Do You Believe Jesus?
After Jesus was resurrected, He appeared to His disciples many times over the course of forty days. During this time, He was teaching them a lot about the Kingdom. Even after three and half years of walking with Jesus they still had this picture in their mind of how Jesus was going to deal with the Romans. Let’s look at Acts 1 to see the question they kept asking. “Every time they were gathered together, they asked Jesus, “Lord, is it now the time for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?” When will you restore OUR kingdom? They wanted Him to remove and annulate the Romans but that is not why Jesus came. What was Jesus’ response about His return?
“The Father is the one who sets the fixed dates and the times of their fulfillment. You are not permitted to know the timing of all that he has prepared by his own authority. But I promise you this—the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and you will be seized with power. You will be my messengers to Jerusalem, throughout Judea, the distant provinces —even to the remotest places on earth!”
Unfortunately, we have had a lot of misinformation about the return of Christ. Like we discussed yesterday it has caused us to get off of the wall and wait to escape. This is called escapism. Why would Jesus promise us the incredible gift of the Holy Spirit and His power just so we could wait around to escape. That makes no sense. This matters more than we’ve ever realized. In Acts 3, we see where the Holy Spirit gave Peter revelation knowledge in Jesus’ return. We don’t know the time, but we do have a picture of what it will look like. “For He (Jesus) must remain in heaven until the restoration of all things has taken place, fulfilling everything that God said long ago through his holy prophets.” Acts 3:21
What does the restoration of all things mean? The word restoration in the Greek is apokatastasis which infers the restoration of creation to the state of existence before the fall. The Gospel of Luke chose a Greek word that has a medical term, meaning the restoration of perfect health. (See the footnotes in TPT) If Jesus isn’t returning until the cosmos is restored to its original condition who is responsible for the restoration? It makes sense of why He would give us the gift of the Holy Spirit and His power to see this restoration come to pass. In 1 Corithians 15, Jesus says when He returns, He will deal with the last enemy death. We are responsible for dealing with the other enemies like cancer, disease, divorce, addiction, obesity, mental health and all the other enemies of His perfect plan for His creation.
On Earth as it is in Heaven. We are on Earth and have the power of the Holy Spirit to address all of these issues. Remember, this walk is building on the foundation of our intimacy with Jesus. As we choose Him daily and hear Him speak to us, it is in these moments we get to encourage others, love them like Jesus, pray for healings, and we begin to see the restoration take place one person at a time.
If Jesus says this is possible, do you believe?
