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Once the Christmas packages are cleared away, the dark sections of life can become painfully visible again—and we may have no idea how to fix them. Revelation 22 meets that helplessness with a river of life, a tree for the healing of the nations, and a coming day when night will be no more.
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You know, sometimes it does take a couple of tries to get something right, right? And sometimes with Christmas decorating, it actually takes more than a couple of tries. We’ve probably all had that strand of lights that just won’t stay lit. And maybe not as much for the younger members of our congregation, but if you’ve had a little more time to fiddle with lights over the years, you may remember lights used to be a lot more persnickety than they are now.
You get these LED lights that we have today, and for the most part, they’re pretty easygoing, right? The bulbs don’t burn out. They certainly don’t do something else, which is make it so that if one bulb goes out, the whole strand goes out. Yeah. But that’s the way, some of you may not believe this, that’s the way it used to be on every strand of lights. Amen, brother. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we can testify here to this.
And it would be so frustrating. You’d get the lights up outside or on your tree. The tree’s probably even worse because, you know, it’s all wrapped around the tree, the ornaments are on. And then the middle section just goes out. So you’re trying to figure out where’s the bad bulb. You get a bulb tester specifically to try to locate the bad bulb because at that point, the electricity just blocked and it’s not going to go any further. So most of us have been there.
And sometimes you go through every single bulb and it still wouldn’t work. And sometimes then you go to the end of the strand and realize the squirrel had chewed through it. Only after, of course, testing every single bulb. I mean, that’s the only way, right? And so old-fashioned light strands can be really, really frustrating. And there are more than a few strands I’ve run into over the years where I just couldn’t figure it out. It drove me nuts. I wanted to figure it out, but I just ultimately concluded that I don’t have the power to fix this strand of lights.
Sometimes that’s the way our lives feel. As we’re wrapping up 2025, looking towards the new year of 2026, maybe that’s how you’re feeling right now, that there are an awful lot of bulbs out, whole sections out. And just like some of those strands feel next to impossible to locate that bad bulb, it feels like I don’t know where to locate the bad bulb in my life. I don’t have any idea where it is. I don’t know how to find it. All I know is I did see a squirrel run by every once in a while, so maybe that has something to do with it, but I just don’t know what to do about it. And the light feels out.
Christmas kind of disguised it because the beautiful packages and the dinner table sat in front of it, and you didn’t notice the big section was out in your life. But now you can see that just glaring down at you, and you think, I’m going to a new year, and what am I going to do? Sometimes not just in us, but how we feel like we are in the world, right? We look around at this world, and what did I see the day after Christmas when I actually looked at the news again? Horrific, horrific bombings in the Ukrainian-Russian War where Russia was just bombing the city to bits over Christmas. And you just look at that, and you think, it feels like there’s a lot of lights out.
You see everybody going back to their usual positions and fighting again, and you think, well, Christmas seemed good for a moment, but boy, are there a lot of lights out.
On Christmas Eve, we talked about the ultimate Christmas tree. We’ve been talking about building the ultimate Christmas tree all month long, but ultimately we concluded what the ultimate Christmas tree is, the cross, where Jesus went to that tree for us that we would live. There is the ultimate Christmas tree.
So the week after, we find ourselves here on Christmas Sunday. What does the ultimate Christmas tree have to do with all the lights that are out? If we’ve encountered the ultimate Christmas tree, why are there so many strands not lighting? Tonight we’re going to turn to Revelation 22. And as we do, we see that God doesn’t just bring to us the ultimate Christmas tree. That tree comes with lights included. Let’s go ahead, and you can turn there if you would with me, and before we dig into it, let’s go ahead and come before God in prayer.
Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Lord, would you help us to understand how you bring light into the darkness, the darkness of our lives, the darkness of the world. And in there, would you help us to hold on to that truth as we conclude this year, as we go into the new year, would it be something that is extinguished as people take decorations down, but something that we hold on to and never let go of. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Revelation 22, we’re going to start at verse 1. It says, “The river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city. Also, on either side of the river, the tree of life, with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”
This is what we’re told is going to happen. Creation is going to be restored. Because of the ultimate Christmas tree, creation is going to be restored. And in this opening to Revelation 22, we see both rich metaphors and their application happening. So, we’ve heard about the tree of life, we’ve read about living water, right? Jesus talked to people about needing living water. The woman at the well, for example, in John 4. But here we’re told there’s an actual river flowing. And we’ve seen that before in Ezekiel.
But John speaks of what’s going to happen at the end. We see that the metaphors being realized, turned into something real to physically portray what’s true. That all that’s been anticipated, everything about Christmas and everything that came after Christmas was pointing to, actually happens. There’s no coincidence that, as John goes over this in the conclusion of Revelation, that he alludes to the very things that happened at the very beginning. Take a look at Genesis 3, verse 22.
Do you think about Eden? Do you think about the goodness of creation? God created something that was not just good, but how good? Very good. Yeah, absolutely good. It was unimaginably good. We don’t even have any way to compare it to anything because we’ve never encountered that level of goodness. God made that, and then we bring sin into the world. We turn from him, and it’s all tossed aside.
And sometimes, sometimes we end up viewing Christmas as like a rescue mission where the paratrooper comes swooping in, and then we turn to Jesus, and he grabs onto us, and he has a zip tie going back up to his helicopter, and we get zipped up, and we leave behind the burning, desolate waste of a failed project. But John here says, eh, not so fast. You wonder what’s going to come? It’s what was.
God didn’t make a mistake when he made Eden. God didn’t make a mistake when he created a creation that was unimaginably good. God did exactly what is good. He doesn’t give up on it. And the fact that we mess it up doesn’t mean he gives up on it. He doesn’t say, oh, well, if I’d only known how sinful human beings could be, I would have done this. I just wish I’d known. But God knows everything.
So what does he do? We’re told that he creates this recreation. It’s a recreation here in the new Jerusalem, the new heavens and the new earth. And what does he do in it? He says, let’s revisit exactly what was, because it was good, and now you’re going to actually get to enjoy it. Now the goal isn’t to keep you away from the tree of life. Now the goal is to bring the nations to the tree of life. And because of that, this is what was said in Genesis, but now it’s a good thing and not a bad thing. Death is no more. Forever is the reality.
Verse 5, Revelation 22, 5: “And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.”
In encountering the tree of life, we see fruit for every season and leaves of healing. That this tree, as it grows its leaves, they fix everything that’s broken. And not just for one or two people. Not even for a select few, but for all that turn to Jesus. So John can say in verse 2, that it’s for the healing, not of the people of God, sons of Abraham, but for the nations.
Why? Because the people of God went on a mission, the Messiah came, and he expanded his kingdom and encompassed all who would turn to him. So now that healing isn’t just a surgical little healing for a few, but for the many. For all who trust him.
But what does that mean? Because after all, we messed it up the first time. So maybe God wants to have a museum of what could have been. Does anyone go down to Main Street for Christmas? Go down there and look at all the Christmas decorations and lights? It’s always so pretty with the trees all lit with their lights, and the fresh evergreen on the buildings, and the big red bows, and the Victorian carolers. I don’t know if they did those this year. Anyway, all kinds of beautiful things, right? Maybe you can even find some chestnuts roasting over an open fire if you look around there.
And maybe while you were down there, if you happen to go at the right time of day, you might have even encountered an opportunity to take a tour of the First Aid Capital. I’m sure many of us have been through the First Aid Capital at some point, right? Anyone? Yeah? Just doing a little St. Charles tourist survey here. It’s a wonderful tour. It’s been many years since I’ve been through it, but it’s a wonderful tour where you see this packed dry goods store that then turned, it’s upstairs, into the first capital of the state of Missouri.
If you didn’t know that, that’s why when you’re trying to drive to Little Hills, if you’re coming off of 70, you turn onto First Capital, because we’re right here by the First Capital. And so you can go through there, and you can see what the dry goods store would have looked like, and then you can go upstairs, and you can see the place where the first politicians of the state took part in leading the state before ultimately they moved the capital to a city built specifically for it, Jefferson City.
Well, let’s say you were down there, and you wandered in, you got off the street, carolers are outside singing, you walk into the capital, you take the tour, and you say, wow, this is a really neat place. And incidentally, since I’m in a dry goods store, maybe I should pick up some flour and some herbs, and do they have fresh-baked goods here? Maybe I’ll get some bread. I need to stock up, and why go to another store? I’m in a dry goods store right now, right? But it won’t work. Why? Because it’s a museum. You don’t go to that dry goods store for your grocery shopping. You don’t go upstairs to go speak to your lawmakers because you won’t find anyone there other than the tour guides, and they are powerless to do anything about legislation. It’s a museum.
Notably, as we hear about the restoration and revelation, God undertakes a different project than what we often see when we restore things. We restore buildings to show off what was, and the distant, glimmering memory of the time when they actually did the thing they were meant to do. Now we admire what they did. But when God talks about restoring creation, He doesn’t talk about restoring it so that we can sit there frozen in time, looking through the glass at what could have been, and say, wow, that was really beautiful. At least now I got to see it.
I think sometimes that’s what we fear. For all the wonder of Christmas to face eternal separation from God, or be standing at the plate glass window, looking at the creation I can’t actually experience. I guess the plate glass is better. But it still doesn’t sound very good, does it? Why do I even exist? Why do you exist? And yes, just looking at it would be wonderful for a time, but for eternity?
But notably here, as John talks about what God’s going to do, He doesn’t talk about a museum. He doesn’t talk about getting to see it. He talks about getting to live in it, to experience it, for it to be active and real. Because it’s not just creation’s restored, the relationship between God, the Creator, and the creation is restored. From human beings and God is restored.
Take a look at verse 3. “No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His servants will worship Him. They will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads.”
And then this verse that we looked at earlier, we’re going to come back to it here. “And night will be no more, and they will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.” The curse is replaced by the cure.
The very Lamb of God is right there. As the Lamb of God is there, as His people can come before Him and worship Him, and actually be in His presence, what do we see? There’s worship going on, and there’s reigning going on. And notably, all barriers are removed. In Ezekiel, when Ezekiel speaks of seeing a river flowing, it’s out of the temple, the place where the average person, you and I, we couldn’t go in there and come into the Holy of Holies and encounter the Lord. We could kind of see the result, right? The river’s flowing out of the temple.
But here, here the river flows straight from the throne, where everyone can come before the Lord. And not only does God continue to provide life to His people, as He has throughout the ages, finally now, the Creator and the created come face to face, and there’s no separation. There’s no distance left. It’s like an evening. And night is no more.
Everything dark, everything that is missing and absent is no more. Instead, God Himself becomes the light. Can you imagine that instead of using the stage lighting, or just the different ceiling lights in the room, or the street lights outside, or your headlights, or any other kind of light that you simply bask in the light of God? What’s that like? I can’t imagine, but I know it would be wonderful, and it will be wonderful.
And as He provides that light, He provides that light and sends His created people to go and do the thing they were supposed to do to begin with. When it says that His people reign now forever, well, that should also ring a bell from Genesis. Genesis 1:28, “God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Sometimes we scratch our head at Revelation 22’s reference to reigning, because if those who rejected the Lord are no longer in His presence at all, they’re completely shut out, and everyone else is part of the reigning group, then who were they reigning over? What are they actually doing? In essence, what we see is a restoration of what humanity was originally supposed to do, to have dominion over the earth. Not to rule it harshly, but rather to be the caretakers of God’s creation, to actually enjoy it in a way that is fruitful and productive, and an ongoing blessing. And it happens because of God’s light.
Now, in the presence of the Lamb, God’s people see clearly, and they go and do what they were made to do. And I can’t imagine what that will be like, but as we reflect on what Christmas declares, and we look at the beautiful light still glowing here, that’s what we should be thinking about is how much more beautiful it will be when these lights fade into the very light of God.
You guys. It’s because of that presence that then the relationship leads to the restoration of purpose, to being able to go and to steward the earth, to live in the earth in a way that actually is how God intended it.
If you’re reading along in our 12 Days of Christmas devotional journey, today we visit with Solomon. Solomon was wise in so many ways, but Solomon also messes up badly. And you think about that. You just think about how is it that perhaps the wisest man ever to live outside of Jesus, of course, how did he get it so wrong?
It was because he took his eyes off of wisdom. He may have been wise up here, but his eyes weren’t on wisdom incarnate, on God himself. And here what we see that’s different, we may not be Solomon, but in that time in Revelation 22, all of us will be in the presence, unmistakably, unyieldingly, in the very presence of wisdom himself.
So because of that, because of that, we’ll actually get to do what God made us to do. Can you imagine that? We’re not looking through the plate glass. Creation won’t become that museum we walk through and say, wow, that would have been pretty neat. Creation will actually be doing what it was always made to do, and we’ll be a part of it.
I do love those LED light strands. I really love them for all kinds of reasons. You don’t have to do the bulb test. They don’t get so hot, so you’re not worried about them burning down the house, hopefully. I won’t say they can’t, but you’re not as worried at least. But I do have LED strands that have gone out, and they’re actually perhaps harder to fix when they do go out than the regular strands, because you don’t just take out the bulbs. Oftentimes the bulbs are fixed, or they’re specific to that strand, and I can’t find any more to go in it.
In other words, it’s a lot better, but we certainly haven’t reached the perfect light. And every time we take the lights off our trees here, I hope that all the strands go back on and function again, but eventually some of those strands are going to end up being discarded because they won’t light up any longer.
And everything that we’ll try to do, just like everything Solomon tried to do, as long as we’re powering through it on our own, we can come up with something better, and a lot of the things Solomon did, guess what? They were better, but they weren’t perfect. And even some of the things that Solomon did that might have seemed wise by every measure and weren’t necessarily wrong in themselves, what did they do that ended up getting him further away from the Lord?
Because what he was doing was looking at what he was accomplishing and not looking on the Lord. But John says here, in the completion of things that we see in Revelation 22, that we’re not just going from incandescent lights to LED lights. They won’t burn out as often. They’ll work most of the time. Will work most of the time.
You can’t even imagine it, but God restores us to himself and to our purpose. And there won’t be any separation between us and our purpose anymore, because there isn’t any separation between our God and ourselves any longer. We can’t really fulfill our purpose when we’re broken off from him. That’s why all these images of healing, the tree of life is there, yes, but right in the middle, the thing that’s ultimately in the middle isn’t a thing at all. It’s a him.
We can say next to that tree of life is the ultimate Christmas tree, because there’s Jesus, the perfect sacrifice, the perfect priest, right there to bring that restoration. And we can’t fully praise him without being fully restored and going and doing what we’re meant to do, and that’s the beautiful thing.
As the people are worshiping, what are they doing? They’re reigning. Why? Because when we suddenly are in that presence, he doesn’t say, well, you could have done some really neat things if sin hadn’t come into the world, but not now. No, just like he doesn’t make the creation as a whole a museum, he doesn’t make us a museum. But we’ll go and actively do things in his presence, and in that will be worship.
How often today do we struggle with that? We wonder, well, is what I’m doing right now really an act of worship? Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. And certainly, the best we can try to do in this life is we seek what God’s will is, we seek to follow his will, we seek to be faithful with what we’re given, and when we’re doing that well, there is an aspect of worship to everything that we do in that mode, but someday everything will be that, because the restoration really will be that full.
I think the incredible thing we see here, and sometimes we get sort of kept, captured by just a few of the pictures, and there’s so much happening, is that this ultimate Christmas tree we’re talking about, it’s not about a contained celebration. It’s not about a day, or a specific place. It was about God giving an unleashed restoration. Everything he made his creation to do will be happening, because it will all happen in his presence, and none of it will be broken.
And that’s the light that we get to take with us for Christmas.
In the praise of Jesus.
Lord, as we come before you, we recognize that so often we do fall short, even when we’re trying to do our purpose. We’re like Solomon, only worse. We seek after your wisdom. You give us some of your wisdom. We try to be discerning, and we head towards something that you’ve called us to, and we go right off the rails again.
But Lord, as we ask that you would guide us now, and you’d help us to do your purpose more now, would you help us to do so, because we have the hope that someday we will be able to do it fully, because we will be in your presence, and your presence will empower us to do it.
Indeed, you will take away every bit of night. You will take away every bit of brokenness. You will heal the nations. Right now, what we exist to do is to declare that to the world, to be that unleashed, restored people that go to the nations, go to the world declaring that our Savior is not only born, but lived, suffered, died, and triumphed over death to be the perfect sacrifice, and also to be the perfect priest who comes and connects us with himself. Would you help us to hold on to that today and every day. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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