All Things Will Be Made New Resolution | Prepare The Way

Sermon Transcript:

(transcribed with AI)

Well, good morning all, and thank you for joining me here on the last Sunday of 2025. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Tyler Schultz. I am one of the elders up here at Promontory, and today it is my privilege to be able to study God's word with you. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. Mine was wonderful as we got to spend a lot of time together with family. Many of them are here this morning.

But now it's December 28th. And if you're like many people, you're moving past that, and starting to look at your New Year's resolutions. And with that comes doing the rough calculations and checking the calendar to figure out how long you made it with those resolutions last year before you caved. And then figure out how long you need to keep them this year to get to a new record.

And there's lots of common New Year's resolutions, some are health related. Maybe eating better, maybe exercising more or losing weight. Or maybe it's getting finances in order, paying off debt, planning for retirement. Or it could be working on something personal. Some personal growth like learning a new skill, or spending more time with your family, or committing to read through the Bible in a year, which is a good one.

But despite the best of intentions, it's estimated that about 50% of New Year's resolutions don't make it through 2 weeks of the New Year. 2/3 of them are over by the 3rd week of the year, and only about 20% of New Year's resolutions actually even make it into February. Those aren't great odds, but hopefully today can help shape some of the resolutions in your life, and you might be able to stick with them.

But today is not a message about plans that we are making. But rather we want to focus on a resolution that was made for us, and a revelation that was given to us, in which we can be 100% confident of it coming to fruition.

So if you have your Bibles with you this morning, please open with me to the Gospel of John, chapter 14, starting in verse 1. Or read along on the screen behind me here, and it's our tradition to stand for the reading of God's word, so if you're able, please rise. These are the words of Jesus.

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. In my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.

Thus far the reading of God's word, please be seated.

So the season of Advent and Christmas often come with a sermon series focusing on the prophecies and the events surrounding the birth of Jesus. But over the last month, we've been looking back at prophets who pointed both to the first coming of Jesus and his birth, but also to those who were paving the way for his ministry as an adult here on earth.

Through the prophet Isaiah 700 years before Jesus' arrival, God revealed to his people that there was going to be a savior coming. He also revealed that there was going to be a messenger coming in front of him, preparing the way. So for hundreds of years, while the people waited. They had to keep looking back at these promises of God in anticipation of what was coming.

But time went by, and time went by, and more time went by, and eventually you get to the prophet Malachi. And through him, God reiterates his promise. A savior is coming, and there will be a messenger coming ahead of him to show us the way. But again then, there's a period of 400 years of silence.

But after this period of silence, Zechariah, a priest in the temple, is visited by an angel. He has promised a child, and at the birth of his son, he is given a prophecy that his boy would be the front runner to the Messiah's ministry. And it was Zechariah's son, John the Baptist, who was prophesized about both hundreds of years earlier and by his own father, who was the fulfillment of

the voice of one crying out in the desert, Make straight in the desert, a highway for our God.

It wasn't necessarily the typical lead up to Christmas in a sermon series, but all part of our focus as a church for preparing the way. So on Christmas Eve, we celebrated the Christmas story. Finally, the birth of Jesus has arrived. The Messiah, the promised savior, is here.

Imagine, after hundreds of years of waiting, this is now fulfilled. It must have been hard for the people of Israel to hold fast to their faith. Knowing what the prophets have said, but having to keep on waiting. Keep on wondering, when, when is this gonna happen? When will this savior finally come? And then it happens, just as promised.

Well, in some ways, we don't have to imagine some of what the people were going through, because we actually find ourselves right now, in the midst of waiting for something else. Except we get to do it with the added benefit of hindsight.

You see, it can be easy to look through situations in the Bible and just think, oh, come on, that's so obvious. To some when they saw Jesus' birth, it was obviously the fulfillment of prophecy. To some when they saw Jesus' ministry and miracles, it was obviously a demonstration that he was God. Who he was may seem obvious, but certainly more so in hindsight. But to others who were there, people who knew the same prophecies, saw the same miracles, heard the same messages from Jesus' own lips, they didn't recognize him for who he was.

And that's also similar to what we go through today. Most of the people on Earth do have access to the Bible. And they can read the same things that we can. But for those who call themselves Christians, we have not only heard the gospel message, but also been changed by seeing the fulfillment of the promises of God. We recognize the importance of Jesus' death and resurrection, as well as looking forward to something new that has been promised to us.

So in our series now, we're past Christmas. We're past the announcements of Jesus' ministry, and we're taking a leap way ahead to the end of his time on this earth. We're switching gears from preparing the way for his first coming, the one we've already seen. To looking ahead to his 2nd coming. The promise we now find ourselves waiting on.

This morning we're looking into a situation on the eve of his crucifixion. Jesus knows that his time is now coming to an end. And he's having a conversation with his disciples that takes place during the Last Supper. Now, the disciples. They don't know that almost everybody who's reading this, that comes after them, is going to refer to it as the Last Supper. As far as they knew, they were just gathered for another Passover meal.

But Jesus had been trying to tell them, though it not seeming obvious to them, that to fulfill all of the prophecies about the Messiah. He must be crucified and die, and then be raised again back to life. That is what he was here for. That is what was coming. But the disciples with him still don't at that point seem to grasp what lay ahead.

You see, when the disciples first encountered Jesus, they responded to the call that he put on their lives. When he told them to drop everything and follow him, they did. They saw the many miracles that he performed. So many in fact that John later would write.

Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

So they heard the sermons, they heard the declarations, and they had the one on one interactions with Jesus. They've dedicated the last 3 years of their lives to following him around. And now they're in a room in a house and celebrating the Passover with him.

But let's take a look at what has happened in the last 5 minutes of this meal. If we back up into John chapter 13, we read that Jesus has first told the group that one of them is gonna betray him. And then he goes as far as to identify that it's going to be Judas. Judas then gets up and leaves, yet somehow, the reason for his departure still seemed unclear to some of the other disciples.

Second, Jesus questions Peter's loyalty and tells him that he's going to deny him 3 times before the next morning arrives. And thirdly, they are given some of the worst news that the disciples could possibly hear. Jesus tells them that he is leaving them and going to a place that they cannot come.

Confusion, fear, anxiety, sorrow, all of these things must have filled the room at that point. But it's in this moment, Jesus is facing a situation where he knows he's going to the cross. He is about to face one of the most unimaginable things in the world. He is probably the one who needs to be comforted by his friends in this moment, but despite knowing this, his concern is instead for them. He recognizes that they actually need his support, both emotionally and spiritually.

As he says to them in John 14:1,

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God Believe in me also.

In other words, take comfort. Be comforted by this, since you believe in God, since you have placed your trust and your faith in him, and since you have seen all that I have done and heard all that I have said. Know that you can also trust and believe in me. Trust in what I am telling you, he says to them.

Jesus doesn't downplay their concerns, or pretend that what they are experiencing isn't real. Rather, he provides comfort to them in that moment. And if we look back a couple of weeks to the words we read in the book of Isaiah, we see a common theme here, as that passage starts with

comfort, comfort my people, says the Lord.

And then it later says,

the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

And at the time that was written. Life would have been very difficult for those people, and they would have been facing immense challenges, but all along the way, God was comforting them. New prophets arose, reminding them over and over again of the same promises. The glory of the Lord will be revealed. And then it was, Jesus was born in Bethlehem for all the world to see, a comfort for all.

But now the disciples need to come to grips with the fact that their comfort, their leader, the Messiah that they were waiting for, is about to go away. And they need to be reassured. Just like us, in our lives, we are going to face situations that seem daunting. That challenge us, that can test our faith and test our trust in God. But we can be confident that God is still our comfort. We know this because of what we read in our Bibles, and how we see God at work in our lives. And in the promises of what is still to come.

The words Jesus spoke to them then can still comfort us now, no matter what we're going through. And then he moves on. You see, earlier in the conversation, Jesus had been talking to them about going away to somewhere that they could not follow. But now he takes it one step further with a promise. He skips over everything that he's about to go through and starts talking about what's going to come after that. Yes, he needed to come to the earth, yes, he needed to go to the cross. Yes, he needed to do that in order to reconcile us to God. And he could have mentioned that here, but what he wants them to know is that regardless of where he goes, he will return. He will come again to us to fulfill God's plan to be together.

In verses 2 and 3, he says,

In my father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.

On its own, these verses may seem like just another comfort measure. Can we be confident that Jesus is going ahead of us to heaven, to prepare a place for us and will come back again to us one day? Absolutely. But this imagery in particular, would have made much more sense and had more meaning in the cultural context of the day. Both to the disciples and to the people reading John's Gospel.

This description of going away to a father's house to prepare a place paints a picture of a wedding. In the Jewish culture, weddings were arranged as a contract where the family of the groom would make a proposal to the family of the prospective bride, and if everyone was agreeable, then the groom would have to go away to prepare a place for them to live. This often would have been a part of, or an addition to his family home.

And then once the new edition is ready, and the wedding preparations have been approved by the groom's father, only then could the groom go back for his bride, and the actual marriage ceremony could take place. You see, people would know that the groom would be working on this, working on the room, working on the addition, working on the house, but it wasn't until the place at the new home was complete that he would even be able to come back. And even then, it might not be immediately afterwards. Once the preparations were all in order, everyone would enter into this waiting phase. Where they would expect the groom to return for the bride and they would have the wedding, but there was no certainty of how much time would pass. Everyone just needed to be ready.

And that's the picture that Jesus has given to the disciples. That's where we find ourselves today. The contract is in place. It was signed, sealed, and delivered when Jesus went to the cross. He paid the price for our sins, and he has been raised from the dead and now gone away into heaven. Jesus the groom has gone to his father's house with the promise of,

I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am, you may be also.

He's going to come back to take his bride, the church, us, to heaven with him. To be in the very presence of God.

And after Jesus' resurrection, then moving ahead. He is together again with the disciples. And we're looking into the book of Acts, chapter 1 and verse 6 and 7, they now ask him,

Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?

And he said to them,

it is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.

Now that once again could have been quite discouraging for the disciples who were with him. You see, while they were alive with him, while Jesus was alive and they were with him, he first says, I'm going to a place you cannot follow. Then he revises it, he says, I'm going to a place that I'm going to prepare for you. But here finally, they ask him point blank, is now the time? And he responds with, it is not for you to know the times that the Father has fixed, and so they wait.

But while we don't get to know when he will return, we don't have to wait long after this before we're given a glimpse of what the return will look like. We are given something else to be hopeful in. First, that Jesus has given us hope in what he's already done for us. Having died for our sins and then coming back to life, but it doesn't just end there. We are also given a hope in his second coming, which is briefly described to us in a few different places.

In Acts 1, verse 10 and 11, right after the disciples are told that it is not for them to know the time of his return, we read.

And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who is taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.

And again in 1 Thessalonians 4:16. We read,

for the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command. With the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words.

And finally, in 1 Corinthians 15:52.

In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

See, when Jesus was born, angels appeared to the shepherds in the fields, and a star appeared to the wise men, for them to follow. A select few were made aware of this. But throughout his life, many, many more people had encounters with Jesus, and their lives were transformed. And others who came after him, studied and researched his life, and realized that it was Jesus who fulfilled hundreds of prophecies, proving that he was this long-awaited Messiah. And they wrote it all down for us.

All these stories, all of these confirmations, everything in our Bible is written by people who are inspired by God to record their firsthand experiences and research knowledge for anyone who chooses to read it.

But upon his second coming, Everyone is going to experience it firsthand. Whether they choose to or not. Revelation 1:7 says,

behold, he is coming with the clouds. And every eye will see him.

There will be no doubt. There will not be a trend going around social media saying hashtag did anyone else hear that trumpet? It's going to be clear though, Jesus is going to descend from heaven to gather up those who have believed. And those who do believe in Him. Both people that have passed away and those who are still alive. It will be deeply personal for all those who know him, as he has said,

I am coming to take you to myself.

Friends, I don't know if there's anything better to put our hope in. What will heaven be like exactly, we're not sure. Streets of gold, pearly gates, it won't matter because we will all be together with God, the creator of the universe. And in our Father's house, there are going to be many rooms, meaning room for all of those who place their trust in Jesus. We can be confident of that. He doesn't say there will only be room for a few, or only room for those who earn it, but there will be room for all who believe.

We worship a God who has a plan to reunite us with him in his house. A plan that has been in place since man first fell away from him in the Garden of Eden. But we will be together again in his presence.

But right now we're in this waiting period, waiting patiently, waiting hopefully, anticipating what's gonna come. We're smack dab in the middle of these two phrases Jesus speaks of, if I go and prepare a place for you. And I will come again and take it to myself.

But this time of waiting, it's not meant to be a passive time, rather, it's meant to shape how we live our lives. Sometimes it can feel like the Bible might just be an old book of stories, something that happened long ago and is no longer relevant. But it's a book with the living word of God. And while nothing new can be added to it, we are no less a part of the story. We fit right into it there, in Jesus' own words, and we are called to be active in this.

So in the final part of today's passage, John 4:14, Jesus says to the disciples after this, he says,

And you know The way to where I am going.

And I love this because he says that it's a statement. He doesn't say that as a question. I imagine he's looking around the room right now, like, come on guys, show me you know the way. Remember earlier when I said that is, I am when I said that I and the Father are one. Or how about when I said, whoever believes in me, believes not in me, but also in Him who sent me. For 3 years I've been showing you, teaching you. Does anyone know? Please give me a nod.

But no, His declaration right after that. Is that they don't know where he's going. In verse 5, Thomas says,

Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?

To which Jesus replies,

I am the way. And the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

As they are having this conversation, he emphatically confirms to the disciples that he is the only way to God.

But then he's taken from them. He dies, panic sets in. But then suddenly he's back, risen from the dead 3 days later. And this very well may have been what the disciples thought he was referencing when he said he was going to go away somewhere they could not follow and then come back to them. But as we looked at earlier, that's not it. His appearance to the disciples after his resurrection is just another part of the preparation process.

After his resurrection, Jesus spends another 40 days with them, continuing to explain how it was in fact him that all of the prophecies were about, and how he fulfilled them all. And then he makes it clear for us, while we do not know the day or the hour of his return, we are given a task until he does return. Which is the great commission in Matthew 28 in which we've put up on our banner here.

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I'm with you always to the end of the age.

So yes, we are in this time of waiting, and we can be waiting confidently. Jesus has gone away to prepare a place for us. We can take comfort in his words. And in his absence he has given us the Holy Spirit. A helper to provide the comfort as we are charged with the task of making him known in our community and around the world. And again, knowing at that time that both the disciples and us would need reassurance, he says that he is with us always to the end of the age.

Just as the prophets of the Old Testament were given messages from God to prepare people for a savior. And Jesus' first coming. We, as individuals and as a church, are now called to be the messengers, to proclaim both the truth of his first arrival, and also to announce that he is coming back. So let us prepare the way.

We don't know the details of what's going to happen in our lives. We don't always get the answers that we're looking for, but what we do have are the promises of God, and we can share them with others. Jesus says that

I am the way, the truth and the life.

He said, I'm going to heaven, going to be with the Father to prepare a place for you. And one day, I'm gonna come back. What a hope-filled, joyful message that needs to be made known to all people.

So as you go about planning your New Year's resolutions this week, if you're into that. Be thinking about how You can be a part of fulfilling the great commission. We're thinking about how we as a church can be part of making disciples of all nations.

And let me finish this morning with some resolutions that were given to us 2000 years ago. In Revelation 21:5. The one who is seated on the throne says,

behold, I am making all things new.

And then in the 2nd to last verse in the Bible, in Revelation 22:20, we read,

He, being Jesus who testifies to these things says, surely I am coming soon. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for sending your son to us. We thank you that you provided ways hundreds of years before his arrival for all to be able to recognize him. So that we can have absolute confidence that he has fulfilled the words of your prophets. Lord, we are all sinners separated from you, but you made a way for us to be with you again, and we thank you for the promise of His return. Lord, when he will take us again to be with you in heaven. Father, we love you and we give you all the praise in Jesus' name. Amen.