A Living Hope

“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” — 1 Peter 1:8–9 I WHERE WE ARE

Alright. We’re in week two of Share the Hope. And the whole series is asking one question: How do we share the hope we’ve been given?

And I want to start this morning with something that might seem obvious, but I think it unlocks the whole series.

Joy is shareable. By nature. We already know how to share it. We do it every day without thinking about it.

Think about it. When something makes us laugh — a video, a moment with the kids, something the dog did — what do we do? We share it. Immediately. We pull out our phone and send it to somebody. When something moves us — a song, a story, a sunset — we take a picture and post it. When something makes us happy, we don’t have to be taught how to share it. Sharing is what joy does. It overflows. It’s natural. It’s instinctive.

So here’s my question. If sharing joy is the most natural thing in the world — why are we struggling to share the hope of the gospel?

And I don’t think the problem is that we don’t know how to share. We share all day long. The problem is we’ve lost the thing worth sharing.

Now, we’re working through 1 Peter 1:3–12 backwards in this series. Last week we started where Peter ended — verses 10 through 12. And Peter ended with a question: What are the angels looking at? And the answer was stunning. The angels — who see the face of God, who’ve never had to trust because trust is what you do when you can’t see — are stooping down, leaning in to peer at what’s happening inside ordinary believers like us.

And we talked about what they’re looking at. It’s not us. It’s not our performance. It’s the exchange being reversed. In Romans 1, Paul said we traded the glory of God for images of ourselves. That’s the oldest story in the universe — a creature choosing itself over its Creator. The angels have seen that a billion times. That’s not what fascinates them.

What fascinates them is what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 4 — God has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay. The glory that was traded away is coming back. The self-life — the sin, the inward curve — is being exchanged for the glory of God. Inside ordinary people. In real time. That’s what the angels can’t stop looking at. We ended with a prayer: Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. I want to see You.

And this week the question gets more personal: How do we find joy… again?

But I want to reframe that. Because I don’t think it’s really “again” — like joy is a set of car keys we lost. I think the joy was always there. The table was always set. We just walked away from it.

So the real question is: How do we get back to the table?

Let’s read our text. 1 Peter 1, verses 8 and 9. All the way to the end — because that last phrase is where everything’s headed.

Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Love. Faith. Joy. And then — the salvation of our souls. Every word in that sentence is flowing toward that destination. Love leads to faith. Faith leads to joy. And all of it — all of it — is the experience of salvation arriving. Present tense. Right now.

But before we can talk about salvation, I want to show us where the love comes from. Because it doesn’t start with us. II WHERE LOVE STARTS

Okay, so we say “God is love” all the time, right? It’s on coffee mugs. It’s on bumper stickers. And because we say it so much, I think we’ve stopped hearing it. It’s become wallpaper. So I don’t want to just tell you God is love this morning. I want to show you.

I want to take you to one scene first. The baptism of Jesus. Matthew 3:16–17. Picture this. Jesus comes up out of the water, and three things happen at the same time:

As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Do you see who’s there? All three. The Son is in the water. The Spirit is descending like a dove. And the Father’s voice breaks through heaven and says: This is my Son, whom I love.

That’s the Father, declaring His love for the Son. Out loud. In public. And the Spirit is right there — the Spirit is the one making the love visible. The Spirit is the dove. The Spirit is the means by which the Father’s love is expressed and experienced. All three, present. All three, active. All three, bound together in love.

That’s what love looks like inside the heart of God. Before we were ever part of the picture. Before we were ever invited in. The Father, Son, and Spirit — loving one another from eternity.

But here’s what’s incredible. That love didn’t stay inside. It reached. And 1 John 4 shows us exactly how. Listen to this — John says:

God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Did you catch the order there? Not that we loved God. We didn’t start this. But that He loved us. God moved first. And the way He moved was by sending the Son. That’s the love of the Trinity reaching toward us — fully God becoming fully man, carrying the Father’s love with Him, because He never stopped being the Son.

And then John tells us how that love actually lands in us. Verse 13: This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: He has given us of his Spirit.

The Spirit. The same Spirit who descended like a dove at the baptism — the one who made the Father’s love visible — that Spirit has been given to us. He’s inside us now. And He’s doing the same thing He did at the Jordan River. Making the Father’s love real. Making it something we can actually experience. Not just know about. Feel.

And then John lands the plane. Verse 19:

We love because he first loved us.

We love because He first loved us.

That’s it. That’s where the love in 1 Peter 1:8 comes from. When Peter says “you love Him” — that love didn’t start with us. It started in the heart of God, flowed through the Son, and was poured into us by the Spirit. We’re not generating love for God on our own. We’re responding to a love that found us first.

And here’s why that matters. Because I think most of us, when the joy fades, do the same thing. We try harder. We try to manufacture love for God. We try to produce devotion through effort, through performance, through willpower. Like if we just push hard enough, we can force our way back into the inner life of God.

And it doesn’t work. It never works. Because we can’t get in from the outside. The door doesn’t open from our side.

It opens from the inside.

Like a tomb. Nobody from the outside rolled that stone away. It moved from the inside. And when the disciples got there and peered in — He wasn’t there. Which means He was already out. Already moving. Already on His way to find them before they had the sense to come looking. That’s the gospel. The door burst open from the inside, and He came out looking for us.

And Paul says it so clearly in Romans 5:1–2:

Since we’ve been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we’ve gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

Access. That’s such a big word. The blood opened the door. The Spirit moved in. And now the same love that the Father declared over the Son at the Jordan River is being poured into our hearts. We’re not outside the circle anymore. We’re in it.

Love for God is only complete when both are present. The blood that brought us in, and the Spirit that holds us there.

And the joy Peter’s talking about? I think it’s what it feels like to be inside that circle. To actually be participating in the love that’s been flowing between Father, Son, and Spirit since before the world was made. That’s why Peter calls it “inexpressible and filled with glory.” It’s not just a strong feeling. It’s divine love passing through a human heart. III WHAT ABIDING IS

Okay, so we’ve been brought in. The blood did that. The Spirit’s here. But now the question is — and this is the question I think most of us are really asking when we say we’ve lost our joy — How do we stay? What does it actually look like to live inside what we’ve been brought into?

And Jesus answers that so directly it almost feels too simple. John 15:9–11:

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

I want to walk through this slowly because there’s so much packed in here.

“As the Father has loved me” — that’s what we just saw. The eternal love inside the heart of God. “So have I loved you” — that’s the circle reaching toward us through Christ. And then the invitation: “Abide in my love.” Stay. Remain. Don’t walk away from the table.

And then He tells us why He’s saying all of this. And it’s easy to miss. He says: “These things I’ve spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.”

Whose joy? His. Not ours. His. The joy that exists inside the Trinity — between Father and Son and Spirit — flowing through the vine into the branches. We don’t produce it. We receive it. The branch doesn’t manufacture fruit. The vine does. The branch just stays connected. It just abides. And the fruit happens.

So here’s where this connects to Peter. Because look at 1 Peter 1:8–9 — it’s easy to read love, faith, and joy like a checklist. Three boxes. Check, check, check. And if the joy box is empty, we need to go find joy somewhere and fill it back up.

But the more I sat with it, the more I realized — that’s not what Peter’s doing. Watch the order:

We love Him — our hearts are drawn to who He is.

We believe in Him — our hearts rest in what He’s promised.

We rejoice — and this is the part I kept missing.

Joy isn’t a third thing we add to love and faith. Joy is what love and faith feel like when they’re actually happening. Think about it — what would it even mean to say, “I love Christ but I’ve got no gladness about it”? That’s not love. That’s duty. Or, “I trust Christ completely but I’ve got no peace about it”? That’s not trust. That’s a gamble.

Joy is the deep gladness of being drawn to someone precious and resting in someone reliable. It was never separate from love and faith. It was always inside them.

And love, faith, and joy together — that’s the abiding. That’s the branch drawing life from the vine. That’s faith in motion. And Jesus used this beautiful picture in John 6:35 — He said, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me won’t hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst. Coming and believing, side by side. The same thing. And the thing they are is eating and drinking. The soul feeding on Christ. Not a box we checked once. An ongoing meal. Vine and branch. Always flowing. Always receiving.

But okay — I can feel some of you thinking, What does that look like when I wake up tomorrow? Fair question. Because if abiding doesn’t work on a Tuesday, it doesn’t work.

Here’s what I’ve realized. If we’re not preaching the cross to ourselves every day, we’ll slide right back into faith-plus-works. Where our standing with God depends on how well we performed today. And the moment we go there, one of two things happens. We’re either crushed because we can’t measure up, or we’re proud because we think we can. Only the cross deals with both.

And it starts with handing over the stuff we’ve been protecting. The corners of our hearts we’ve told God to stay out of. The habits. The appetites. The unconsecrated sin. Because that’s the current that pulls us from the table. And as long as we’re feeding on that, we can’t feed on Him. But look at Romans 6:14:

Sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.

Shall not. Not “might not.” Shall not. Grace is stronger than the pull. Drifting doesn’t have to happen. But it can, if we stop abiding.

But what does preaching the cross to ourselves actually look like? Most of our joylessness — the low-grade, day-to-day kind — comes from listening to ourselves instead of talking to ourselves.

We wake up and the self starts in. Before our feet hit the floor: You’re behind. You’re failing. God feels far away. And we just lie there and take it.

But the psalmist does something different. Psalm 42:

Why are you downcast, oh my soul? Why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, my salvation and my God. His soul was crushing him. And he stood up and said: No. Self, you listen to me. And he preached. That’s what preaching the cross to ourselves sounds like: Listen, self. If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son — will He not freely give us all things? Who can bring any charge? It is God who justifies. Self — what can separate us from the love of Christ?

That’s Romans 8. And those words are a weapon. We preach the gospel to ourselves before our selves preach despair to us. That’s abiding.

So practically? It starts with the Gospels in the morning. Not as homework. As a meal. Read until we see Him. Sometimes five minutes. Sometimes thirty. Sometimes we feel nothing and sit there anyway, because showing up hungry is better than not showing up.

And then through the day — we just don’t hang up. You know when you call someone and forget to end the call? Do that with God. Five-second prayers. Before an email: God, help me. Before a hard conversation: Give me wisdom. Before the scroll: What am I about to feed on? Every car ride, every meal, every moment the kids are losing it. Not eloquent. Just — the line stays open. Everything becomes prayer.

Abiding is ordinary. It’s the Gospels as a meal, preaching the cross to ourselves, five-second prayers all day, handing over the sin, and never hanging up the phone. Joy is what our souls taste when we do. IV THOUGH YOU HAVE NOT SEEN HIM

Now, Peter says something that, when I first really heard it, seemed to make all of this harder. He says it twice: Though you have not seen him. And again: Though you do not now see him.

And I get why that’s a problem, right? If abiding is about feeding on Christ, and feeding happens through seeing Him — how do we love someone we’ve never seen? Isn’t that a disadvantage? Didn’t the disciples have it better than us?

So, this is going to sound like a strange turn, but stay with me. I want to tell you about Alicia.

When she and I first started getting to know each other in college, we spent three months on the phone. Three months. We were in different places. Yeah, we’d seen pictures. Yeah, we video chatted sometimes. And yeah, we sent actual letters — through the mail, with stamps and everything. But we’d never been in the same room. Never face to face.

And here’s the thing — because we couldn’t be physically together, all the distractions that come with being in the same room? They were gone. No temptation to skip the hard conversation and just hold her hand. No temptation to let the physical replace the personal. The distance took all of that off the table. And you know what happened? We went deeper. We talked for hours. We asked the questions you only ask when there’s nothing else to do but really talk. We got to know each other in ways that I honestly think being together would’ve made harder.

The distance didn’t weaken the relationship. It sent us somewhere proximity couldn’t reach.

And I think that’s what Peter’s describing. We haven’t seen Christ with our eyes. But we know Him through the Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John — four portraits covering the full range of who He is. And because the distractions of being physically there aren’t present, we can go deeper than the people who were.

Think about Nicodemus. This is a man who came to Jesus at night — probably because he didn’t want anyone to see him — and they had one conversation. One. And Nicodemus left confused. Or the woman at the well. She met Jesus once, for maybe twenty minutes, and her whole life changed — but she still only got twenty minutes. Zacchaeus climbed a tree and got a single afternoon.

They each got a glimpse. A fragment. A sliver of who He is.

But us? We go with Him to Gethsemane, where even the inner circle fell asleep. We hear whole sermons, not just a sentence caught over someone’s shoulder in a crowd. We see His courage when He’s challenged, His patience when Peter gets it wrong for the hundredth time, His tenderness when the kids come running, His tears when He looks over Jerusalem knowing what’s coming. We see the whole range of who He is.

The crowds got fragments. We get the whole portrait.

The Gospels aren’t second-best. They’re a deeper seat.

And this is what Jesus said to Thomas. Now — you’ve probably heard him called Doubting Thomas your whole life. But I’m done calling him that. We don’t name people after their worst moment, do we? Thomas’s doubt was real. It was honest. He’d just watched Jesus die, and the other disciples were telling him He was alive, and Thomas said, I can’t believe that until I see it. That’s not rebellious. That’s human.

And Jesus didn’t shame him for it. He came back into the room, looked right at Thomas, and said: Put your hand here. See my hands. Reach out and touch the wound. He met Thomas exactly where he was.

And Thomas responded with the greatest thing anyone ever said to Jesus in the Gospels: My Lord and my God.

That’s not Doubting Thomas. That’s Believing Thomas. And I’ll call him that from now on.

And then Jesus looked past Thomas — and I think He looked at us — and said:

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

Blessed. Because there’s a seeing that happens in the heart that goes deeper than eyes. Paul said: God has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

And that seeing — the heart seeing Christ in the Gospels — that’s the abiding. That’s the feeding. That’s what produces love, which enables faith. And when love and faith are actually happening — when we’re drawn to His preciousness and resting in His reliability — joy is what that feels like from the inside. It’s His joy, flowing through the connection. The joy that’s been moving between Father, Son, and Spirit since before the world was made — now moving through us.

That’s the answer. That’s how we get back to the table. We see Him. We love Him. We trust Him. And joy is what happens when we do.

And if the sermon ended there, it would be enough. But Peter’s sentence doesn’t end there. It keeps going. And where it goes changes what joy even means. V SALVATION IS ARRIVING

Stay with me — the end of verse 9.

Obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

That word obtaining — it’s present tense. Not past: “you obtained,” done, behind us. Not future: “you will obtain,” someday.

And most of us have never heard it that way. Most of us think of salvation as something that happened. Past tense. We prayed a prayer. We got saved. Done. And now we’re just waiting. For heaven. And everything in between is just — the hallway. Not really salvation. Not yet heaven. Just endurance.

Can I be honest? I thought that for years. And it almost killed my faith. Because if salvation’s behind us, then the most important thing God’s ever done in our lives is in the past.

That’s not what Peter says. Peter says obtaining. Present. Progressive. Right now. We’re in the act of receiving the salvation of our souls.

Salvation is initial. Salvation is ongoing. And salvation is pressing us toward being made complete.

It’s the continued, daily work of God rescuing and renewing us. Making us whole. Unbending the heart that was curved in on itself. Filling us so completely with the love of Christ that sin loses its grip. Remember what we said last week — the exchange? We traded the glory of God for ourselves? Salvation is that exchange being reversed. The self-life is being replaced by Christ’s life. The glory is coming back into the clay. And that work hasn’t stopped. God didn’t start something in us and walk away. He’s in this room. He’s working right now. The salvation of our souls is arriving at this moment.

And you see what that does to joy, right? If joy’s just a feeling, then losing it’s no big deal. We’ll get it back eventually. But if joy is the experience of salvation arriving — if joy is what it feels like when God is actively rescuing and renewing us — then the absence of joy is a signal. It’s telling us we’ve stopped receiving what was always being offered.

We haven’t lost our salvation. But we’ve stopped participating in it. We walked away from the table. We stopped eating. We stopped drinking. And the joylessness we feel? That’s the ache of a soul that was made to live inside the love of God and is trying to survive outside of it.

The cure isn’t finding something new. The cure is remembering what we first tasted. And sitting back down.

And this is why salvation should be celebrated. Not just remembered. Not just confessed. Not just filed away as a date on a calendar. Celebrated. Because somewhere along the way, we stopped being amazed by it. Salvation became wallpaper. Background noise.

But when the early church talked about miracles — and they saw real miracles, signs and wonders, the lame walking, the sick healed — the biggest miracle they kept coming back to was salvation itself. Changed hearts. Dead souls coming alive. People who were bent inward their whole lives suddenly looking up. That was the miracle that made the Sanhedrin nervous.

In Acts 4, Peter and John had just healed a lame man and preached about Jesus, and the authorities hauled them in and told them to stop. Stop talking about this. Stop preaching in that name. And Peter and John looked at them and said:

We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.

They couldn’t stop. Not because they were brave. Because the joy wouldn’t let them. They weren’t sharing a doctrine. They were sharing what happened to them. And what happened was so real, so alive, so present that telling people to stop talking about it was like telling them to stop breathing.

And that’s what we saw, right here in this church, when we baptized those people recently. Remember what it felt like to stand in this room and hear them talk about what God had done? How their lives had changed? There was joy in their hearts. And there was joy in ours. That was the miracle. Not legs getting longer. Hearts coming alive.

But here’s the danger. And I need us to hear this. That joy? That celebration? It fades when salvation stops being present tense and becomes a memory. When we stop tasting and start just remembering. And if we lose the joy, we lose the sharing. Because we don’t share old news. We share what’s alive. We share what we can’t help talking about.

Salvation is the miracle. And it hasn’t stopped. The river doesn’t end. VI THE RIVER FLOWS OUT And here’s what ties the whole series together. When the abiding’s real, something starts to happen that we didn’t plan. Jesus said it in John 7 — Whoever believes in me, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.

The water doesn’t just satisfy us. It becomes a spring inside us. And the spring overflows. Not because we tried to be inspiring. Because we were drinking. And the drinking became a well. And the well became a river toward everyone close enough to get wet.

Paul lived this. He told the Thessalonians:

We cared for you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well.

Not the gospel at arm’s length. His life, shared up close. And that word delighted — that’s not duty. That’s joy overflowing into relationship.

That’s what sharing hope looks like. A life shared up close.

And here’s where I need to be honest with us.

A fire that isn’t tended becomes a smolder. And a smolder still gives off a little warmth — enough to fool ourselves. But it’s not a fire anymore. It’s the memory of one.

I’ve been in churches my whole life. And here’s what I’ve seen — in every single one, including this one. At some point, what’s presented up front starts to drift from what’s actually happening behind it. We say we’re welcoming. And we mean it. But the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are — that’s where people get hurt. And that’s where our witness dies.

I’m not saying this to shame us. I’m saying it because I’m afraid of it. The only thing that makes a church genuinely warm is people who are genuinely being warmed by Christ. People who are abiding. Those people don’t manufacture warmth. It comes off them like heat off a fire.

But when the fire’s real — people walk into a room and feel something they can’t explain. Something that holds on the third visit and the tenth visit and the hard visit. And they find out — yeah. These people actually care. Not because they’re performing. Because something happened to them they couldn’t have pulled off on their own. Our joy is our witness. And the world can tell the difference between a fire and a smolder.

And notice — this series isn’t called Share the Faith. It’s called Share the Hope. And that’s intentional. Because faith is our doctrine — what we believe. And sometimes we think evangelism means explaining a theology we don’t fully understand to people who didn’t ask. No wonder we freeze up.

But hope? Hope is what we’ve experienced. Hope is what we’ve tasted. And sharing hope is what Peter and John were doing when they said, We can’t help speaking about what we’ve seen and heard. They weren’t defending a doctrine. They were overflowing.

Get the fire burning again — get the salvation back into real-time experience — and the sharing takes care of itself. In the weeks ahead we’ll talk about what that looks like. But it starts here. It starts with the fire. VII RETURN TO THE TABLE

I want to close where we closed last week. Because this is the prayer of the whole series. The prayer every week builds on.

Last week I asked God to open my eyes. And I meant it. And honestly? By the middle of the week, I’d walked away from the table. The prayer faded. The fire went out. I stopped abiding and didn’t even notice.

But the table’s still set. The vine’s still producing. The blood’s still sufficient. The Spirit’s still here. Nothing changed on God’s end. I’m the one who walked away.

So this morning I’m not asking us to try harder.

I’m asking us to sit back down at the table.

To start drinking again. Not the sip of duty. Not the gulp of performance. The deep, slow, satisfied drink of a soul that’s remembered where the bread is. Where the water is. Where Christ is.

Open the Gospels this week. Not as an assignment. As a meal. Look at Jesus till we see Him.

Look at the man on the beach, building a fire at dawn. He’s cooking. Breakfast. For the friend who swore he’d die for Him and then denied knowing His name three times before the sun came up. And Jesus didn’t lecture him. He fed him. Sat down with him by the fire and asked him about love. Three times. Once for each denial. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

Look at the man face down in a garden. Blood pressing through His skin. Praying the most honest prayer anyone’s ever prayed: Abba, Father, not my will but yours. No audience. No performance. Just a Son, talking to His Father, in the dark. And meaning every word.

Look at the man standing in front of Believing Thomas, offering His wounds. Put your hand here. Not to shame him. To save him.

And as we see Him — as we sit back down at the table and taste again what we first tasted — something’ll happen that we can’t produce on our own. Our souls will drink. And be satisfied. And the joy won’t be something we manufactured. It’ll be His joy — now flowing through us.

And the salvation of our souls will keep arriving. Initial. Ongoing. Pressing toward complete. And the river will flow out. Toward our spouses. Our kids. The neighbor who’s been watching. Not a gospel at arm’s length. Our lives, shared up close.

How do we find joy… again? We sit back down at the table. We receive what salvation is already giving. And the joy that comes from that — His joy, not ours — overflows into everything and everyone around us.

And in a moment, we’re going to do exactly that. We’re going to come to the table together. The bread and the cup. The body and blood of Jesus. Not as a ritual. Not as something we check off. As a meal. As a remembering. As a present-tense act of receiving what salvation is already giving.

This is the table. It’s been set since the cross. And it’s set right now.

So let’s sit down. Let’s eat. Let’s taste again what we first tasted. And as we do, let’s pray the prayer of this whole series:

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. I want to see You.

Do it again, Lord. Do it again.

Share the Hope — Week 2 Falcon Community Church of the Nazarene