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About Jesus - Steve (Stephen) Sweetman Certainty
In An Uncertain World As I write this article
in December 2024, it is difficult to imagine that 2025 is days away,
almost a quarter of a century after the big age-ending Y2K scare.
Okay, I admit to buying a generator in 1999 only to trade it in for
a new back and front door a few years later.
That being my confession, maybe you will agree with me that 2025
comes with many uncertainties in our insanely chaotic world. I'm
a realist. I am neither
depressed or hiding my head in the proverbial sand.
I accept Jesus' predictive promise found in John 16:33 that I am
sure was not in my mom's Bible promise box in the 1950's. "I
have told you these things, so that in
me you may have peace. In
this world
you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world." Just a few days before
Jesus was executed, He spoke to His disciples about their immediate
future. After Jesus told them
the world would probably hate them (John 15:18) He promised them trouble,
as you have just read. That
didn't exactly sound like the abundant life (John 10:10) He had previously
promised them. He then told
them to take heart because He has overcome the world.
Apparently overcoming the world doesn't end all of the troubles of
life as Peter discovered when he was arrested and imprisoned, as seen in
Acts 12:3. While Jesus was being
arrested in When the Holy Spirit
entered Peter's life as we read in Acts 2, he was elevated into a
spiritual dimension where he was seated right beside Jesus.
The apostle Paul wrote to us about this new seating arrangement for
Christians in Ephesians 2:6. Peter
could now view the troubled uncertainties of life on earth from a brand
new heavenly perspective. He
could finally take it all to heart, having a new heart of hope which is
not like the uncertain hope of winning a lottery.
It's a heavenly heart-felt hope, a certain expectation of a future
eternal reality in the midst of an uncertain world. We are never free from
troubles and uncertainty in our entropic, decay leading to death world,
and it only gets worse as we age. When
I view, then, all of the current cultural and political insanity in Canada
and the United States these days from my heavenly perspective, I am at
peace in Jesus, despite the fact that I shake my head at the stupidity I
see on earth.
If like Peter, you have
God's Spirit within you, then you have been elevated to the same spiritual
dimension as was Peter. You,
in the spiritual sense of the word, sit beside Jesus in the heavenly
world. You can view all of the
earthly troubles from a heavenly perspective which makes it easier to take
it all to heart. You have
peace in Jesus, a certain hopeful expectation of an eternal reality as you
approach an uncertain world in 2025.
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