Passage: Revelation 5:11-14

Date: May 4, 2025 (Confirmation Day)

Author: Pastor Horton

Have you ever experienced great excitement?  It was an exciting night a week from Thursday in Green Bay, WI.  The NFL draft took place and I can’t even imagine hearing your name called and walking out to hundreds of thousands of people cheering for you.  I can’t imagine the excitement.  What a celebration!  We often celebrate when big life events take place: acceptance into the college you were hoping for or that job promotion you’ve been wanting, or a wedding day.  These things bring about great celebration.  And then there are those things in life that make you incredibly happy: achieving a life goal, finding pleasure in music or nature or friendships, or spending time with loved ones (yes, pets count as loved ones).  These things may bring us great joy.

Excitement.  Celebration.  And joy.  I hope on this day of your confirmation you are feeling some of those things: excitement, celebration, and joy.  Why?  Well, because of the One who sits upon the throne of heaven.  The One who is able to receive all “power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.”  The One who has made your Confirmation Day possible for you.  So as we approach our reading: Listen.  Live.  And Let loose.  For Worthy is the Lamb!

As you listen to that reading from Revelation, what do you hear?  The verbally inspired author, John tells us what he hears,  “I heard the voice of many angels who were around the throne and around the living creatures and the elders.  Their number was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands upon thousands.”  There’s a party going on; on this your Confirmation Day!  We here in church are singing but we are also joining together with hundreds of millions of saints as well as with hundreds of millions of angels cheering, praising, and breaking into song for the Lamb on the Throne. 

But that is what we are told in these impactful and encouraging words from John, the disciple whom Jesus loved.  Listen!  The Lamb on the Throne is in control of all things including your life!  And believers need to be reminded of that.  Remember, the Christian church at that time of this writing was going through it.  About 60 or 70 years after the ascension of Jesus, the force of the Roman Empire was now being brought against the Christian faith.  Sporadic persecutions were erupting.  Popular opinion in  the world was turning against this Christian faith that disrupted Roman lifestyles and empire worship practices.  Would they survive?  Remember it was to these hurting people that this last letter of the Bible, Revelation was written. And remember in the opening chapters of the book, how some of those young Christians were losing their love of the gospel?  How some were growing lukewarm in their life of faith – to the extreme of Jesus ready to spit them out of his mouth?  And how some looked alive spiritually but were dead inside?  This letter was Christ’s gift to people running low on hope.  Just as much as any other, this book of the Bible is written to give hope.

And we need this secure hope built on Jesus and guaranteeing us salvation through his righteous blood.  Because sometimes we lose hope.  We lose faith.  We lose trust.  Sometimes the world will overwhelm you and apply pressures from the outside and your hearts will face temptation from within.  The devil is a deadly adversary and know that he will  do all he can to poison the well of your soul with doubt, and with despair.  And there is still the matter of your old Adam, which will want to do its own thing and go its own way – in defiance of the loving path God lays out before us.  There will be moments for you that are far removed from the excitement, celebration, and joy of your Confirmation Day – times when you are running low on hope.

“Listen” Jesus says to John and to you and to me, “take your eyes off your fallen world and your sinful self and look at what is coming!  For what we have here will only lead to despair and destruction and death.  But look at the life that is coming through Christ!  Listen to the shouts and cheers of praise!” 

Instantly John is transported to the throne room of heaven.  He sees God the Father there. And around him, as he describes the scene, are a crowd of countless angels, then 24 elders, and finally four mysterious beings, perhaps the cherubim the prophet Ezekiel had seen, but called here: “living creatures.”

Seated on that throne in the middle of the crowd, God holds a scroll.  The scroll is sealed.  This is the message John has been summoned to hear.  “But” John says, “no one in heaven or on earth… could open the scroll or even look inside it.  I wept and wept because no one was found who was worthy to open the scroll or look inside.”  At first it sounds a little silly: crying because you can’t open a letter.  But remember: this is the message he has been called upon to hear.  Imagine a final message from a loved one, a special farewell video you simply could not open.  That would be incredibly sad.

“Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep!  See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has triumphed.  He is able to open the scroll and its seven seals.”  Which brings us to our verses.  Listen to the excitement, celebration, and joy of the hundreds of millions who were there: “They (the angel hosts)) encircled the throne and the living creatures and the elders.  In a loud voice they sang: ‘Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!”

Praise be to the Lamb.  Worthy is the Lamb!  Far better than walking out to the draft day crowds, here is an unexpected source of hope.  Not a fierce gladiator or a merciless tyrant, but a Lamb.  And not just any lamb, but a Lamb that looks like it has been slaughtered; his wounds still visible in the perfect holiness of heaven.  Now hopefully you (confirmands) have learned who this Lamb is and why he looks like he has been offered up in death.  We just sang “Crown him the Lord of love — Behold his hands and side, Rich wounds, yet visible above, In beauty glorified.”

Praise be to the Lamb!  His glory, in heaven “for ever and ever”, will be that he has died for us.  Think of it!  Jesus did a lot of miraculous things while on earth.  He taught many wonderful things.  But his glory is that he died to pay for our sins.  He did what we could not.  He opened heaven’s doors.  Our salvation comes through him alone.  That is what our youth have been taught here at our church and school, it is what we all know by the gift of faith thanks to the activity of God the Holy Spirit, it is what our former family members who died in the Lord now get to celebrate in glory, and it is what one day we will get to see and sing alongside the heavenly hosts.

Worthy is the Lamb!  Listen to the truth of your salvation.  And then live it with your Lord Jesus.  There will be times you will have spiritual highs.  Today, your Confirmation Day may very well be one of them.  You hear what in our reading?  The joy of heavenly victory.  You are ready and eager to charge out into the world with Jesus.  But then the realities of this world and the lack of perfection which exists in you and in me have a way of dashing those heavenly hymns to pieces.  There are times the world says it knows better than God and we listen.  And there are times we are not doing our confirmation best, and get bogged down in our own muddy sinful struggles.  There are times the devil is able to trip us up.  Then, oh, Lord, especially in those times, but always, show us our salvation in Jesus, pick us up in your forgiveness, brush away our sins, cleans us by your blood, take us under the arm and help us put one foot in front of the other in those ways you would have us go, ways that honor you and reflect our thankfulness and joy in being yours.

Help us to always listen to you.  Help us always to live for you.  And then, dear Jesus, help us to let loose great praise and adoration to your name now and forever in heaven!  John tells us more about worshiping the worthy One in heaven, “I also heard every creature that is in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, saying: To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever.”  And then, cascading “Amens” of praise are sung forever in the throne room of our Lord!

Worthy is the Lamb!  Dear confirmands old and young, the same One who knew you before creation, and claimed you as his own in your baptism waters, and who blessed you and kept you in the faith, will now strengthen and guide you all your days, and will nourish your soul with forgiveness, life, and salvation in his supper, and will see you safely home.  And one day, purely by the grace of God given to you by Jesus, the worthy Lamb on the throne, as your earthly walk of faith comes to a close, you will get to see that scene that John saw, and hear those millions of angels and millions of saints, and you will get to let loose with your own song of praise in excitement, celebration, and joys unending.  For worthy is the Lamb.  Amen.