Restoration | Abe Cho
No longer will violence be heard in your land,
nor ruin or destruction within your borders,
but you will call your walls Salvation
and your gates Praise.
The sun will no more be your light by day,
nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you,
for the Lord will be your everlasting light,
and your God will be your glory.
— Isaiah 60:18-19
Close your eyes and imagine for a minute. What do you picture when you think about the Kingdom of God?
What do you see? Buildings, structures? How about nature…do you picture trees, waterfalls, rainbows, animals, or grass?
Come back to this email after you’ve imagined for a minute or two (or many more – don’t let us stop you!).
imagination intermission
We walked through creation, fall, and redemption. We’ve now reached the concluding part of the four-part Biblical Narrative, and this is the part that requires some serious imagination. It requires imagination because we’ve experienced God’s restoration, but there is more to come.
Many use this phrase to sum up where we are: the already-but-not-yet.
God has already restored so much. AND he is in the process of making all things new. Of changing everything. And this is kind of a weird place to be.
Thankfully, God has some co-creators, image bearers to help him with this restorative work.
(Us!)
We are called to join in God’s restorative work through our vocation, our relationships, our actions, and our habits.
And this is where our imaginations come into play. What can we do to help God bring restoration to the world? Where is He calling us to go? What is He calling us to do?
We say “us” because it is communal. At Jubilee 2024, Abe Cho took time to spur on our imaginations of what the Kingdom of God looks like. And he reminded us that it is work we do together:
“The New Jerusalem will never become what it's meant to become until we all bring our cultures and the beauty and the wealth of our cultures into this great City."
Restoration | God says, "Join me."
At Jubilee 2024, pastor Abe Cho set out with a goal to spur our imaginations and outline the three aspects of the Great City, the new Jerusalem: material, cultured, and converted.
We'll conclude with this prayer from Abe:
“Lord capture our imagination, show us the beauty that you're up to, and show us the greatest beauty, which was the price that Jesus paid. It's easy to just destroy something that has gone wrong. It's costly to redeem it, and you paid that price even to redeem us when we wanted nothing to do with you. Teach us the Rhythm so that no matter where you send us back to, we would go there dancing to a distant drum, the soul-saving music of Eternity. We pray in Jesus name, Amen.“