through the church.  And let me say this, when we understand God’s intended purpose for the world, place our hope in God to bring it about, and then let God’s future shape the mission of the church, we will be able to endure hardship, setbacks and disappointments.

CONSIDERING MISSION IN LIGHT OF FUTURE
One of the things I appreciate about N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, is his appeal to the church to consider her mission in light of God’s future.   N.T. Wright basically looks at scripture like a five act play.   God has given us the first four acts and the last scene of the fifth act – God’s future.  And so we are called to immerse ourselves in God’s story so well, that we get to know the God of that story and live a life that is faithful to Him in the context in which we find ourselves – the fifth act. 

Then what he would say, is that if we understand the last scene of the final act – God’s intended purpose for us and all of creation, and let that future shape the churches mission, then we will have a really good chance of living lives that are faithful to God.  That is what I mean when I talk about a future-shaped mission.   One of the reasons that Paul never gave up, in spite of the setbacks and difficulties in the churches he planted, is because he always kept God’s future in his mind, and he let the promise of God’s future shape his ministry and his life. 

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE?
So what does that future look like?  Well we see here in Romans as well as the rest of the scripture, that the future God promised through the prophets, and the future that John the Revelator saw in Revelation was that of a renewed creation – where God makes all things new.  He doesn’t make all new things, but makes all things new.  In other words, God redeems the world, in N.T. Wrights words, “God does for the world what he did for Jesus at Easter – a re-embodiedment, a new vibrant life which does not decay or corrupt, a world in which justice and peace overflow like milk and honey in the promised land, where all of creation is renewed.”

So as we freshly grasp what God has promised in the final scene of the fifth act, and anticipate the future in the present, we can anticipate what God anticipates, have renewed hope, and thus have the ability to persevere in our calling. In the next post, we will see how this fleshes out  in our lives as a community of faith, by looking at some of the pictures we are given of our future hope.