Hope to Live Again
Notes
Transcript
Do ya’ll remember this verse from a few weeks ago?
4 For whatever was written in the past was written for our instruction, so that we may have hope through endurance and through the encouragement from the Scriptures.
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Well today’s passage is 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 and it to is about hope, hope that we will rise from the dead.
13 We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. 14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, in the same way, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. 15 For we say this to you by a word from the Lord: We who are still alive at the Lord’s coming will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. 16 For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the archangel’s voice, and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are still alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.
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Notice God did not say that He did not want us to grieve at all, He said that He didn’t want us to grieve like those how have no hope of life after death. He want’s us to have hope, and He said that we should encourage one another with that hope.
But where does that hope come from? It comes from faith in Jesus Christ and believing that God raised Him from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Let’s walk through a few scriptures and see if we can build a clear picture of how we can have hope that we will live again. Let’s start with Acts 2. Here Peter and the rest of the apostles have just preached the gospel at what we now call Pentecost. This is what it says happened.
37 When they heard this, they were pierced to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles: “Brothers, what should we do?” 38 Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
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He said that if we would repent and believe in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins that we would receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
When we jump to 1 Corinthians 6 we read:
19 Don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought at a price. So glorify God with your body.
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He said that God’s Holy Spirit would come to live inside of us and our bodies would become the temple of His Holy Spirit.
And then in Ephesians 1 we read:
14 The Holy Spirit is the down payment of our inheritance, until the redemption of the possession, to the praise of his glory.
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He said the Holy Spirit is a down payment, or a guarantee of our inheritance. What is a down payment? Well it’s when you say you are going to give someone a certain amount of money or product or service one day in the future, so as a statement of good faith, you go ahead and give them something of value to put towards that future payment. It’s a way to show that I will make good on my promise to give you the full amount later by giving you part of it now. But What did God promise to give us later that He hasn’t given us yet, that He decided to give us a partial payment for up front? The kingdom of God, in its state of perfection. He has promised us a new earth where there will be no more sin, no more pain, no more suffering, no more death, where He will live with us and we will live with Him. And He has built an enormous city, a beautiful city, where He has prepared a place for each and every one of us to live with Him, and He will bring that city down from heaven where it is now, to the new earth for us to live in with Him. And God has given us a downpayment. He has given us something to say to us, “Hey, I promised you an inheritance in my kingdom, and so as a pledge of good faith, I am giving you something that you can have now that will assure you that I will make good on my promise.” And that downpayment, according to God, is His Holy Spirit who comes to live within us. God, Himself, comes to live within us as an assurance that we will inherit His kingdom when we leave this earth.
And so a quick recap: Peter said that if we would repent and get baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of our sins, then we would receive the free gift of the Holy Spirit, who will come to live inside of us, and therefore our bodies will become His temple, and that He is the down payment of our inheritance.
And then we read in Romans 8:
9 You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to him. 10 Now if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. 11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, then he who raised Christ from the dead will also bring your mortal bodies to life through his Spirit who lives in you.
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He said the same belief that we have that Jesus Himself was raised from the dead by the Holy Spirit is what gives us confidence that we too will be raised from the dead by the same Holy Spirit who lives in us.
He goes on to say a little later:
22 For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together with labor pains until now. 23 Not only that, but we ourselves who have the Spirit as the firstfruits—we also groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 Now in this hope we were saved, but hope that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees? 25 Now if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with patience.
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We are eagerly waiting for it with patience. Do you eagerly wait for something with patience if you don’t believe you are going to get it? No, you might patiently wait for something you don’t think you’ll receive, but you don’t eagerly wait for something you don’t think you’ll receive. But for those of us who believe that God actually raised Jesus from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit, who truly believe that Jesus was really dead for three days and God really did bring Him back to life through the Holy Spirit, we believe the same Holy Spirit who had to power to raise Jesus to life and give Him a glorified body that could both eat real food and disappear and reappear through walls and locked doors, we believe that same Holy Spirit lives within us and will raise us to life from the dead and give us a glorified body one day.
My confidence that I will be raised from the dead is a direct result of my confidence that Jesus was raised from the dead. And even though believing that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead does take a certain amount of faith to believe, it’s not a purely blind faith that one has to accept with no evidence, or completely contrary to all the evidence. No, there is a great deal of historical evidence that Jesus did in fact raise from the dead.
First hand witnesses gave their lives as martyrs because they were convinced that they personally saw Jesus alive from the dead. A Jewish persecutor of the first Christians had a radical transformation where he went from hunting down Christians to writing the majority of our New Testament because He saw the risen Jesus. Jewish historians who were never converted believed he rose from the dead. Today’s New Testament scholars, many of whom, by the way, do not believe in miracles, are convinced that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Why? Because of all of the historical evidence.
Do you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins and was raised from the dead by the power of God through His Holy Spirit? If so, then turn from sin to God, and that same Holy Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will come to live in you, and will raise you from the dead as well.
If you do not believe that Jesus actually rose form the dead, then today is the day of salvation. Today is the day to place your hope in Him. Don’t put it off another day. Leave no stone unturned in your pursuit of the truth, because your eternity is at stake. There is nothing in this life more important than your eternal future, either with the God who made you and loves you and wants to spend eternity with you as your Father, or separated from God for all eternity because of your sins. We have all sinned, and none of us deserve to spend eternity with a perfectly holy God, but that’s what He wants. So He died in our place so that we could be forgiven. Please do not reject Him.