As I think about the first 20 years of modern worship and the song that got it all started, I can’t help but wonder when churches last unplugged their instruments to let their people just sing. I can’t help but wonder how many churches actually could. The organic and entirely unprofessional moment that contributed to the beginning of the movement gave way to an obsession with excellence and professionalism. What got lost along the way is that the heart of worship is not a great band, a perfect key change, or a soaring chorus, but human voices lifted together to God. 

I had been lost in a kind of daydream and snapped back to reality with the realization I had been singing “The Heart of Worship.” It surprised me to learn I know the song by memory, and since I was already well into it, I kept on going. You probably remember the chorus: “I’m coming back to the heart of worship, and it’s all about You, Jesus.”
It was 20 years ago that Matt Redman penned this song, which means it was 20 years ago that the modern worship movement emerged from the UK and swept across the world. The groundwork laid through the Jesus movement of the 70s and the million-and-one choruses of the 80s led to the rise of Redman and Tomlin and Delirious? and Sonicflood and so many others in the 90s. There is no objective way to define exactly when the movement began, but I say it was the day Mike Pilavachi, pastor of Soul Survivor church, in Watford, England, pulled the plug on his band.
Here’s the story: Soul Survivor church was doing well, drawing people, enjoying success. They were gathering as a church every week, singing loud songs, and having a good time. But the leaders couldn’t shake the growing conviction that for all the good they were seeing and all the fun they were having, they had completely lost track of what it is to worship. So one week Pilavachi unplugged the sound system and had the band leave the stage. For a time they sat in awkward silence until finally they began to raise their voices unaccompanied by instruments, amplification, and lights.
Redman later reflected on that experience and penned “The Heart of Worship” which immediately became a smash hit and a worldwide worship staple. It is certainly not one of the great songs of history, but it was the song for a moment. It was a song of confession, a song of commitment, and in some ways a song of hope. “When the music fades, all is stripped away, and I simply come / Longing just to bring something that’s of worth that will bless your heart / I’m coming back to the heart of worship, and it’s all about You, Jesus.”
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Are we looking forward to the new creation? Isaiah and Paul are telling us: we should be! Our hope for the new creation should be what sustains us here and now. It’s what we were made for. 

When I was studying to be a pastor, I was invited to speak to a primary school class at a Christian school. The topic was heaven. I had to stand in front of a bunch of kids and tell them what heaven is like.
It was awful. I knew heaven would be good, but I had no idea how to describe it. The thing about kids is that you can’t fake it in front of kids. They know if you don’t know what you’re talking about.
And so I bombed that day. I couldn’t paint an accurate picture of what heaven is like. I couldn’t answer any of their questions, at least accurately. I left from that experience devastated, because I knew that I should know better than what I did.
We need to understand what heaven is like. We are alive for only a short time here on earth. If you are a follower of Jesus Christ, you are meant to think a lot about heaven. It’s supposed to get help get you through this life, which can be very hard.
But here’s the problem: It’s hard to hope for something we don’t know very much about. So what I want to do is to give you a picture of heaven today, one that I hope will be exciting enough to give you hope no matter what you’re going through today.
We’re in a series through the entire Bible from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22. Right now we’re in the part of the story in which we hear from a prophet named Isaiah, written some 2,700 years ago. Today we’re in the latter part of Isaiah, which is significant. The first part of Isaiah—chapters 1 to 35—contain a lot of doom and gloom. The second part of Isaiah—chapters 40-66—give us a lot more hope. Isaiah has a lot to say to Judah. He accuses them of sin. He calls them to repentance. He talks about God’s judgment. But he also provides hope: hope that God isn’t done with them, and that he will bring the restoration that we need.
We’re in the hopeful part of the book of Isaiah today. In the passage we’re looking at today, God gives us a glimpse of what we’re waiting for. We need to hear this.
Two Descriptions
So what is our future like? You’re going to like this. Two things:
It will be a place of joy.
For behold, I create new heavensand a new earth,and the former things shall not be rememberedor come into mind.But be glad and rejoice foreverin that which I create;for behold, I create Jerusalem to be a joy,and her people to be a gladness.I will rejoice in Jerusalemand be glad in my people;no more shall be heard in it the sound of weepingand the cry of distress.(Isaiah 65:17-19)
I want you to notice a couple of things. First, Isaiah says that God will create a new heavens and a new earth. The new creation will not mean the end of the earth. It will mean the recreation of the heavens and the earth. We need to get rid of the idea of a disembodied, floating existence somewhere out there. Think about the recreation of the world, except as it should be.
The Christian hope is not merely that someday we and our loved ones will die and go to be with Jesus. Instead, the Christian hope is that our departure from this world is just the first leg of a journey that is round-trip. We will not remain forever with God in heaven, for God will bring heaven down to us.(Michael Wittmer)
What is it like in this remade heaven and earth? Isaiah says that the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. “About five seconds into this new world, you and I will turn to one another and say, ‘Cancer, terrorism—what were they? Hmmm. Can’t seem to remember. No matter. Here we go!’” (Ray Ortlund). Now I can get behind that.
But that’s not even the best part. It will not just be a place where bad things are forgotten, it will be a place of joy. Verse 18 envisions this new heaven and new earth with a new Jerusalem at the center, and that it will be filled with joy. In this new earth, we get what we want and need most: God, and it will make us very, very happy. It will be what we’ve longed for all this time. The new creation will be a place of inexpressible joy.
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 Darwin envisioned the momentous ontological change from ape to man occurring gradually by way of “transitional forms.” Pressing far too heavily on time itself as a causal agent, he advanced the untestable hypothesis that the changes will have taken place during the billions of years separating our present day from the supposed time of the first appearance of a simian species on our planet. Since this theory is beyond the reach of any possible empirical test, it requires alternative evidential back-up. Unfortunately for Darwin there is a dearth of any fossil evidence establishing the claimed evolutionary “missing links,” a large lacuna which Darwin was aware of but still hoped might be remedied in finds after his day (vainly to date, it must be added, and the notorious Piltdown fraud only served to underscore the evidentiary gap)1.

It is self-evident that any dispute concerning Darwin must have far-reaching implications for society beyond the world of the biological sciences because Darwin’s strictly materialist theories of human origins and evolution came to oust the idea of the world as a divinely created and providentially directed planet. Hence, if a group of eminent biologists and other scientists could no longer support the claims on which those profound inferences depend (and on which, rightly or wrongly, the worldview of many in the West rests), this must incontestably be a matter of some existential moment, and, I concluded, deserving of far more than the cursory examination I had given to the subject heretofore. This inspired me to make amends for my previous inattention by making the attempt to unpack both the scientific evidence for Darwinism and the wider ramifications of its acceptance by Western society as a whole.
A Surprising Journey
Since biology specialists had, in a manner of speaking, been largely left to mark their own homework for upwards of 160 years, an independent audit, I felt, was overdue, especially since I came to perceive the field of evolutionary research as being distorted by a considerable ideological bias (with some honorable exceptions). Albeit a complete outsider to the biological guild, I came to see myself in the role of foreman of a jury in a technical legal trial tasked with weighing up complicated evidence with as much insight and impartiality as I could muster.
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