The Restoration Project
Your Mission as a Believer in Jesus
Excerpted and adapted from The One Year Heaven on Earth Devotional.1
“He must remain in heaven until the time for the final restoration of all things.” (Acts 3:21)
God is into restoration.
That’s his ultimate purpose for this planet. In the prophets, he restores his people to the land, and they restore broken walls (Isaiah 58:12). Through Jesus, he restores his own image in redeemed image-bearers. In the end, he restores Eden’s qualities, but in a city rather than a garden (Rev. 22:1-5).
Even now, Jesus is in heaven waiting for his enemies to become his footstool (Heb. 10:13) and anticipating the time “for God to restore everything” (Acts 3:21). Clearly, God is not letting any part of his plan fall through the cracks.
In the meantime — in this process between the two advents of the King, when the ever-increasing kingdom is being cultivated — we are to be restorers too. If God is into restoration, and if his people are to live in practical union with him at all, then we are meant to be into restoration like he is. We live in a broken world, but we are never told to let it remain broken. There is nothing about his creation that we are called to write off as a loss.
“Wherever the bounds of beauty, truth, and goodness are advanced, there the kingdom comes.” —Frederick Donald Coggan
It’s easier to think otherwise. Some things look like lost causes. Some hearts seem to be so hardened that they could never be open to redemption. Some relationships are so difficult that they appear hopeless. Some aspects of human society look unredeemable.
But we are never authorized to make any of those assessments. If God calls us to demonstrate faith, hope, and love, we can never call anything impossible, hopeless, or unlovable. We are investing ourselves in a kingdom that cannot and will not ever pass away. That should make us irrepressibly optimistic and relentlessly persistent.
How do we become restorers? Think about the “broken walls” in your life. Envision what the kingdom would look like in your relationships, in environments like your home and community, even in your physical or emotional health or those of the people around you.
Then pray, live, work, and relate to others toward that vision. Step into the kingdom picture in every way you can, gently and winsomely drawing others into it too. When your focus is a restoration of all things, you are aligning yourself with the heart of God.
Chris Tiegreen, The One Year Heaven on Earth Devotional (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2015), 12.