In Rev. 1:17, Jesus says, “Fear not; I am the first and the last; I am He that liveth, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore.”
Every week, you hear the words of institution, where Jesus said that this meal, and the wine in particular, is the new testament or new covenant in His blood. This means that every Lord’s Day we are renewing or reaffirming the new covenant. This is the promise of God not to hold our sins against us for the sake of the blood of Christ. Here is God’s solemn oath in the blood of His own Son: your sins are forgiven. As far as the east is from the west, He has removed your sins from you.
This means you can always start over.
This is also why Jesus is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, the first and last. On the one hand, this is His Sovereign power to bring you through. He holds the beginning and the end, the beginning of your trials and trouble and the end of them all. When you go through challenges and difficulties, if you are in Christ, you are always going through them with Christ. If He is the beginning and the end, then He is there in the middle of every moment.
But He is there in a particular kind of way: He is with us as the beginning and the end. He is the end of all our sin, all our suffering, and He is the beginning of eternal life, endless glory, Heaven itself.
So when you come to Him, You come to Him as the One who is constantly making an end of those things which must end and constantly making a new beginning. And this means you are not stuck in a rut. You are not stuck in the past. You are not trapped in a moment. Your past does not define you. Your sin does not confine you. Your family, your history, your parents, your choices, any more than anything in the future – if you are in Christ, You have come the Lord of history, the Alpha and Omega, first and the last, the beginning and the end. So as Christ said to John, I say to you: fear not.
So come and welcome to Jesus Christ.
Photo by Luke Stackpoole on Unsplash
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