Scripture: Hebrews 11:39-12:2; Luke 12:22-31; John 3:16; Romans 7:15-20; Matthew 5:1-7:29
Jesus is a threefold gift—securing our future through the cross, freeing us from our past while making us part of the cloud of witnesses, and calling us in the present to a grace-enabled transformation of desire in which what we consume no longer defines who we are.
Illustrations: socks-vs-heirloom-gifts, covenant-resurrection-window, nicaea-hypostasis, lifetime-meal-count, ravens-and-lilies, friend-spend-time-with-god
August 24, 2025
The Gift of Jesus
Hebrews 11:39-12:2 Luke 12:22-31
Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better so that they would not, apart from us, be made perfect. Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God. - Hebrews 11:39-12:2
He said to his disciples, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, you of little faith! And do not keep seeking what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that seek all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, seek his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. - Luke 12:22-31
Some gifts in life are quite simple. Socks, for instance. When we give our kids socks, there is no greater meaning than that they need socks. Other gifts, a grandfather’s watch or and a grandmother’s pearls, has a deeper meaning. It represents the past. It can be worn in the present. But it also represents the future and generations to come.
We are continuing our series on the stained glass windows at Covenant with the fourth window today, the gift of Jesus. There’s a picture of the cross here. The window originally signifies and points to Christ’s death as offering us life.
But I want to take this idea of the gift of Jesus and expand it into three that Jesus is a gift for us: for our future, for our past, and for a present.
Usually there is a premier importance given to the future, in scripture and in the Christian tradition. Our future with God is deeply important. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ opens up the presence of God for us eternally. We celebrate this at Easter. This is why we sang all the verses of Christ the Lord is risen today and He Lives because we should celebrate this reality more than just at Easter.
As John famously writes, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. “ The gift of Jesus is a future with God because of the cross. But as a friend of mine used to say, if we don’t want to spend time with God now, why would we ever want to spend time with God in the future?
The great call of Jesus is not: do whatever you want now and then right before you die, confess, and then you get to live in paradise doing whatever you want. Instead, it goes far, far deeper into the reality that our desires, what we want in this life, in our day-to-day existence, has been corrupted and needs to be redeemed. As Paul writes in Romans 7, we don’t want what we should want and we want the things we shouldn’t want. Our desires need to be renewed, changed, converted, transformed.
This is why, in order to understand the gift of our future with Christ, we need to think about the gift of our past with Christ. Our life before now, our life up to now. What we are given in Jesus is not determined by our past. What I mean by that is that our past does not define who we are.
Part of this is that we are not trapped by our circumstances. We are not trapped by our culture. There’s freedom from our past, both the good and the bad. The bad we try to escape, but the good can also trap us. Fixating on the good of our past, whether in our life time or in the time of our ancestors, makes us defensive of our past so it can be hard to look at it honestly. We are shaped by where we come from. We are shaped by our histories, but we are not redeemed by our histories.
Our reading from Hebrews starts at the end of chapter 11, this great litany of the heroes of the Old Testament. It is one of my favorite passages in the Bible. It begins with a definition of faith: Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. What is faith? Hebrews defines it for us and gives us illustrations to help us understand. Faith is not culture. Faith is not what we have done or who are parents are. Faith is the assurance of what we hope for. More than that, the substance of what we hope for. The foundation. In Greek, ὑπόστασις. In the trinitarian debates at the council of Nicaea in 325, this is one of the key words. Three persons, one hypostasis.
The figures in Hebrews 11, by faith, lead towards the coming of Jesus and the redemption of the world and they’re given as a cloud of witnesses for us throughout our life and our story and the lives and stories of those who came before us. There was a cloud of witnesses offering Jesus to us throughout our life. This is another aspect of the gift of Jesus for our past. It is the gift of the people in our lives that showed us mercy, that showed us kindness, that showed us how to live, how to give, how to love, how to serve.
Take a moment and think about someone in your life who taught you or showed you what it means to serve others.
Now, I want us to think of a moment or someone in your life who taught what does it mean to show forgiveness or to forgive?
The gift of Jesus is found in mercy for the sins of the past. The gift of Jesus is found in the people who were there in our past who showed us the way of Jesus, who walked like Jesus, who offered mercy and grace and service, encouragement, who fought hypocrisy and revealed God’s love, but this gets us to the gift of the present, which is articulated most clearly in the sermon on the mount in Matthew and the Sermon on the Plain in Luke.
To say that it’s articulated clearly doesn’t mean that it’s easy to follow or implement in our lives. The teaching of Jesus can be challenging to follow. Sometimes we are tempted to name anything that’s difficult to do as idealistic. This is not quite a proper use of the term. Ideals are not perfect ways to do things. Ideals are guiding ideas that shape how we see the world.
Something that is difficult to practice is impractical. These terms matter because it’s easy to dismiss the idealistic. It’s difficult to dismiss the impractical, because then we have to get to the point or root of why it isn’t practical.
When we are faced by the impractical call of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and Plain, there is grace which God infuses in us to help us. For example, on our own, we can’t forgive our enemies. Only grace offers us that opportunity and freedom.
So we have grace in Jesus about our future with God, about our past, before and after knowing God, and we have grace in Jesus for our present. As we respond to all these graces in life, in the kingdom, we need to also remember that we are a part of the cloud of witnesses for others. The reality that we have been shaped by others puts upon us the charge that we are also here to shape others, to show our neighbors and children and friends and community, what it means to serve and give and love.
The words of the sermon on the mount and sermon on the plain are known as impractical because it is designed for the kingdom of heaven. This is what the kingdom of heaven looks like. This is what our future with God looks like. It’s a way of living into that kingdom as a part of this cloud of witnesses that Luke includes this passage about worry, about anxiety.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear.
Jesus tells us not to worry and then names three of the greatest worries any of us have, worries that all of us have. No matter what kind of life you have had up to this point, in some season you have had worries about life, about how long you’re going to live, about how you’re going to die, things of that nature. The same goes to worry about what we eat. One of the most consistent decisions any of us have to make in our life is what are we going to eat.
When you turn 40, you’ve lived around 14610 days, which means that when you turn 80, you’ve lived around 29,220 days. So, if you average three meals a day, a forty-year-old has eaten 43,830 meals, an 80-year-old 87,660 meals. That is a lot of decisions and a lot of interaction with food. Now you didn’t always get to pick what you ate, but that is a lot of decisions and exposure to food in a life. And we are not even talking about snacks, or diet culture, or the different ways we relate to food.
Finally, Jesus tells us not to worry about what are we going to wear. This is a different challenge for women than it is for men because of how society categorizes men and women, and thus shapes us to categorize ourselves. Nevertheless, culture shapes us but it does not define us.
One way to read this passage is to see it as idealistic, another way is to see it as impractical. It is impractical today to not worry about our life, to not worry about what you eat, to not worry about your clothing. There is so much anxiety in these three areas because there are so many ways to mess up. There are so many mistakes that we could make.
What if we’re making a mistake with our life? What if we’re making a mistake with our health? What if we don’t eat the right thing things? What if we don’t wear the right things? What if someone somewhere judges us in a way we don’t like?
Jesus goes on
For life is more than food and the body more than clothing.
Yes. Yes it is. I think all of us can agree that life is more than the food we eat. It’s more than the clothes we wear. So why do we let these choices and patterns of life being dictated to us by the culture around us take up space in our brain.
Jesus calls us to consider the ravens. Jesus calls us to consider the lilies of the field. Jesus calls us to a life that’s not designed around what we consume. A life where what we consume does not define who we are.
If we take all these gifts of Jesus seriously, this is a radical claim on each of our lives. God has a radical claim on each of our lives: what we consume does not define who we are. We are loved so much to be brought into the gates of heaven, not by what we have done, but because of who Jesus is. We have been loved so much that our past mistakes, our consumptions, our errors, do not define us and direct where our future lies. Neither does where we work, how big our retirement is, whether we’re able to retire at all, none of this defines who we are.
Seek Christ’s kingdom. Seek God’s kingdom and what you need will be given, a transformation of desire. This is one of the most radical calls of scripture that is often dismissed because it doesn’t fit into a neat category. We can’t commodify it because what we consume, what we buy and sell is how we shape our identities today.
The gift of Jesus is that our future has already been secured, not through the labor of our hands or the labor of our ancestors, but through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have been called to be a part of this cloud of witnesses expressed in Hebrews 12.
So when you see this window, and you come in to this holy place, remember the gift of the future that the cross promises us, the gift of the past that our sins have been forgiven, but also the gift of the present that we have been called to be a part of this cloud of witnesses to live a Christ-like life here and now. It may be impractical, but it is not idealistic. It is possible thanks be to God. Thanks to the grace of God in this life and when we fall short again, God is there to seek us out to love us to forgive us to offer us a chance again and again.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit Amen