From thence He will come to judge

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Well, good morning. It's good to be here. It's a little different. Most Sunday mornings, well, I don't know, maybe most Sunday mornings are different here. I don't know. We tend to change from Sunday to Sunday. Today, we've got a couple of our interns and our others that are graduating at FGCU even as we speak, and the term is over there, so things kind of shift just a bit. But I'm excited about today's message, and I'm excited for them, even though they can't be here, that we are sharing the foundations, and they have this foundation in their life as well. So we are thankful for so many of our students here who are gaining that foundation, the building blocks of faith in our campus ministry and in our lives. And so we're going to, like Phil said, we're going to be starting with the foundation series for one last week today, and then taking a break for the next three weeks as we go Advent and Christmas to the gift of Christmas. And then we're going to go back January 8th to finish up the creed with, I believe in the Holy Spirit, et cetera, for five weeks. It's a long time, I know, but in one sense, it's really good. And each week with just a different section of the creed, we get something new. So today we're looking at the phrase, from thence he will come to judge the living and the dead. And right away, you hear that word judgment, and you're going like, gloom and doom, here we come. Okay. Nobody gets super excited about being in front of a judge and standing before a judge. It's okay. Okay. Because you kind of feel like, I don't know anybody who's ever had to go to court feels like, hey, it's court day, let's go. How many of you have been excited about jury duty? Let alone if you have been accused of a crime and you'd have to stand before a judge. It doesn't sound exciting. But here, contrast that, that picture that we have about a modern day courtroom, with this truth that Martin Luther shared the great reformer years ago. And he said this, if we could grasp this in our heart, what kind of joy would we experience in the last judgment that one would not fear it? Are you kidding me? That we could have joy in this phrase, from thence he will come to judge the living and the dead, and not be trembling in our boots as we come into that. But I think that's where we're headed. And that's where we're going to get to as we study God's word today. And as we study what this really means, that you can have that balance in your life, that clarity and that belonging in such a way that you can have joy, even at this phrase from thence he will come to judge the living and the dead. So as we have moved into the creed each week, and we've shared the fact that when we confess, when we profess this creed, we're pledging our allegiance to this God. We are saying this is who we are because of who God is and what God has done for us. And this is our identity, this is our destiny, this is our future, this is whose we are. And we've gotten into that every week. And at the same time we have pledged that, we've said over the millennia, the Christian church has also, when it's confessed this creed, has said, and we reject the narratives, the storyline of our popular cultures, wherever they happen to be over the thousands of years, we reject that because it's just a myth. They want to shape and form us into this when it's not really about that at all. Life isn't about this. And we've said there are different isms that come up from materialism to hedonism. You know what I did? I researched this week. I went on Google, of course, and looked up ism. And do you realize there is a site that has a list of a zillion different isms that you can study and look at? And it starts with A and it ends with Z. And you can look at the word and the definition. So we've got the definition, absolutism. It starts with that, the doctrine of single government by a single power or autocracy. And it goes all the way through to Z, the next slide, where zootheism, the attributes of divine qualities to animals. And you can have all sorts. But we're going to study two of them today and say these are the two that we reject. And they're very popular isms that, you know, you've heard them. You use the words and I'm not against the words. But we are saying when we confess this creed that we actually reject these kinds of ways in and of themselves. And the first is optimism. Do you see on this? It's a lack of information. Yeah, well, OK. I know that's kind of funny. But, you know, optimism basically says this is the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can go right will go right. Have you ever seen that bumper sticker? Have you ever thought about that bumper sticker? Whatever can go right will go right. So that whatever is happening in this world is the best it can be. So then this is the best it can be. Are you kidding me?...