Find Hope

We are beginning a sermon series today called “Seek and Find.” We are allowing 1 Peter to help us focus on ways that we can seek a closer relationship with God.

This week we seek to find out how humanity can find hope in the world we live in today. Our scripture comes from 1 Peter 1:3-9.

3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In 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 can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, 5 who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 8 Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, 9 for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Let us pray…

We spend much of our lives striving to find hope in our world. It is often when a person can no longer find any sense of hope in their lives that they begin to spiral and try to figure out what they may be missing in their lives

The surface answer to our topic for today is easy. We are able to find hope in the world we live in today through Jesus. In fact, some would argue that the only way to find true hope and meaning in our lives is through Jesus.

I call this the surface answer because it goes much deeper than just Jesus. It goes to who Jesus is and what God continues to do for each person that walks the earth. God becomes the only way for us to discover hope that will always remain.

(Transition)

This should remind those of us that are here today and online as a part of the You Tube worship experience that if we are followers of Jesus, we have something to offer to this world where many people are feeling a sense of pain, disappointment, and often disillusionment.

We have Jesus. We have the one who as our scripture points out has given us “new birth into a living hope.” We have a hope that will not disappoint during our times of struggle. We have a hope that never leaves us.

We have this hope because there is someone greater than us who loves us enough that he is willing to always be there for us. We have a hope that we should share with this hurting world. We have a hope in Jesus.

(Transition)

When we look at the definition of faith as it is offered from the writer of Hebrews, we find that hope is what our belief in God and Jesus as our Lord and Savior is centered around. The writer states that “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

We spoke of this last week during our Easter Sunday celebration. Hope for followers of Jesus is not about a desire for something to occur. Hope for followers of Jesus should be about expectation. Faith in Jesus is the “confidence” that our expectations are going to be fulfilled.

(Transition)

Faith is hope personified. It is us living out a hope in Jesus through our desire to become closer to him. It is through our confidence in Jesus as our Lord and Savior that leads us to want to get to know him better and to serve him.

This is why it can be difficult to become a follower of Jesus. They must find a way to have this hope and also to find assurance in what they cannot see in order to become a follower of Jesus. That’s why God must be a part of this process.

It is through God using us to help someone discover an understanding of God and what was done for us through Jesus that can eventually lead someone to make the decision that they are willing to have Jesus become their Lord and Savior.

(Transition)

God can help those around us realize and us remember what Jesus calls himself in our first reading, “the way, the truth, and the life.” This is one of the clearest statements Jesus makes on how he wants to be viewed by those first early followers and us.

We could change his statement that Jesus is the way to hope. The truth about hope. And how we live our lives with hope. Jesus and hope work together in our lives to help us create a life that will be better for us and more pleasing to God.

(Transition)

We begin this journey with Jesus the first time that we see Jesus as “the way” or as our main scripture states it is our inheritance. It is an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. The English Standard translation says it this way. It is “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading”

This translation to me offers a clearer picture on the magnitude of what Paul is attempting to say. Our inheritance can’t be destroyed, can’t be ruined, and always remains the same. The hope offered to us by Jesus is unchangeable and unremovable as long as we are willing to accept it.

We have available to us and to those around us something that can’t be said about anything else around. We have a hope that can be trusted. We follow a God that doesn’t remove himself from our midst. As the song says “on solid ground I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.”

Jesus is “the way” to this inheritance. This ability to live on earth with the Holy Spirit to guide and direct us and after our deaths to be able to reside with our God forever. We receive the best of both worlds. God’s help on earth and God’s company in Heaven.

(Transition)

We also should see Jesus as “the truth.” Scripture is our link between humanity and the hope offered by Jesus. We find that hope throughout the New Testament but if we listen closely to what is being said in the Old Testament, we can also find that hope.

We spent Advent, our time leading up to Christmas, looking at Isaiah and the ways he referred to Jesus in the text. We find throughout the Old Testament a belief that God will be there for his people. We have the proof that over and over again God showed up and helped the Israelites overcome obstacles around them.

It is through spending time in the scriptures that we are able to become more connected to God. The scriptures can lead us into a greater understanding of who God is and the hope that he desires to offer to each one of us.

Scripture helps us keep the hope for what is and what is to come. We find God at work in the past. We hear how God is at work currently in our lives. And we are able to be reminded of an expectation for the future. A future that includes residing with God forever.

(Transition)

Jesus is also the life. We are able to be who we are as followers of Jesus because of the example and what Jesus did for each one of us. We have scripture able to help guide us along on the way that we should choose to live our lives.

Jesus shows us that we are to be people of compassion. We see his interactions with especially the lepers. A leper was an outcast for a reason. They had a skin disease that could be shared with someone else.

It is understandable why people would keep their distance, but they were also considered less than by society because of this disease they didn’t ask for but received. Jesus chose to treat the leper as anyone else. It was when he would heal a leper that he was able to bring them back into the community.

(Transition)

The way he treated the Gentiles and Samaritans. These two groups were looked down upon by Jewish society. We have Jesus entering into their areas and performing healings and sermons. Jesus treated those outside of Judaism as equals for the most part.

The way that Jesus interacted with these two groups of people show us that there is no one who is unworthy to be loved. It is why our mission statement has us loving all people. We are to look at all people as people loved by God.

(Transition)

That is a lot of information focused on the understanding of what hope in Jesus should be about. It should be about having the faith to follow God. It should be about a willingness to seek knowledge about God. It should be about seeing Jesus for all he is to us: the way, the truth, and the life.

But when we head back to our main scripture, we receive some additional reminders on what hope in Jesus does for us. It tells us that we are shielded by God’s power. Our hope in Jesus offers us a sense of protection from the world around us.

(Transition)

We spoke earlier about looking towards the Old Testament. We find in the Exodus how God protected the people. He first allowed for them to exit Egypt through forcing Pharaoh to let his people go.

After they left, he continued to protect them by allowing them to cross the Red Sea and those following them to be swept away. God continued to walk with the people helping them survive during their long journey.

God does the same for us. We should have the hope, the expectation, that God will do the same for us. He will help us during our times of struggle. His protection though is not so much to the things of this world as it is from Satan himself.

(Transition)

We find this expressed most clearly in Paul’s description of the armor of God. Paul points out that the protection we can receive from God is not to protect us from a human foe. The protection God gives us protects us from the evil one.

This distinction is important because we often hear the question, why is their evil in the world, why do bad things happen to good people? It is similar to the expectation of the Pharisees. They expected to have the Messiah rescue them from the oppression they were facing from the Romans.

Instead, God rescued them from the power of sin. We don’t like having things in the world go wrong. We would prefer to live in a perfect world of love and peace. This is not where we live. We live in a world in which God offers humanity free will.

(Transition)

It is why our scripture speaks of the protection given to the people by God one minute and that is followed up by Paul speaking of “suffering grief in all kinds of trials.” God is with us but that does not mean that bad things are not going to happen to us.

Paul states that we should use these trials to help us keep the faith, keep the hope that we have in Jesus. We often don’t grow in faith while life is going well. We often will find ourselves growing in faith when things seem to be working against us.

(Transition)

It is the struggles that we face that allow for the “proven genuineness of our faith to shine forth” to the rest of the world. When we show our hope in Jesus to the rest of the world it can lead them to wonder where our faith, our hope comes from.

We find this explained best in the text we used for our first reading last week where we are reminded that

“Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

It is through the struggles that we build a greater appreciation for what God does for us which leads to us having a greater anticipation in the future that God will do the same things for us again.

(Transition)

Our scripture ends with this final reminder that when we believe and have the hope that God will continue to be our provider and our Savior will lead us to an even greater joy for our Lord and Savior.

Let me tell you a little of my story…belief without hope, belief crying out to God, belief with hope leading to ministry

Let us have hope in Jesus. Let us be willing to share that the way to find hope is to be a follower of Jesus the only one who can offer us hope that will never disappoint.

Let us pray…