King Jesus and Faithful Responses to His Enthronement
- Faith responds to the enthroned King Jesus by living faithfully and pursuing the Great Commission with compassion, hope, and worship despite hardship.
- Across the last centuries, the church has powerfully served outsiders and the vulnerable through care, programs, and generosity that reflect Jesus’ commands.
- Revelation’s portraits of the exalted Christ strengthen believers to endure tribulation with a clear view of who Jesus is until the end.
How does faith respond to the enthronement of Jesus? That’s an interesting question, because we’re not merely asking what faith is or how to have a relationship with Jesus. We’re asking how the church—the book of Acts, book of Revelation—responded to Jesus’ enthronement, his resurrection, his ascension, his being seated at the right hand of the Father.
That’s a great question, and I want to give a short answer and then unpack it in two specific ways. The short answer is this:
Faith responds to Jesus’ enthronement by faithfulness and by fulfilling the Great Commission with compassion, hope, and worship despite difficult circumstances.
That’s the short answer. I want to unpack it in two specific ways.
First, years ago I did a study on all the commands of Jesus. As in, Jesus’ Great Commission: “Teaching them to observe all that I’ve commanded you.” I came up with 107 commands, looking at all the imperatives of Jesus to his disciples, and I categorized them. Some of them were very simply, “Be with Jesus,” or “Follow me,” “Believe in me.” It’s about presence and relationship. Some of them were about religious ritual: prayer, fasting, giving.
But there’s one category that really caught my eye because it is the only category in which the church today is doing a better job than the church of the first century. Now, that should catch your attention if, like me, you’re part of a Restoration Movement. We want to go back to the New Testament and find the authentic, original church of Jesus Christ.
That command is to care for those who are ostracized: women, children, ethnic outsiders, those that are sinners and tax collectors and prostitutes. Jesus did that all throughout his ministry, but there’s very little evidence of the church in the book of Acts doing that. Now, I’m sure they did, but the evidence is not recorded in the book of Acts except for scant circumstances.
“There’s one category that really caught my eye because it is the only category in which the church today is doing a better job than the church of the first century.”
In Acts 2 and 4, you see the church giving, even selling off property and giving the funds to take care of the needy. But that was the Jerusalem church within ethnic Israel. When you start crossing other geographic or ethnic lines or economic lines, there’s not a lot of documentation of it happening.
But I can document today foster care, after-school programs, Boys and Girls Clubs types of programs, hospitals, medical care, literacy for women… In the last 250 years, the church has done more to alleviate poor in this world than virtually all other organizations combined. We’ve done an amazing job, and we don’t get enough credit on the major news outlets of what God is doing through God’s people for people who are not God’s people. And that’s one thing that would really stand out as expressing our faith in Jesus Christ.
Here’s another thing. If you look at the book of Revelation, yeah, it is about the end of time. It’s about Jesus coming back and God making the world right again. I get it. But in the center lane of Revelation, it’s not about eschatology or end times. It is about Jesus.
“In the center lane of Revelation, it’s not about eschatology or end times. It is about Jesus.”
Chapter 1, chapter 5, chapter 19 all give a portrait of the exalted Christ. And what is interesting to me is that each of these portraits precedes a particularly difficult season of the church. Chapter 1, you have the exalted Christ, the great high priest, before the seven letters to the seven churches, all of whom—or most of whom—needed a word from the Lord. Then you get in chapter 5 the lion and the lamb scene in heaven that precedes the tribulation on earth. And then chapter 19, you see the exalted warrior, the returning Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, preceding the judgment scenes of chapter 20, 21, and 22, both hell/the lake of fire and the new heaven and the new earth.
What I draw from that is, if we are going to faithfully live our faith representing Jesus on this earth, we had better have a clear view of who Jesus is because it is only the portrait of Jesus, the reality of the exalted Christ, that will get us through the tribulation times that we will face.
What does faithful faith look like? Facing opposition with a clear view of Jesus in mind. That will take you clear to the end.
