God does not call us to work “till Jesus comes” as the old song says, so that we finally collapse into our graves. Ending strong happens when we keep receiving the creative work of God in our lives, right to the end, when it is God who brings it all to completion.

Prayer - Good Shepherd of Our Souls, bring us all to the end of the story of fear and dread, that we may use every fleeting day as an expression of thanksgiving for Your salvation, which we believe will unfold in our lives, and in our world, right to the end. In the Name of our Savior and Perfecter, Jesus Christ, Amen.

There comes a time when everything must end. Jobs end, school ends, relationships end, and even marriages end one way or the other. Political campaigns end, but none too quickly. Parenting seems to never end, but childhood does, all too quickly it seems. Eventually life ends.

The ending of the story is perhaps the part that counts most. It is at the end that the tensions of the story get resolved and the moral of the story is made clear. When they don’t, we feel gypped or angry. There is nothing worse than reading a novel that doesn’t end well, or to endure a three hour movie that ends abruptly or without a conclusion. And a conversation, or a sermon, that seems to go in circles without ever coming to a point like a plane that just keeps circling over LAX can be a terrible frustration.

Books have endings, but so does each chapter in the book. Each chapter of a job, or a relationship, or a life also has chapters. There is a chapter about childhood, a chapter about leaving home and moving from one city to the next. They way you end the chapter will provide the moral to that story, and dramatically affect the experience in the next chapter. In the end, the final curtain is drawn, and it will be what you did at the end that people will most remember. So, regardless of how the early chapters turned out, you want to make sure that you have a strong ending.

Today we come to the end of Luke’s account of The Spirit’s work in the early church. As far as we know, these also are the last words written in Scripture about Paul’s life. It is a curious ending to a long book of history, story and theology – because it doesn’t really end. It begs for a sequel. But what we know about the end of the book, and the end of Paul’s life, can guide us in our efforts as we bring to completion the various chapters of our own lives, hopefully with a strong ending. I believe we can gain some insights from this text today about how to end strong.

First, you can end strong when you live in community. Even as he was walking up the Appian Way from the seaport toward Rome, here in a strange place and a sea away from his home, a community of believers traveled to meet him. “On seeing them, Paul thanked God and took courage.” (Acts 28:15) We have seen one common theme throughout the book of Acts: Paul was no lone ranger. He not only had travel companions, but everywhere he went he made sure that he participated in the life of a spiritual community of Jesus Christ. At the most threatening and lonely moments of Paul’s life, his life was surrounded by people God provided to remind him that he was not alone, and to give him courage to face the next chapter.

It wasn't always easy to be in this community. There were many conflicts along the way, and a great deal of this conflict was with the church. But Paul took community seriously, seriously enough to recognize that conflict only happened because they all took the gospel seriously, and the community was generally to be honored over the conflicts. That is why he never walked away. Not even the Apostle Paul could understand himself apart from the community of faith whose life was bound up with his own.

Living in community goes against every instinct that we have, and particularly the instinct to do it all ourselves. When we give ourselves to the community of Christ, our ethical, personal and family decisions are inextricably woven together with the decisions and faith of this community, and The Christ community at large. If you are thinking about retiring or moving away from your community, from the people who know you best and who have shaped your life, to some paradise, you first need to ask yourself how it will affect the community of people you are with now, and how you will participate with a circle of believers in the place you are going.

It is not that you can’t retire or move away – several people from our church have done so this year with godly and good reasons – but they all asked themselves how their decision would impact this community and the one in the next place. Moving churches, whether across the country or across town, is not a lone ranger decision made by you alone. Your life is woven together with a community of faith, and it is that community that will continue to sustain your faith and life wherever you may go. You certainly can move. But you cannot move to a place . . . you can only move to a people, a family, specifically the family of Jesus Christ. If you are coming toward the last stage of life, do not put yourself in a lonely place. We are meant for community, and living in community is the only way you can end strong.

Perhaps retirement and death seem a long way off for you, and you are in the half-time of life. In his wonderful book called 'Half Time', Bob Buffo distinguishes between those who strive for success and those who strive for significance. If you have spent the first half of life striving for success, then your agenda has been to accumulate much wealth, power or security as you can from the community. Now is the time to start becoming a good steward of that success; start now to change the agenda of your life to doing something for the community in your life.

Secondly, you end strong by living and proclaiming the reign of God. Luke ends his account of the life of Paul, and his Acts of the Apostles saying that Paul lived in Rome for two years at his own expense and “welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the Kingdom of God.” (Acts 28:30). To fully appreciate how Luke ends his account, we have to remember that the story of Acts began with the disciples asking Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when You will restore the kingdom of Israel?” (Luke 1:6). The last verse of that story then ends with us hearing that Paul was proclaiming the Kingdom. However, it was not exactly the kingdom the early disciples were expecting. In this Kingdom, as we see in Acts, there is room for not only Israel, but also for the Gentiles and people they would have never expected. That is what happens when we commit to the dreams of God. God’s dreams are much bigger than we anticipate, and they have a lot of surprises waiting in them.

Throughout the book of Acts, we have been shocked into an awareness over and over that God’s grace often extends to people and circumstances beyond the reaches of what we thought was possible so that we find God in all kinds of unexpected places. That is how it is with God’s Kingdom. Because He reigns and is sovereign, God will constantly surprise you with His providence and mercies.

During the last two years of his life, Paul was under house arrest and chained to a Roman guard. He would talk to everyone who came to him about the Kingdom of God, both Jew and Gentiles alike. He “welcomed all who came to him.” (Acts 28:30) I feel sorry for the poor guard who was chained to him. He heard a lot of preaching in those two years.

Just as Jesus had promised before he ascended to the heavens, the Gospel had now been proclaimed “first in Jerusalem, then in Judea, then Samaria, and [now] to the uttermost parts of the earth.” (Acts 1:8). Paul’s life was a living narrative of the inclusive and universal reach of the Kingdom of God. One of the key themes of Acts is this one principle: There is no place or people where God does not desire to reign. Do you see now how the end of the story interprets the rest of the story? The story of Jesus and the church begins with a question, “When will the Kingdom come?” Jesus says it will come with a promise, and “you will be my witnesses” to the ends of the earth. Now here, at the end of the story, Paul is in Rome fulfilling the promise and laying one more stone in the foundation of a Kingdom that will continue to spread until the whole world kneels before Jesus Christ and declares Him the Lord of All.

That is how the story ends. That is how Paul’s story ends too. Now how about you? Are you going to use the end of your life to fulfill the promise of your early life? At the end of life, will we be saying that you fulfilled your baptismal vows to God? Did you grow in faith over your years, did you surrender your life again and again to Jesus Christ, were you still as consumed by the dreams of God at the end of life as you were at the beginning?

The third way that you end strong is to fulfill your mission with boldness. What an amazing ending to this great story. Don’t forget that Paul has spent the last four and a half years of his life in prison. Along the way, he has been shipwrecked, snake bitten, betrayed and even attacked by mobs. And yet, what is his epitaph? “Nothing could hinder him from completing his mission.”

If you have a mission that is a great mission in your life, do not be surprised if you encounter some obstacles along the way. In fact, you had better choose a mission worthy of obstacles. But if it is a mission of Jesus, not even the gates of hell can prevail against it.

What has you imprisoned right now? Confusion about which way to go? Declining health? Loneliness? A broken heart? A broken family? These cannot hinder you from ending strong. Maybe you have committed a sin that has filled your heart with guilt. Wasted a lot of time on things that don’t matter? According to Paul in Romans 8, none of those things . . . nothing in life or in death . . . can keep you from ending strong.

The only thing that can keep you from ending strong is fear. The end of Paul’s life was characterized by boldness and not by fear. It is fear that focuses us more on the hindrances and obstacles we face than on Jesus Christ. Fear paralyzes us and prevents us from taking risk. I particularly find that people up in years often live every day with dread and anxiety about what is around the corner for them. They no longer take any risks; they have lost their sense of mission and adventure. You cannot end strong if you do not live boldly, even at the end.

You would think that a goal-oriented Type A guy like Paul would have gone crazy spending four and a half years of his life imprisoned. But it was during this time in his life that he wrote his epistles to the Philippians, Ephesians and Colossians. There is no fear in them, no anger, anxiety, or defensiveness. Paul spends his words in these letters writing about “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus his Lord” (Philippians 3:8); “In Him, we have been blessed with every spiritual blessing” (Ephesians 1:3); “In Him, all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17); and “He who begun a good work in you will bring it to completion.” (Philippians 1:6).

How can Paul be fearless? Why is he able to end his life strong enough to overcome every hindrance? How does he keep on mission and with great boldness? Because he knows his life was never about what he accomplished. Life is always about the good work that Jesus is doing in you, through you, for those around you, to the very end. That is the story of the book of Acts. It is Jesus working through His Spirit in the church and in the world that will accomplish all God wants for you, and for us.

You can live boldly when you know that your success doesn’t depend on your hard work, getting it right, or leaving a legacy. In fact, it has little to do with you at all. When you realize that, you are free to live each day lightly and boldly, trusting The One who will one day bring to perfection all that you are and have done, in Jesus Christ, The One in whom all things are coming together. That is how you end strong.

The book of Acts has no real ending, or not the ending we would expect. Nothing is resolved. But I believe Luke did not end the book of Acts with a nice resolution because this book never was about the Acts of the apostles (that is just a title given to the book by the church in later centuries), or about the Acts of Paul. This book is about the Acts of The Spirit of God in the world, and the Acts of God’s Spirit have not ended. God is still living out His life and dreams in His church, and wherever the church continues to trust and walk in the power of that Spirit, so God’s Kingdom ever increases until the story finally ends. There is no ending to this story because the story goes on and on, and now even includes you.

So when will the Kingdom of God come? It is coming right here, right now, as more than two thousand years later, this church is a witness to the reign of God and to a life lived with purpose and not fear. “You will be my witnesses . . . “ And we are. The Kingdom of God is here. And the story goes on.....

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