Real Hope from Our Unseen Savior

Sermon on Sun, Apr.19, 2020 EASTER 2 SERIES: “Living With Hope”

Text: 1 Peter 1:3-9 “Real Hope from an Unseen Savior”

There’s something about a handwritten letter, especially these days when we’re so isolated from one another to such a great extent.

A text or a video chat is nice, too, but with a handwritten note people get something from you differently than a text or a message on Facebook. They get your time in a letter. They know someone spent some time and thought on what they are reading. A letter allows you the opportunity to take time with your thoughts and words as you put them down on paper. The reader can pour over your thoughts. It’s just different than electronic media.

Now apply that to what we have before us with Peter’s letter. Peter writes to us in the Bible. So not only do you have someone taking time to write down things he’s thinking about with his fellow believers in mind, but then you have God’s inspiration at work in PEter’s letter, too. All Scripture is God-breathed, so you have God guiding Peter’s thoughts and God giving him the words to write down. Through the Scriptures you have God giving us himself, in that his Spirit is at work through letters like these in the New Testament.

We begin a new sermon series today on Peter’s Letter. It’s the first of five sermons under the theme: “Living With Hope.” It’s drawn from the opening verses of Peter’s Letter in verse three in which he writes, “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.”

Just what kind of hope does Jesus give? And how does it help people? First word to pay attention to in these verses is that phrase at the start of verse three. “In his great mercy.” Sometimes the first thing people jump to in their minds is, “Okay, what can I do with this living hope—how does it help my relationships, or how does it relate to real life in terms of my family, my work, and everything else?” But better first to ask where we’d be without it in the first place. Apart from God’s mercy in Christ we’d have no hope! Jeremiah wrote that it’s, (Lam.3:22) “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed.” If we don’t understand how God’s mercy in giving us his Son, Jesus, instead of punishing us for our sins, then the rest of the relationship is meaningless.

Our living hope starts there, with Jesus dying and rising again to set us free from sin and death. (vv.8-9) “Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not see him now, yet by believing in him, you are filled with a joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, because you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

The great unseen need every person has, is the salvation of our soul. In the gospel, we hear the good news that our sins have been wiped away by the blood of Jesus and that heaven is our home. The moment we believe that, Peter says, it’s a new birth into a living hope. The Greek word Peter uses is unique. It’s [ζάω, (or the noun ζωή)] “life” as opposed to [βίος]. Bios which we get the word “biology” from, the study of life in an extensive sense—all different kinds of living things. The life Peter’s talking about with this word, ζάω is life intensive—it’s more about what it means to be alive—it’s about life in the transcendent sense—like what it means to live the kind of life God gives by faith to his children and the kind of life we will live in heaven one day because of Jesus who says, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

The living hope we have in Christ helps us because we know that whenever bad things happen to us, that God always gets the last word on things, and that the best is always yet to come. We face our problems and the future with a sense of optimism because we know God’s on our side.

That’s important because people have real problems they are facing. What is it? About 22 million unemployed right now? Small businesses that had to close their doors; will they be able to open up again? Some don’t have savings and are struggling. When will the economy open up in my area? There are loved ones in the hospital and nursing homes we can’t visit or bring the sacrament to. I heard of a Catholic clergyman doing last rites through the window of a person he serves in a nursing home because he couldn’t go in.

What a difference it makes when you as a loved one remember that even though you can’t be there, that still, you still know that Jesus, our Redeemer, lives—he lives within us--and he does help and strengthen us through his Word.

The original readers of Peter’s letter had problems, too. Back in v.1 Peter addresses these first century Christians as, “exiles scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia.” (1:1) A persecution broke out against the church in the days after Stephen’s death, and Christians were scattered. In v.6 Peter says they were suffering “grief in all kinds of trials,” trials that pressed hard on their heart and left them with serious questions about their faith—and about God—they wondered what, if anything God was going to do about their troubles. Did he still love them? Was it all really real? When everything’s being taken away from you—your freedom to do what you used to be able to do, your dignity, your health, your money—it’s tempting to just pack it all in and give up your faith, because (it seems), there’s no use, and there’s no hope.

Dante wrote that, “Life without hope is hell.” Kind of feels like that. I heard a podcast this week about the different ways people and churches are trying to come together online for worship, and drive-in worship, and so on. And the comparison was made between what’s going on now with the pandemic and 9-11. Back in 2001, in the days after 9-11 people had real questions about what happened, and why. They had questions about God and the effects of evil in the world, evil that hit very close to home. We weren’t used to that. But the big difference between then and now, is that people back then could come together in places like churches. One of the most confusing and painful parts of this right now is the fact that people can’t come together in worship, to grieve and to ask their questions, and to weep, and to pull through this. 9-11 happens and all over America there are massive worship services for people to go to get direction from God, and to hear about what God was up to in the world, and about how we make sense of this? With the corona-virus, coming together is the problem (of spreading the virus), so that in a lot of cases these questions are being asked by people alone in their homes.

And I know all people have to do is pick up a phone or go on Facetime and what have you, but nothing really replaces the ability to literally be together. I’m glad we at least have this right now (streaming technology that we didn’t have back in 2001). It’s not ideal, but it’s important for us to keep making the effort to come together regularly around God’s Word like this, because we need Christ to fill us with the living hope and direction from his Word that only he can give.

Through faith in Jesus we are “shielded by God’s power,” Peter says, and that you have an inheritance in heaven that Is “undying, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” Think of anything happening in your life right now, or someone you love, and then think about how happy you are to know that God is shielding you in his power, that your unseen God loves you and is storing up eternal blessings for you in heaven?! (v.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.”

Peter talks about the refining purpose of our trials, something we’ll get into a little more in a sermon coming up. But (vv.7-9) “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.” Peter reminds us that this life with it’s trials, is just a little while compared to heaven, and that even if God does allow troubles to come into our lives, it’s something he promises to use for our good.

Prayer: “Lord Jesus You are our hope. Your Word breathes hope into our hearts. Through Your Word help us to live with hope. Amen.”

Peter tells us when he gets us thinking about our inheritance, (v.4) “kept in heaven for you.”

Life intensive through Christ, not just something you study about in a biology book, but something you receive—a living hope that does something to us on the inside through faith in the risen Savior!