New Creation

AMacario Martínez was one of the thousands of fluorescent-green uniformed street sweepers in Mexico City, toiling with their long-bristled brushes in 8-hour shifts for about $10 a day. Then came the video.

Martínez, a 24-year-old aspiring musician and composer, recorded himself riding on the back of his garbage truck as it rumbled down the city’s tree-lined Reforma Avenue, his fellow sweepers unaware. He made several takes early one morning and then laid the images over a plaintive, romantic song he’d written about a love scorned. At 7 p.m. on Jan. 27, he posted it on TikTok. Waking up the next day for his 6 a.m. shift, Martínez was shocked to see “Sueña Lindo, Corazón” (“Beautiful Dream, My Love”) had around 100,000 views.

“That day I went to work, but I was really distracted because I kept checking my TikTok,” Martínez said in an interview. Two weeks later, he quit.

Martínez became an overnight sensation… People now recognize Martínez on the streets of Mexico City and want selfies with him. His first performance after “Sueña Lindo” went viral was a free concert on Valentine’s Day in front of a few hundred enthusiastic fans at a landmark outdoor Mexico City cultural center. Martínez invited his former co-workers to the front row, where they cheered him on.

Preaching Angles:

The new birth in Jesus will most likely not give us fame and riches, but it will give us a new name, a new relationship with God the Father, the gift of eternal life, and all the spiritual riches of the heavenly places.

Changes in personality following a heart transplant have been noted pretty much ever since transplants began. In one case, a person who hated classical music developed a passion for the genre after receiving a musician’s heart. The recipient later died holding a violin case.

In another case, a 45-year-old man remarked how, since receiving the heart of a 17-year-old boy, he loves to put on headphones and listen to loud music — something he had never done before the transplant.

What might explain this? One suggestion could be that this is a placebo effect where the overwhelming joy of receiving a new lease on life gives the person a sunnier disposition. However, there is some evidence to suggest that these personality changes aren’t all psychological. Biology may play a role, too.

The heart transplant seems to be most commonly associated with personality changes. The chambers release peptide hormones which help regulate the balance of fluid in the body by affecting the kidneys. They also play a role in electrolyte balance and inhibiting the activity of the part of our nervous system responsible for the fight-or-flight response. The cells in charge of this are in the hypothalamus — a part of the brain that plays a role in everything from homeostasis (balancing biological systems) to mood.

So, the donor organ, which may have a different base level of hormones and peptide production from the original organ, could change the recipient’s mood and personality through the substances it releases.

We know that cells from the donor are found circulating in the recipient’s body, and donor DNA is seen in the recipient’s body two years after the transplant. This again poses the question of where the DNA goes and what actions it may have.

Whichever mechanism, or combination of mechanisms, is responsible, this area of research warrants further investigation so that recipients can understand the physical and psychological changes that could occur following surgery.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This phenomenon is still unproven medically, but what is certain is that before salvation each of us had a desperately sick heart (Jer. 17:9). But by the process of regeneration, God implanted a new heart (Ezek. 36:26, Ezek. 11:19; Psa. 51:10-12; 2 Cor 5:17). This gradually and radically changes a believer’s personality to reflect the Christlike qualities of a new nature (Eph. 4:22-24). With a new heart, a Christian will begin to show unconditional love, kindness, and forgiveness. They become less focused on themselves and exhibit simple acts of servanthood toward others.

By the year 2000, Judge John Phillips had long since lost count of the number of minors he had sent through the California penitentiary system for crimes committed during a violent and hopeless adolescence. He said on one occasion, “You send these young people to prison, and they learn to become harder criminals.”

In 2003, he set out to find a better way—to get kids in an environment of support where they could pass through these difficult years with a hand on their shoulder. Phillips started Rancho Cielo in the town of Salinas, ironically using an old juvenile detention center.

Rancho Cielo has a wide variety of programs, much of which is hands-on and kinetic, from the carpentry and construction program and vintage car repair, to beekeeping and equestrian care. Experts and industry professionals frequent Rancho Cielo to share their knowledge; like Tom Forgette who teaches the auto and diesel repair shop, and Laura Nicola, co-manager of the ranch restaurant, whose other job is at the James Beard Award-winning La Bicyclette.

“Upstairs,” traditional high school level classes are held for academic topics like writing and mathematics, usually to prepare students for a GED or community college admission. This is paired with additional preparatory courses like resume and cover letter writing and interview skills.

17-year-old Omar Amezola said, “In my other school, it was all reading and writing. Here the teachers are more chill, you don’t have to stay in your seat all day, you can do things that are hands-on—it’s cool.”

Each year, 220 students attend Rancho Cielo. While some don’t make it, 84.8% of first-time offenders who enroll at Rancho Cielo never re-offend, compared to the 40% recidivism rate in the county. Even with all the tutoring, diversity, and infrastructure, it costs just $25,000 to put a kid through Rancho Cielo, compared to the $110,000 it costs to house them in prison.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Grace; Judgement; Justice; Mercy – There is only endless punishment when God judges the guilty for their sins. But through his redemptive grace, he offers hope, a new life, and a new beginning to those who come to him in faith in Christ.

In an issue of CT magazine, author Jen Wilkin writes of the difficulty in describing the glory of heaven:

I am a competitive game player. A few years ago at a party, the host brought out Pictionary for the evening’s entertainment. Ready to wow the room with my skills, I glanced at the word on my card: “Difficult.” I had played Pictionary for years and had never had a word that hard. My mind went blank.

Nothing seemed to rhyme with it or illustrate it. The timer ran out, and in utter frustration I said, “How ironic that my word was ‘difficult’!” Holding up the card as proof, I realized I had accidentally drawn not a card for game play but the instruction card listing each of the categories for different words. Difficult, indeed. I spent 60 seconds trying to illustrate an abstract idea, trying to draw the undrawable.

My dilemma made me think of the Book of Revelation. John, in describing the new heaven and the new earth, is playing the hardest round of Pictionary known to man—he is called upon to describe the indescribable. Talk about difficult. He writes “The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone,” (Rev. 21:18–19).

At first glance, it seems that streets made of gold are meant to stir our excitement to live in a place where opulence abounds at every level. But John’s description of heaven takes things we esteem the highest in this life and reduces them to the level of commonplace.

All of these elements—gold, precious stones, crowns—are things that we exalt. These are all the idols of this world. When John determines to describe the indescribable, he turns our human expectations upside down.

Heaven is a first-is-last place where the things we have exalted will be cast down to the level of their real worth: as mere metal and stone. Heaven is a place where precious metals and stones are trodden under foot as common road dust. Where our crowning personal honors are cast at the feet of God. Where the people and objects and institutions to which we have ascribed our worship will fall from their lofty places. It is a place whose inhabitants at last obey the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me.”

“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, later set to music. It was written over the Christmas of either 1863 or 1864, in the middle of the bloodiest war in American history.

The carol’s first verse is familiar and peaceful:

I heard the bells on Christmas day

Their old familiar carols play;

In music sweet the tones repeat,

“There’s peace on earth, good will to men.”

But the carol is not cotton candy; it is a beating heart, laid bare. It’s a carol that still rings true today. By the third stanza we sing:

And in despair I bowed my head;

“There is no peace on earth,” I said;

“For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”

Longfellow wrote to his friend Henry Ingersoll Bowditch in 1866, “The death of the young men in the war . . . makes my heart bleed whenever I think of it. How much I have felt for you. Particularly on that cold December night when I came back with my son, and saw you at the station and knew that yours would come back to you no more.”

This is the landscape in which Longfellow wrote “Christmas Bells.” We aren’t currently entrenched in a literal civil war, but the cracks in our country’s foundation are splitting wider. People with power abuse it; people without it suffer. Day after day, the news cycles through horrors. Many days, it feels a little bit like the end of the world—like an apocalypse.

But then Longfellow brings the gospel to bear in the final triumphant stanza:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is bringing his kingdom to us. The last thing we see in the Bible is an image of “a new heaven and a new earth,” with “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Rev. 21:1, 4). The world is always ending, but one day, it will end. Justice is never done, but one day, it will roll down like a river.

Sam Allberry writes in an article for the Gospel Coalition:

A friend of mine has a little motto thing on the wall of her office, one of these little sayings that someone has printed out prettily and put a frame around. And it says this: “Those who hear not the music, think the dancer is mad.”

It’s true. If you watch a music video and you take away the volume, it looks ridiculous. There’s a lot of strutting. A lot of pouting. You put the sound back on and it does begin to make a bit of sense.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus is our music, but it is unheard by the world. The world sees our worship, our service, our sanctified lives, our joy, but to them our behavior is “mad.”

When French impressionist painter Auguste Renoir was confined to his home during the last decade of his life, Henri Matisse was nearly 28 years younger than him. The two great artists were dear friends and frequent companions. Matisse visited him daily. Renoir, almost paralyzed by arthritis, continued to paint in spite of his infirmities. He had to hold his brush between his thumb and index finger. As he painted, students often heard him crying out in pain.

One day as Matisse watched the elder painter work in his studio, fighting torturous pain with each brush stroke, he blurted out, “Auguste, why do you continue to paint when you are in such agony?” Renoir said, “The pain passes but the beauty remains.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

If we were to speak to Jesus on resurrection morning, He might have said the same thing. The pain of the Cross has passed, but the beauty remains: The beauty of new creation, the beauty of an army of disciples that spans the millennia, the beauty of a kingdom established in the hearts of his people, all this remains. But it may be that you are going through pain just now and you can’t see an end to that pain. Can you trust that out of the pain will come a beauty that will last forever? Give that pain to God and ask him show you its beauty.

Simon Davis, writing for Religion News Service, tells us, “Since atheist blogger Martin Hughes left Christianity, he hasn’t missed believing in God or in hell. But he does miss heaven.”

Hughes said, “I wish that there was one to go to, and that’s the truth.” He went on to say he knows his view is not “atheistically correct.” But he says that in his own version of heaven, he would “understand everything.” There would be “deep, rich happiness that feels like Mom’s sweet potato pie on Thanksgiving.”

Davis then writes:

Hughes may not be alone in his desire to keep believing in a more secular version of heaven. According to a recent analysis in the journal SAGE … the general trend over the past few decades is broadly toward less religiosity (both public and private). However, the one indicator that seems to buck this trend is belief in the afterlife, where a slight increase was recorded in recent years.

The world we live in now offers us a glimpse of the joys and pleasures that we will experience when God brings the new heaven and the new earth (Rev. 21).

In his book Heaven, Randy Alcorn explains, "All our lives we've been dreaming of the New Earth. Whenever we see beauty in water, wind, flower, deer, man, woman, or child, we catch a glimpse of Heaven. Just like the Garden of Eden, the New Earth will be a place of sensory delight, breathtaking beauty, satisfying relationships, and personal joy.”

We will not live in a sterile environment or float about among endless clouds with nothing to do. We will live on an all-new earth—just like this one, except free from storms, earthquakes, drought, floods, or any other disasters. Things will grow easily, and weeds and thorns will not exist. Animals will not harm us but rather look to us benevolently as their leaders and benefactors.

To explain how Christ in us now labors to make us more human, not less, pastor/author Rankin Wilbourne used the following illustration:

Consider two superheroes, Batman and Spider-Man. Batman is a rich and strong man with lots of cool gadgets. His superpowers stem from his external possessions. Spider-Man has a few accessories as well, but he is a superhero because of the spider powers he obtained when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. His nature has been changed. Now he has a new power accessible to him, within him.

Christ in you makes you more like Spider-Man than Batman. Something alien to you, from outside of you, has entered into you and changed your nature. You now have power that you did not have before. The trouble with this analogy is that Spider-Man became something more than human, while we instead are being restored to our full humanity. We are becoming more like Christ.

Tim Keller writes:

Years ago, I read an ad in the New York Times that said, "The meaning of Christmas is that love will triumph and that we will be able to put together a world of unity and peace." In other words, we have the light within us, and so we are the ones who can dispel the darkness of the world. We can overcome poverty, injustice, violence, and evil. If we work together, we can create a "world of unity and peace."

Can we? One of the most thoughtful world leaders of the late 20th century was Vaclav Havel, the first president of the Czech Republic. He had a unique vantage point from which to peer deeply into both socialism and capitalism, and he was not optimistic that either would, by itself, solve the greatest human problems. He knew that science unguided by moral principles had given us the Holocaust. He concluded that neither technology not the state nor the market alone could save us from nuclear degradation. "Pursuit of the good life will not help humanity save itself, nor is democracy alone enough," Havel said. "A turning to and seeing of … God is needed." The human race constantly forgets, he added, that "he is not God."

The popular novelist Andrew Klavan was raised in a non-practicing Jewish home. For about the first 45 years of his life, he lived as a "philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist." Klavan explains some of the steps along his journey that eventually led him to faith in Christ:

Jesus never appeared to me while I lay drunk in the gutter. And yet, looking back on my life, I see that Christ was beckoning to me at every turn. When I was a child, he was there in the kindness of a Christian babysitter and the magic of a Christmas Eve spent at her house. When I was a troubled young man contemplating suicide, he was in the voice of a Christian baseball player who gave a radio interview that inspired me to go on. And always, he was in the day-to-day miracle of my marriage, a lifelong romance that taught me the reality of love and slowly led me to contemplate the greater love that was its source and inspiration.

But perhaps most important for a novelist who insisted that ideas should make sense, Christ came to me in stories. Slowly, I came to understand that his life, words, sacrifice, and resurrection formed the hidden logic behind every novel, movie, or play that touched my deepest mind.

I was reading a story when that logic finally kicked in. I was in my forties, lying in bed with one of Patrick O'Brian's great seafaring adventure novels. One of the characters, whom I admired, said a prayer before going to sleep, and I thought to myself, Well, if he can pray, so can I. I laid the book aside and whispered a three-word prayer in gratitude for the contentment I'd found, and for the work and people I loved: "Thank you, God."

It was a small and even prideful prayer: a self-impressed intellectual's hesitant experiment with faith. God's response was an act of extravagant grace. I woke the next morning and everything had changed. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar faces and objects; they were alive with meaning and with my own delight in them. I called this experience "the joy of my joy," and it came to me again whenever I prayed. Naturally I began to pray every day.

This would lead to a full acceptance of Christ as Lord. Later, Klavan was baptized and wrote a book about his spiritual journey titled The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.

In the early 1980s the city of Philadelphia had a huge problem with graffiti. The mayor established the Anti-Graffiti Network, committed to combatting the vandalism, which morphed into the Mural Arts Program, led by the artist Jane Golden. Golden said, "I spent the first five years of my life in Philly being told that graffiti is never going away and the kids you're working with are going to end up in jail." But she didn't give up. When police caught kids painting graffiti, program officials first asked them to sign an amnesty statement, pledging to refrain from graffiti writing, then assigned them scrub time, cleaning spray paint from walls.

Then without warning one Friday night, about a dozen guys showed up at Golden's door. As they introduced themselves, she recognized most from their graffiti tag names, like "Rock" and "Cat." Golden invited them inside. "They came in and went right for my art books, pulling out all the books on abstract expressionism," she said.

Many of them had dropped out before high school, but they had learned about art from books they had checked out or stolen from the library. Most had brought Golden their sketch books, so she could see the type of work they were doing. "They'd learned about drawing from comic books; they had an intuitive sense of color and design," Golden said. After talking with the young artists about their work, Golden explained the anti-graffiti program, and before they left her house, all had agreed to sign the pledge and commit themselves to scrub time.

Golden connected with the young graffiti writers not as "criminals," but as artists. She offered them a lifeline, a way they could be paid money to paint murals legally. The organization is now the largest public art program in the U.S, with a collection of over 4,000 murals.

Editor’s Note: The program is still going strong in 2024, you can read the latest here

NYU professor Adam Alter has observed the power names have to shape destiny. The technical name is "nominative determinism," which literally means "name-driven outcome." Alter points to the following examples: The current Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales is Justice Igor Judge. His colleague, Lord Justice Laws, is a judge in the Court of Appeals. In the realm of athletic pursuits, Anna Smashnova is a professional Israeli tennis player. Layne Beachley is a seven-time world champion surfer. Derek Kickett was an Australian Rules footballer. Stephen Rowbotham was an Olympic rower for Britain. Usain Bolt currently reigns as the fastest man in the world over the 100 meter and 200 meter distances.

Other examples include Daniel Snowman, the author of a book about the Arctic and Antarctica; Christopher Coke, a notorious Jamaican drug dealer; the rapper Black Rob who was sentenced to seven years in prison for grand larceny, and Dr. A.J. Splatt, a doctor of urology.

Are all of these examples just coincidences? For instance, would Usain Bolt run just as fast if his name was Usain Plod? Alter concludes, "Researchers have shown that our names take root deep within our mental worlds, drawing us magnetically towards the concepts they embody."

Possible Preaching Angles: Positively, this illustration shows that we can live into the true name that Christ has given us (our identity is in Christ). Negatively, this story can illustrate how we all carry names deep inside us (like "loser," Not-good-enough," "Failure," Rejected," "Abandoned") that shape our destiny more than we could imagine.

This illustration comes farm-fresh … all the way from Alaska. Tim Meyers is a farmer in Alaska, where the soil is rich, but frozen. Conventional wisdom says that farming where the ground never fully thaws is impossible—or at least impractical. But through savvy practices and hard work, Tim has become a permafrost farmer, growing organic food on his 17 acres of land, proving that even the most barren frozen land can be fruitful.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes in our lives, the ground feels frozen. But Tim's story reminds us that even in the most hostile conditions, life can find a way to break in. God is waiting to make even the permafrost fruitful. Will you let him?

Editor's Note: The following is a fictitious story but it's a beautiful way to illustrate God's work to restore his fallen creation or his power to restore broken people.

Ever since he was a little boy, his parents had been promising that they would give him a beautiful car to drive when he turned 16. He even planned to park it in the family's barn where it could stay warm and dry. Only first his dad would have to get rid of that old car sitting in the barn. He couldn't wait for his dad to haul it off to the dump to make way for his dream car.

But when would that day come? When would that new car arrive? And when would his dad get rid of that old junky car under the tarp? Then one evening in early summer he heard strange sounds coming from that old barn. It sounded like power tools … a drill … a hammer. What was going on? Peering into the darkness he saw nothing but the stars overhead. And he noticed that a light was on in the barn. He walked into the warm night air, down the dirt path, and poked his head into the barn door.

When he saw the tarp, rolled up and left against the door, he excitedly thought, Was Dad finally getting rid of that junky old car? But then he suddenly looked and saw one of the most incredible sports cars in automotive history. It was a Corvette, but not just any Corvette. It was the coveted, beautiful, powerful 1963 Corvette 327 V8 with a split window, aluminum knock-off wheels, painted candy apple red.

So that was the car underneath the tarp all those years. He stood there stunned. It was always there, just getting ready for his father's masterful work of restoration. At that moment his father looked up, his hands deep in the engine bay, and handed his son a socket wrench. With a broad smile, he said, "Come on, son. Grab a tool and let's get this car ready."

In his talk entitled "The Sense of an Ending," Jeremy Begbie tells a story about attending a worship service in a poor South African township.

I was told, immediately before the service, that a house around the corner had just been burned to the ground because the man who lived there was a suspected thief. A week before that, a tornado had cut through the township, ripping apart fifty homes; five people had been killed. And then I was told that the very night before, a gang hounded down a fourteen-year-old, a member of the church's Sunday school, and stabbed him to death.

The pastor began his opening prayer: "Lord, you are the Creator and the Sovereign, but why did the wind come like a snake and tear our roofs off? Why did a mob cut short the life of one of our own children, when he had everything to live for? Over and over again, Lord, we are in the midst of death."

As he spoke, the congregation responded with a dreadful sighing and groaning. And then, once he finished his prayer, very slowly, the whole congregation began to sing, at first very quietly, then louder. They sang and they sang, song after song of praise—praise to a God who in Jesus had plunged into the very worst to give us a promise of an ending beyond all imagining. The singing gave the congregation a foretaste of the end.

Christian hope isn't about looking around at the state of things now and trying to imagine where it's all going. It's not about trying to calculate the future from the present. It's about breathing now the fresh air of the ending, tasting the spices and sipping the wine of the feast to come.