Living Hope: Anchored in Christ's Resurrection

As I think back, some of the hopes that I had for this past year have come true. I got back to athletic activity recently after six months of rehabbing a back injury. So thankful for that. Some of my hopes have nearly come true, approximately come true. Hoped for my alma mater to win a football championship. didn't happen, but they won the basketball championship, which is next best. Others of my hopes, like I'm sure for yours, didn't come true. We hoped this year to be celebrating a baby's first Easter, for example. I don't know what your list of hopes would look like this morning. I imagine some of your hopes everybody around you knows about because it's the item on your birthday list that's underlined five times. Make sure that person gets the message. others of your hopes. I imagine you may feel like they are too vulnerable to even share publicly because to admit that you've allowed yourself to hope that your spouse will feel affection for you again. [00:26:48]

When our hopes, our deepest hopes come true. You know the feeling. It's euphoria. When our deepest hopes are crushed. Probably know that feeling, too. That's enough to sink us. And it's possible this morning that there's someone here who is in this place this morning and you are feeling absolutely utterly sunk. Like the drive here this morning was the opposite of celebratory for you. All you were was annoyed that somebody told you to dress up today and frustrated that you're having to waste a morning on religion. And the thing is though, at one point you had allowed yourself to live with hope. [00:39:39]

But then God, if there is a God, when he allowed all your friends to get married, but not you. When he allowed you to get passed up for promotion after promotion year after year. When he took away your parents even though you had prayed desperately to him to give you more time with them. You were done with hope after that. You said, "If there is a maybe there is a God, maybe there isn't. But if there is, he's not worth hoping in." The first readers of Peter's letter that we call First Peter, we're in that same boat. [00:43:36]

They turn to God. They expect to be blessed. And all God does is allow them to be mocked for their faith, to be excluded for their faith, to take monetary loss for their faith, maybe even at this point some physical beating and physical persecution for their faith. And so a main reason why Peter is writing this letter is about 30 years after Jesus's resurrection to to remind his readers of the hope that they have even in the midst of a moment in which life is not going their way. [00:54:26]

Have you found a hope that compels you to celebrate even when life isn't going your way? And I'm not talking about do you celebrate when your kid makes Eagle Scout. I'm not talking about do you celebrate when you get the promotion. I'm not talking about do you celebrate when you ring that cancer remission bell. That's all great. What I'm actually more interested in this morning is are you able to celebrate? In fact, are you compelled like Peter is here to celebrate even when things aren't going your way? When nothing's going right? If you're skeptical that that sort of hope exists, I want to tell you it does. [00:57:22]

What could there possibly be in my future that might give me the strength to endure what seems impossible right now? When I ask my friends whether they think they're going to heaven, most of them respond that they do think so. And when I ask them what gives them confidence that they're going to heaven, um they aren't quite as sure. And so we explore that further. And what not always but sometimes what ends up being the case and what we end up realizing together is that their hope of heaven is actually just the same kind of wishful thinking that I have when I open my closet each morning and look at my favorite pair of jeans and say one day I'm going to fit back in those again. [01:08:25]

Why do I tell myself that day after day? It's not because there's any empirical basis or foundation for that hope. I'll tell you what it is if I'm honest. It's that to consider the alternative, it's an unbearable thought. And so someone will say, "See, even if our hope, even if deep down we know our hope is really just delusion, wishful thinking can still help get us through, right? And that's the value that religions offer." What I'm wondering this morning is, do we have anything more than wishful thinking to go on? Is it possible that there's a hope that exists that's actually grounded in something beyond wishful thinking? [01:17:27]

Because of his great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope. And I want you to think back with me to the day you were born. You don't remember it. You were the tiniest, tiniest infant. So just think about what that experience would be. If you had words to say it, what you could have said to your parents would be something like I'm new here to this world. I got a lot to figure out. Hey, can you tell me what I have to hope for? What I have to look forward to? Just let's just start with like a 100 years from now, 200 years from now. What your honest parents would have to tell you is that the only thing that you can be certain about 200 years from now is that you will be dead. [01:27:19]

And so death becomes the killer of hope as it always has been. And maybe for you that's been the case in your own life that death was the killer of hope. When that loved one was taken from you, that was the moment when you said, "I'm done with you, God." But what if there's a living hope? What if there's a different sort of hope that goes on and on and is never ever interrupted by death? Would that sort of a hope be enough to give us strength to face the present when it seems unbearable? [01:34:57]

But then he clarifies what that is in the next verse. Into, it's parallel into an inheritance. The inheritance, in other words, is renaming the hope. It's clarifying what that hope is. And Pastor Richard laid that out for the kids and for us so well. What that inheritance is all about. Um it's called salvation later in these verses. That's kind of a churchy word though that has lost its meaning for some of us. What we are promised, what's waiting for us is delight greater than the greatest of our earthly delights. It's also simultaneously intimacy greater than the deepest earthly intimacy we've experienced. [01:46:42]

And it is actually unlike all my wishful thoughts about this being the year that I'm going to get a tax refund instead of having to owe money on April 15th. This is concrete. It is stored up for me in heaven. And as Pastor Richard shared, it is as such uh solid. It's going to be there. But it's not just waiting for me. It's also protected. I'm saying that because of these two words, near synonyms that talk about how it's the treasure that's being kept for us. And simultaneously, we are being guarded for the treasure. And both parts of that are so crucial. [01:52:55]

What God would be saying to us here is it's not only that your inheritance is being kept under lock and key in heaven for you, untouchable, but also you've got a military detail to protect you from straying from being the sort of person who can claim it, who can inherit it one day. Your military detail is willing to take a bullet for you rather than you lose out on your inheritance. You say, "There's no way. There's no way God would take a bullet for me just so that I could claim my heavenly inheritance." But he did. That's exactly what he did. That's what we remembered on Friday. [02:10:47]

That God so wanted you to claim your inheritance that he came to earth to take the bullet for you. That's what was happening on that cross, that cursed cross that we looked at on Friday, that he was taking the bullet for you so that you would be guarded for your inheritance and wouldn't be able to stray from it forever. That's why, well, let's say this. If he's willing to go to those lengths to protect you, do you really think he's going to allow your future to be derailed by the loss of a job, by a breakup, even by the loss of a loved one? He won't. [02:14:24]

Real hope is easier to come by in one sense than the charlatans say it is because you can't pay for it. You can't earn it. There's no good deed you could do to ever grab hold of it. It the only way to take hold of the inheritance that's waiting for us, this living hope, is if God gives it to us as a free gift and we just receive it. So in that sense, it's easier than what the charlatans say when they say you have to pay this, do this. On the other hand, there's another sense in which it's harder than what the charlatans say it is to come by true hope. [02:19:41]

Because in order to take hold of true hope, you have to go through a process that's no less transformative than being born. When Peter answers this question, how do we claim this hope? That's his answer. It's that in a sense, you have to go back through the birth canal. You have to experience being born again. Because of his great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope. Let's go back again to that moment you were born. Think about it. You don't remember it, but now in hindsight, you can appreciate that you were seeing colors in that moment that you didn't know existed before. [02:23:26]

When God gets hold of a person's life and gives new birth, it is no less transformative than that. He gives us an entirely new purpose for living. He reshapes our entire identity. He what else does he do? He gives us a new sense of place in this world. All of our life events take on new meaning. Our priorities get upended, turned upside down. And if you think I'm exaggerating about what God can do and does do for a life when he gives new birth, he has taken addicts and turned them into Bible teachers. He has turned promiscuous teachers into or promiscuous teenagers into devoted parents. He has turned murderers into gentle servants. [02:29:17]

The birth canal, so to speak, if we're going to press the uncomfortable analogy, that we pass through to get the living hope is Jesus's resurrection from the dead. Here's what Peter has in mind. He's saying he's saying we get the new birth. On the other side of new birth, we are end up in a living hope. But the way we get there is through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. That connection there between birth and resurrection is why Easter eggs became a thing a few generations ago, right? Do you ever think about why that is? [02:34:45]

It's because when Jesus rose from the dead, Christians have recognized that was more than just a resuscitation. He was actually being reborn into a new existence in a sense, a new category of living, a new category of humanity. And you and I, the amazing news is that if you and I are joined to him in faith, it's not just his resurrection anymore. His resurrection becomes ours. When we're joined to him in faith, we are transported spiritually speaking, not physically yet, but in a in a real way. We're transported into his story such that when he died, we died. Such that when he was buried, we were buried. [02:36:56]

Such that when he rose again to new life, you and I rose again to new life. And so it becomes his resurrection that is the transforming process by which you and I become new and are birthed again into a living hope. Is there some pain in that transformative process? Of course, there's pain in the birth process. But on the other side, we become people whose experience of the world and of life is just as new as a person who's only ever seen in black and white finally seeing in color for the first time. [02:40:20]

When he found us, we were dead at the bottom of the ocean and he chose merely purely by his grace to swim down to the bottom, pick us up and breathe new life into us. That's what we celebrate on Easter. That's what he did for us when he united us to his son Jesus in his resurrection. The question this morning is, have you had your second birth? And I want you to sit in that question. I really do. I don't want to just pass pass on through it because it's a really important question. [02:51:49]

Notice I didn't ask, "Do you believe in God?" Satan, the devil, believes in God. Notice I didn't ask, "Do you go to church?" The Fourth of July shooter in Highland Park went to church. What I asked is, "Have you been born once or have you been born twice?" And if you've only been born once, if your life today is pretty much the same as it's always been since you remember, and you haven't experienced what we're describing in terms of a new birth into a living hope, friend, you need that transformation. You need to be born again. [02:56:40]

What Peter demonstrates for us here really is that when we grab hold of that living hope, it can't help but result in praise. He's got this outburst here because he's been thinking about all this that he's about to tell his readers, but as he's thinking about it, he can't get right into it without first saying, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." It's an interjection, an exclamation of praise. That's what happens when God gets hold of us. It's the same as what would happen if you were informed this morning that you had a billion dollar inheritance waiting for you. [03:05:53]

Peter knows that his readers are hurting when he writes them this, but the hope that he's laying out for them was never contingent on their circumstances in the first place. And so, a time of suffering is just as good of a time to burst out in praise than is a time of blessing. If you're a guest of ours this morning, I don't know if you know it, you may know it, but for many of the folks to your left and right in the seats in the front and behind you, this is actually a week of grief for many folks in our congregation. [03:12:32]

Here in this place, over the years that I've been here at North Suburban Church, I have seen a widowerower choose joy after losing his wife of 40 years. who he felt was holding him together in a lot of ways. I've seen a single tear run down the cheek of a musician who shared afterwards as she was just gripped by the weight of her sin, but continued playing with all of her might and joy for what God had done for her in Christ. I've seen a mom turn to God like she'd never turned to God before after the still birth of her child. [03:27:42]

All of those people were saying with their lips and with their lives, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But none of them were saying that exclamation because they had been given good advice by God. None of them. They were saying that exclamation because they were given good news. And that difference between advice and news makes all the difference. Martin Lloyd Jones laid it out decades ago very helpfully. He said, "Advice is counsel about something that hasn't yet happened that you can do something about. News is a report of something that already happened that you can't do anything about. You can just respond to." [03:34:14]

When a king sends troops into battle against an advancing invading army, whether news comes back from that battle or whether advice comes back from that battle depends entirely on whether the battle is won or lost. True. When the battle is won, messengers come back with news saying, "We won. There's peace." When we lost the battle, military advisers come back from the front lines saying, "Fight for your lives." Giving advice. And y'all, that's why Easter is such a big deal to Christians around the world and always have been because this is our moment of victory. [03:37:45]