Hope, Part 1- Our Living Hope

Jon Eagleson

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GREETING

Name Prayer time Prayground and snacks

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Ladies Paint night Monday the 18th, 6:30pm. Cost associated - talk to Shirley.

Ladies bake sale Saturday the 23rd, 11 to 4. Bring baked goods by 10:30

Almost Christmas party Sunday the 24th.

Christmas Play - The Emojii Christmas Play! December 15th, 6pm-7pm. Refreshments to follow.

MESSAGE

1 Peter 1:3–4 NIV

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, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you,

THE POINT:

When we say this word ‘hope’, we mean ‘a desire for a certain thing to happen’

To the world, hope is a different word than confidence. And in this life, this world- that’s true.

Hope in worldly things isn’t enough.

1 Peter 1:3–4 NIV

Hope in Christ is the only real, living hope.

Every other kind of hope is a pale substitute

We hope in many different things to provide something for us. We hope a new job will secure us financially, or a relationship will fulfill us. We hope a family will make us feel complete, or a change of scenery will give us a new lease on life.

And this kind of hope is an incomplete hope - it’s us seeing a need, and saying, ‘well, there’s this thing - i really hope that it does the trick’.

We use hope as the opposite of certainty.

And the reason for this is simple - deep down, we know that nothing in this life is going to ‘finish the job’. It might cover temporarily, and it might even do a good job - but we know that sooner or later, we’re going to have to try for completeness again.

and the reason for this is incredibly simple - In this world, everything dies. Nothing is certain, nothing is forever.

But is this what the bible REALLY means when it uses the word ‘Hope’?

And it’s ironic that, despite the fact that hope can seemingly never be ‘completely enough’, we are built to need hope.

I’ve always found that odd. That we can’t seem to be able to live without hope, we can’t feel complete without hope. And yet, hope in this life can’t complete us. Nothing we can do with our hands in this world is going to complete that thing called hope in us. And when we don’t have hope- we feel lost, we have despair. We feel the full weight of our problems and our brokenness.

Some facts about hope in the bible

We try to build our own lives with our own hands, and we know that deep down, everything we do will eventual fade away. Crumble to dust. Build the biggest house that the world has ever seen, and in 10,000 years, it will be sand. Save up all the money in the world, and sooner or later, it’s useless.

I want to highlight a specific passage that I think gives us a new perspective on the hope that only God can offer.

1 Peter 1:3–4 NIV

In the bible, ‘hope’ is the opposite of ‘powerlessness’ - not certainty

On our own, we cannot do anything to solve this problem. We are powerless, defenseless, hopeless.

Have you ever faced a situation, and you just looked at it and said, ‘man, there is NOTHING i can do here.’ It’s defeating. You feel powerless. When you’re faced with something that you just can’t conquer, it takes away hope.

And in a world where everything dies, sooner or later, we’re all faced with this wall. This powerlessness against death. and it’s in that moment that Jesus came to give us a real, living, awesome hope.

In the bible, God provides to us a ‘living hope’ that is unlike anything else.

It’s a hope that first and foremost gives us eternal life, through Jesus’ resurrection.

He died for our sins on the cross - but he showed that, through the resurrection, our sins didn’t have to be the end of our lives. He showed that death no longer had the final say.

We don’t hope in something that’s a bandaid. We don’t hope in something that MIGHT be able to do the job. He’s already done the job. We can already live in that eternity. And he’s demonstrated that by the fact that He’s still alive!

I’ve heard the phrase that ‘Faith in Christ is inseparable from Hope in Christ’. What that means is - if we believe that we have a problem in us that the bible calls sin, a natural bent to walk away from relationship with God, and we believe that Jesus came to the cross and died to pay the price for that bent, and we believe that He has come back from the dead to demonstrate that He has complete power over death itself - if we ACTUALLY believed all these things, we can’t help but hope! We can’t help but KNOW that the end game, the final scene of our lives, isn’t going to be loss or uncertainty - it’s going to be a victory. It’s going to be a perfect eternity. If we BELIEVE these things, we have a great hope.

This ‘living hope’ brings us into an inheritance - that can never perish, spoil, or fade away.

Through the cross, through living for Jesus, we have before us the one way, the one avenue to have the kind of life that can last forever and ever. Something that can never be taken away, or destroyed. We have the way of living that actually makes us complete.

And people have often believed that faith in Christ means everything else is worthless. It means saying that our families aren’t enough, our jobs aren’t enough. And I have two things to say about that - firstly, are they enough? Are they enough to be that one thing that makes us fully complete, the one thing that gives us true life?

And secondly - this hope in Christ, this ‘living hope’, it’s helped me to be a better father, a better employee, a better friend. There’s a quote that says ‘We see Jesus like we see the sun - not directly, but through him, seeing everything else’. It’s like a lightswitch being turned on.

You can have no idea what living is like until you see by the light of Christ.

This inheritance is a gift!

This is another great feature of this hope - it’s called an ‘inheritance’. What is an inheritance? It is something that, by definition, you are given from someone or something else that you didn’t earn. It’s a gift. And often time, in our culture and many others, inheritance is conveyed by death. Someone earns something for themselves, dies, and passes it on to us.

This sin is us, this thing that we do that makes us imperfect, makes us broken ,and makes us unable to connect with a perfect and whole God - when Jesus died on the cross, he took away the consequence that justice demands from our problems. He paid what we owed. But even BEYOND that, He rose again, showing us that we could expect a real and eternal life if we follow in His footsteps. And all of these things, he takes them, puts them on a silver platter, and says ‘Here you go’.

Before, there was nothing we could do to be able to reconnect with God. Now, there’s nothing we can do to ever make God forsake us.

And the fact that this hope has NOTHING to do with our capabilities, it has NOTHING to do with how good we are or how much we work or how holy we feel like we’ve made ourselves - that fact makes this hope incredibly powerful. Because then it can never be broken, it can never be conquered.

So today, I want to call us all back into this relationship with a God of living hope. A god who loves us beyond measure, who died for us and rose from the dead to give us real eternal life.

Maybe you’ve followed God for ages, but you wouldn’t categorize your faith as ‘hope’.

Maybe you’re new to following God and you’re trying to make sense of the world and how to live with hope

Maybe you’ve never given your life to God, and you feel that tug inside of you - we call that the Holy Spirit, and he’s saying ‘This, this is that thing that you’ve been searching for’.