Ascension of Christ Sermon Ideas
The Ascension refers to the bodily departure of Jesus from this earth and his return to the right hand of God the Father Almighty. Following the forty days after his resurrection when Jesus appeared regularly to his disciples, Jesus was lifted up and out of their sight, leaving them the promise of the coming Spirit, who would empower them to continue to minister in his name. Jesus's ascension is also a preview of his later return, when he will come back from heaven to make all things new. In our worship services—through song, prayer, sermon, and sacrament—we praise the ascended Christ.
What does the Bible say about Christ's ascension?
Use these prefiltered searches to craft sermons and prayers, offer pastoral care, or plan worship services around the theme of Christ's ascension.
- Psalm 47:5–7, God has gone up with a shout
- Luke 24:50–53, Jesus ascends to heaven
- John 16:7, Jesus predicts that he will go away and that an Advocate will be sent
- Acts 1:6–11, shortly before his ascension, Jesus says the time of his return is not for us to know
- Ephesians 4:7–10, when Jesus ascended on high, he led captivity itself into captivity
- Colossians 3:1–4, seek things that are above, where Christ is
Sermon ideas about Christ's ascension
Ascension benefits
Sermons about Christ's ascension can point out that, traditionally, the church has taught that despite the disciples' initial disappointment that Jesus had left them, his departure was actually for the good of the church (as Jesus himself predicted in John 16:7). Among the benefits of the ascension for believers are the following:
Jesus pleads our cause with the Father, serving as our true Mediator in answering our prayers and advocating for the church in its ongoing mission on earth.
The fact that Jesus's own body is now in heaven assures us that one day our own resurrected bodies will likewise be in the presence of God in the New Creation—Jesus's bodily presence at God's right hand is like a sneak preview of what we will enjoy one day.
Above all, Jesus is able to send the Holy Spirit to the church—which happened initially with dramatic power ten days after the ascension on the day the church calls Pentecost—and that Spirit empowers ministry, gives needed and varied gifts to God's people to carry out God's mission, and thickens the faith of all believers in order to enable them to endure with patience the trials, temptations, and pain that still attend them as they live in the already and the not yet of God's coming kingdom.
Heaven "above"?
Sermons about Christ's ascension can also acknowledge that people across the centuries have poked fun of the Ascension as reflecting a naïve cosmology that pictures heaven as quite literally above us (with hell being below us). It seems silly, some allege, to envision Jesus's needing to go up in order to return to God the Father. Because we now understand the nature of outer space and know that no particular spiritual dimensions are literally either above or below us, some believe the Ascension is a mythic story. Indeed, some allege that this story was a convenient way for the disciples to explain why Jesus was no longer around when, in fact, the obvious reason for his absence was that he was quite nicely dead and buried.
But although the nature of Jesus's departure as depicted by Luke may indeed have been staged by God to tie in with the cosmology of the disciples—God often condescends to our level of comprehension, after all—that does not vitiate the reality that Jesus did enter bodily into the dimension in which God exists, beyond the physical cosmos we can see and touch.
Despite our superior knowledge of our place in space, most people still refer to heaven as "up" and hell as "down," to good things as being above us and bad things below. Happy people are "on top of the world" and sad people are "in the pits." Successful people reach the "pinnacle" of their careers; unsuccessful people "bottom out" or are on "a downward slope." So perhaps even today, picturing the Lord Jesus Christ as "high and lifted up" in the heavenly realms is just another way of conveying the positive nature of Christian hope and faith in Christ in ways that everyone can understand and relate to.
The session of Christ
In sermons about the Ascension, we might highlight an often overlooked and undertaught component of Christian theology: the session of Christ— hat is, the idea that Christ is now seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From this position, Christ already rules the galaxies as the true cosmic King and Lord.
Another overlooked feature of this doctrine is that Christ is physically and bodily present in the heavenly realms. Once Christ assumed a real human nature in the womb of Mary, this nature became a permanent part of his Person. This is also why many traditional Lord's Supper liturgies include the introductory line "lift up your hearts," as we envision the Holy Spirit elevating our spirits/hearts to the right hand of God, because that is where we can physically commune with the risen and ascended Christ.