Day 70 – The Ascension – Acts 1:1-11
The third great event in Jesus’ last physical appearances on earth is the Ascension. For several reasons, this event, which is incredibly important, is ignored by many. When I preached on the Ascension last year, people came up and said that they had gone to church their entire life and never heard a sermon on the Ascension. Amazing, but not surprising.
I think the two main issues are this: 1) Liturgically the event always falls on a Thursday. Most Protestant churches in particular, rarely have a special service to mark the event. And most then choose to ignore it on the following Sunday, when a service could also focus on it. 2) Our modern minds have trouble wrapping ourselves around an event in which someone floats off into the sky.
Luke thought the Ascension was so important that he describes it twice, once at the end of the gospel he wrote, and then again at the beginning of Acts. I think we need to recapture this same importance for our lives today.
This is actually one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture (which is why I wanted to write on a fresh brain, rather than my very tired state last night). One aspect overlooked by many is that we worship a fully alive Jesus. Yes his Spirit is with us, and in fact the passage focuses on this promise. But we also worship a living Jesus who has a resurrected physical body, who resides in heaven and is praying for the universe at every moment. This is a powerful truth that we ignore as we go about our life. When we see Jesus, we will know that we too will have our own resurrected body as well. The promise has already been fulfilled for one, so we can be confidant of a resurrection which will let us life in wholeness forever.
This is enough, although there is so much more here!
In Christ,
Randy
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