Easter 2024: Living Hope
Notes
Transcript
Handout
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: 1 Peter 1:3-5
N:
Welcome
Welcome
Good morning and again, happy Easter morning! We’ve already had a wonderful time of celebration, fellowship, and worship today, between the sunrise service, the great breakfast, our Life Bible Study groups, and now in this service with baptism and musical worship… it has been a great day in the Lord!
And I know that there are many here in the room and online whom I haven’t met yet, guests of the Eastern Hills Baptist Church family this morning. Thank you for being a part of this time of focusing on the resurrection of Jesus together. I’m Pastor Bill Connors, and it is my privilege and joy to get to serve in this church body. If you’re a guest in the room today, would you please take just a moment during my message today to fill out a welcome card? You’ll find them in the back of the pew in front of you. We want to be able to send you a note thanking you for your visit and to pray for you. You can get those cards back to us in one of two ways: First, if you’re in a little bit of a hurry when service is over, you can just drop that card in the offering boxes that are next to the doors as you leave. But if you have a minute, I would like to invite you to bring that card down front to me when service is over, so I can meet you for a moment and give you a small gift to thank you for being with us today. I promise it won’t take long.
If you’re online and visiting with us today, I’d appreciate it if you could just fill out the contact card that you’ll find on our website at the bottom of our “I’m New” tab.
I’d like to take a moment to thank our Welcome Ministry team this morning. These folks are just so helpful and friendly and a blessing to our church members and guests alike. Thank you, Welcome Team for your ministry.
Announcements
Announcements
AAEO ($10,327.14, goal $18,000)
AAEO Video: Jefferson & Carol Hernandez, Iglesia Biblica Campo Blanco in Sterling, Virginia
Opening
Opening
You know, I think that one thing that is in short supply for many people right now is hope. With as polarized as our world has become and continues to become, with the self-imposed isolation that many feel from trying to maintain most relationships via online channels like social media, and with seemingly looming issues like artificial intelligence, inflation, and the economy, it might feel sometimes as if part of the human condition is either to be devoid of hope or to constantly have to place our hope in unreliable places.
But I want to tell you this morning that this is not the case! Sure, those things might be actual concerns, but that doesn’t mean that we are without a reliable, constant source of hope. Joe spoke about the hope that we have in the cross on Friday—because Jesus has finished all that He came to do to provide the means of forgiveness and salvation for sinful humanity. This morning at the sunrise service, Rich spoke about Cleopas’s “aha” moment, and the confidence that we can have about the resurrection because of the evidence that we have at our disposal.
So now, open your Bibles or your Bible apps to our focal passage this morning, 1 Peter 1:3-5, and let’s stand as we are able to in honor of God’s holy Word, as we consider the immense hope that we have because of what God has done for us through Jesus’s resurrection:
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead 4 and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. 5 You are being guarded by God’s power through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.
PRAYER (Iglesia Biblica Campo Blanco, Jefferson & Carol Hernandez)
There are things that happen in our lives that fill us with a sense of hope for the future. Just a couple of months ago, my first grandchild was born. He is just the cutest thing!
Here’s a picture of the first time I held him.
And as crazy as it might sound, the simple fact of holding that little guy in the hospital was a moment that gave me a new sense of hope. Here was this tiny brand new little human, with his entire life out in front of him. And as I thought about that, I also realized that my whole life had been a part of that moment, that as I stood there holding him he was so very real, you know?, and now as he went out into his future, he carried a part of me and my history into the future with him. This new birth prompted a new sense of hope—not a wishful thinking kind of hope—a confidence and peace for the future kind of hope.
But even the hope that I felt in that moment doesn’t compare with the hope that is available to us in Jesus. This is because, while in my grandson’s birth I could connect my past, my present, and my future together, the wonder of the Gospel is that God in His incredible mercy and love for us offers a greater kind of hope than even a newborn grandson can. We see this in the first chapter of Peter’s first epistle, or letter.
The apostle Peter was writing to believers who had been persecuted and scattered throughout the Roman empire. Their life was hard. Hope was difficult come by, and even more difficult to hold on to. But Peter didn’t open by saying those things. Instead, he opened with praise, because true hope is found not in the circumstances that we find ourselves in, but in the relationship that we have with God through faith in Jesus. Notice how Peter begins the body of his letter:
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead
“Blessed be” is another way of saying “praise to,” and the focus of Peter’s praise is “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Peter makes two things perfectly clear in this identification: that Jesus is the Son of God, and that He is our Lord. Then he proceeds into the “why” of his praise: Because of His great mercy, He has given us new birth. Not a biological new birth like my grandson, but a spiritual new birth.
Jesus said in John chapter 3 that undergoing this spiritual new birth, or being born again, was necessary for someone to see and experience the kingdom of God:
3 Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
In our focal passage this morning, Peter went on to say that this new birth was given to us “through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” In fact, we find that Peter describes three things that God’s power as displayed in Jesus’s resurrection does, has done, or will do: Jesus’s resurrection has provided us a living hope, it secures us a permanent inheritance, and it promises us a certain salvation.
1: Jesus’s resurrection has provided us a living hope.
1: Jesus’s resurrection has provided us a living hope.
The first of these three things that Peter referred to took place in the past, on the very first Easter Sunday morning. Jesus, who had been beaten, crucified, and buried in a borrowed tomb on Friday, overcame death and rose to life again on Sunday. This is why we celebrate this day!
The Gospels record the facts of Jesus’s life, death, burial, and resurrection. That first Easter, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and others went to the tomb where Jesus had lain, but found the stone rolled away and were questioned by two angels:
Luke 24:5–7 (CSB)
5 So the women were terrified and bowed down to the ground. “Why are you looking for the living among the dead?” asked the men. 6 “He is not here, but he has risen! Remember how he spoke to you when he was still in Galilee, 7 saying, ‘It is necessary that the Son of Man be betrayed into the hands of sinful men, be crucified, and rise on the third day’?”
The claim of the resurrection of Jesus is not simply some interesting “side issue” of the Christian faith that has no meaning. No, the resurrection is absolutely essential to the message of Christianity, and the entire basis of the Christian’s confidence in our salvation. If Jesus did not overcome death, then Christianity is pointless. Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians, as Rich also shared this morning during the Sunrise Service:
17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is worthless; you are still in your sins. 18 Those, then, who have fallen asleep in Christ have also perished. 19 If we have put our hope in Christ for this life only, we should be pitied more than anyone.
But Jesus actually did rise again, and since He did, then we can trust that Jesus is who He said that He is: the very Son of God, because He has proven it through overcoming death. Look at Romans 1:2-4:
2 which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, 3 concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh 4 and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord,
The overall message of the Bible is that God created us to be in relationship with Him, but we rebelled against His will and plan—we sinned—and our sins separate us from God, the Source of life. So we died spiritually because of our sin. This is why we need a new spiritual birth. We cannot rescue ourselves from death. So because of God’s great mercy and love, He sent His Son Jesus Christ to pay the penalty that we owe—the death that we owe. If we will surrender ourselves to His saving work, no longer trying to save ourselves, then our sins are forgiven because the penalty has already been paid. And since Jesus overcame death, then we will overcome death as well.
Paul explained it this way in Romans 6:8-11:
8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him, 9 because we know that Christ, having been raised from the dead, will not die again. Death no longer rules over him. 10 For the death he died, he died to sin once for all time; but the life he lives, he lives to God. 11 So, you too consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Back in our focal passage, Peter could write about the new birth that we experience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead as having provided us with a living hope because if Jesus defeated death on that first Easter, then we will also overcome death if we are His by faith. To put it as simply as I can:
If we have an everliving Savior, then we also have an everliving hope.
This means that if we belong to Jesus, then our hope isn’t dead—It’s not based on futile things that can’t deliver.
If we’re in Christ, then we should see ourselves as dead to sin, but alive to God. Sin can’t rescue us from itself. Sin can’t ultimately give us hope, because sin will always let us down.
Not only that, but there are all kinds of places that we go looking for lasting hope that are going to fall short of providing it. People look for hope in relationships, entertainment, work, money, education, politics, and even in religious observance. But the only place that we’re going to find a hope that will last into eternity is in a relationship with God through faith in the eternally-risen Lord Jesus Christ. You can have this hope today. Right now, right where you are, believe in Jesus’s death and resurrection for your forgiveness and eternal life—your living hope.
What an encouragement this must have been to the believers that Peter was writing to, who had been persecuted, exiled, and dispersed. Their hope was not dead. Because of Jesus’s resurrection, their hope was a living hope. And Jesus’s resurrection in the past has provided us with this same living hope today. But not only that! And so we come to our second point:
2: Jesus’s resurrection secures us a permanent inheritance.
2: Jesus’s resurrection secures us a permanent inheritance.
The believers to whom Peter addressed his letter had been forced from their jobs, their homes, their communities, and even their families because of their trust in Jesus. We might think that “that was then,” and those things don’t happen anymore. We would be horribly wrong. In many places in the world, a person who believes the Gospel and surrenders to Jesus will face much the same kind of persecution—perhaps even death. Even here in the U.S., sometimes those who turn to Jesus out of a Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish background are disowned and disinherited by their families.
So what a message of hope we find in what Peter wrote next:
4 and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.
Throughout the Old Testament, the concept of the inheritance was an important one. When Israel came into the Promised Land, each tribe was given an allotment of land as an inheritance, and that inheritance was passed down through generation after generation, always supposed to stay with the family it was originally given to. Even if a family had to sell their land for a time, the concept of the inheritance was so protected that all land had to be given back to the original family line every 50 years, called the Year of Jubilee.
Even today, we understand the idea of an inheritance. But Peter here is speaking about more than land or money or valuable items that might have been sitting on a shelf or in a china cabinet for decades. It’s possible that Peter was thinking of what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount:
19 “Don’t store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves don’t break in and steal.
Like we saw in the first point, everything in the world will eventually fail. Nothing material lasts forever. But if we are in Christ, then we receive an “inheritance” that Peter describes in very permanent terms.
First, Peter says that this inheritance is “imperishable.” This literally means that it cannot die—it will never perish. Another way of saying this is that our inheritance is immortal. This same word is used to describe God’s immortal nature in Paul’s first letter to Timothy:
17 Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
Paul even explained to the church at Corinth that this inheritance will include not just a new birth spiritually, but physically as well!
50 What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor can corruption inherit incorruption. 51 Listen, I am telling you a mystery: We will not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, 52 in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we will be changed. 53 For this corruptible body must be clothed with incorruptibility, and this mortal body must be clothed with immortality.
Everywhere the words “incorruption” or “incorruptibility” appears in this passage, it holds the same meaning. When we fully come into our inheritance, we will be given a new physical body as a part of it, according to Scripture! My shoulders are really looking forward to that part.
Second, our inheritance in Christ is said to be “undefiled.” It is not and cannot be stained by any kind of moral impurity or evil. It is completely shielded from the ravages of sin that create such difficulties for us in this world. This same word is used to describe Jesus’s own sinlessness:
26 For this is the kind of high priest we need: holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.
Third, the inheritance that we are promised is “unfading.” It is unaffected by time: it will never tarnish or diminish. It will never be less glorious or valuable than it is at this very moment. Inflation cannot hurt it, and the stock market has nothing to do with it.
David Walls, in his commentary on 1 Peter, summarizes this very well:
Our inheritance is death-proof, sin-proof, and time-proof.
—David Walls, Holman New Testament Commentary, I & II Peter, I, II & III John, Jude
This inheritance that we are promised was placed in the past, but it exists in the present, as Peter writes that it is currently being “kept (or “guarded”) in heaven for you.” There is no chance that thieves could steal it away. And it waits for those who are in Christ Jesus, even right now. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t get to enjoy any of it right now!
Incredibly, we have been given a down payment on our inheritance if we are saved—the presence of God’s Holy Spirit in our lives. Paul wrote in his epistle to the Ephesians:
14 The Holy Spirit is the down payment of our inheritance, until the redemption of the possession, to the praise of his glory.
Believers get to enjoy the wonder of walking with God day by day because of His presence in our lives through His Spirit. According to Jesus, the Spirit remains with and in the believer:
17 He is the Spirit of truth. The world is unable to receive him because it doesn’t see him or know him. But you do know him, because he remains with you and will be in you.
So the Holy Spirit is the down payment of this inheritance, until such time as we are fully redeemed or delivered, which Peter explains as our third and final point from our focal passage this morning:
3: Jesus’s resurrection promises us a certain salvation.
3: Jesus’s resurrection promises us a certain salvation.
Part of the beauty of the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ is that we don’t have to be uncertain about our salvation. The Bible promises us that if we are in Christ, we are saved as a matter of fact, as surely as Jesus’s resurrection is a matter of fact. However, at the moment we haven’t fully realized all of the results of that salvation. Those come later, according to Peter:
5 You are being guarded by God’s power through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.
For now, however, we are (like our inheritance) being “guarded” by God’s power through faith. I think that Jesus explained this best in John 10:
27 My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all. No one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”
If we are in God’s hands through faith, then we can be absolutely certain that we are saved! Because of the love of God shown through the death of Jesus Christ, there is nothing and no one who can separate us from His love. In Romans 8, Paul wrote:
38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Consider this list. Not death or life. Not angels (spiritual powers) or rulers (human powers). Not things that are or things that will be. Not anything that might be done to us. Not height or depth (we cannot get physically away from God). And no other created thing at all can separate us from God’s love in Christ. I think this list is pretty comprehensive! We are being guarded through faith until the day when the fullness of our salvation will be revealed.
Paul would encourage Timothy with these words:
2 Timothy 1:12b (CSB)
12b But I am not ashamed, because I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able to guard what has been entrusted to me until that day.
The Bible promises that there will come a day when Jesus will return to receive to Himself all who belong to Him by faith. Jesus Himself promised that He has prepared a place for us, and that He will come again:
2 In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? 3 If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, so that where I am you may be also.
Jesus died and rose in the past. Yes, He currently sits at the right hand of God the Father in heaven. And yes, He is coming back in the future, and He will make all things new.
3 Then I heard a loud voice from the throne: Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity, and he will live with them. They will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them and will be their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; grief, crying, and pain will be no more, because the previous things have passed away. 5 Then the one seated on the throne said, “Look, I am making everything new.” He also said, “Write, because these words are faithful and true.”
What a wonderful truth to celebrate on Easter morning!
Closing
Closing
Through Jesus’s resurrection, God has given us such great and precious promises! Have you been given a new birth spiritually? Do you have a living hope? Have you believed the Gospel, trusting in Jesus as your Lord and Savior, giving up trying to save yourself? Are you confident that you have an inheritance being kept in heaven for you? It’s only through Jesus that that inheritance exists. Do you know that you are saved this morning?
In a moment, we’re going to have what is called a time of invitation. During this time, Joe & Kerry, Trevor, and Rich will join me at the front, and the band will come back up to the platform to lead us in a song of response. During this time, you are invited to respond to the work of God in your life this morning.
Have you believed the Gospel for the first time today? I invite you to come and share with one of us that God has saved you today, so the church family can celebrate with you! If you’re online, and you’ve surrendered to Jesus today, please send me an email to bill@ehbc.org to let me know, so that we can help you as you start this faith journey.
Perhaps you’ve been a believer for a while, but you’ve never been baptized. You saw George baptized earlier as a testimony of his faith. Maybe it’s your turn next to tell the church and the world that you belong to Jesus. Come and let us know that also.
I know that there are many in the room this morning who are already baptized believers, and have been thinking about formal church membership with this church family. You’re also invited to respond to the work that God is doing in your life through Eastern Hills, to come and present yourself for membership if we’ve already talked. If you are interested in formal church membership and we haven’t met yet, come and let us know so that we can schedule a time to get together, share testimonies with each other, answer any questions you have about the church, and go over our Statement of Belief together.
You can also use this time of invitation to respond to God in prayer, either in your pew or at the steps or with one of us if you’d like.
And finally, as the Lord leads, you can use this time of invitation to give your tithes and offerings to the Lord. You can give online using the website, mobile app, or text-to-give (text EHBCGIVE to 888-364-GIVE). If you’d rather give physically, you can place your offerings in the boxes by the doors as we leave after our benediction.
Respond to the Lord this morning as He calls you.
PRAYER
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Bible reading (Num 26-27, Psalm 90)
No Pastor’s Study tonight
Prayer Meeting this Wednesday
Office closed tomorrow
The Case for Easter on the table in the foyer
Instructions for guests
Benediction
Benediction
21 Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. 22 Since you have purified yourselves by your obedience to the truth, so that you show sincere brotherly love for each other, from a pure heart love one another constantly, 23 because you have been born again—not of perishable seed but of imperishable—through the living and enduring word of God.