Real Hope Community Church

Ezekiel 36.26-28 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove your stony heart from your body and replace it with a living one, and I will give you my spirit so that you may walk according to my regulations and carefully observe my case laws. Then you will live in the land that I gave to your ancestors, you will be my people, and I will be your God.

This, of course, is a promise to the Israelites. But as we continue to talk about transformation, we understand that this future promise is for everyone who would like this kind of heart surgery. Our hearts can get stony, gravelly, because they're tired, broken, and yes, sometimes very, very selfish. God promises to replace that brokenness with life. That's what the transformation of the resurrection is all about. We will not live in a certain land, obviously. But we will live in that in between place between heaven and earth, and God promises to be our God. That's a big promise.

You want some joy today? Just watched this video. It's also may be a challenge, but it's very much joy. As a pastor who is also an amateur entomologist, I love this so much. https://www.ted.com/talks/jaime_rojo_the_magical_mesmerizing_migration_of_monarch_butterflies

The magical, mesmerizing migration of monarch butterflies When monarch butterflies migrate, they produce one of the most iconic wildlife spectacles in the world — and provide us with an important indicator of ecological health, says photographer Jaime Rojo. Telling a story about our relationship to the natural world, he shares his experience photographin...

If anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived!

In the new creation, God promises the things we have only imagined. God promised peace, reconciliation, equality, justice, generosity, and more. God promises that we can have our hearts changed so that we are partners – joyful partners –in bringing this about. The old things have gone away, whatever they were that were holding us back from being the kind of people we actually want to be. (There's nothing holding us back from being the kind of person we want to be if we want to be a terrible person too, but very few of us really want that.) Few of us want that because God says that eternity has been placed in our hearts, and we know deep in our souls what is good. And Jesus says, if we turn to him, we can be partners in that good. We can be new creations.The new creation, by the way, is happening now, not in heaven later. Right. Now. Right. Here.