Share the Hope

“Things into which angels long to look.” — 1 Peter 1:12

We say it every week in one way or another. We are a community led by the Holy Spirit that loves God, loves people, and proclaims new life in Christ. That’s our rhythm. That’s what we do.

And our horizon — the thing we’re walking toward — is to bring the gospel to every heart, every neighborhood, every generation, one relationship at a time.

I believe that. I have given my life to that. And most Sundays I stand up here and talk about what that looks like — how we love, how we serve, how we share the gospel with the people God has put in front of us.

But this morning I want to stop and ask a question that I don’t think we ask often enough.

And it’s a strange question. It’s not about us. It’s not about our neighbors or our kids or the people we’re trying to reach.

It’s about angels. If you have a Bible, turn with me to 1 Peter chapter 1. I want to read you a few verses, starting at verse 8. Peter says this:

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.

Now drop to verse 10: Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.

It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven.

Things into which angels long to look. Things into which angels long to look. I want you to sit with that for a moment. Don’t move past it.

What Peter just said is extraordinary. He said that the salvation you received — not someone else’s salvation, yours, sitting right here in this gym this morning — is something that angels are craning their necks to peer into.

The word means to stoop down, to bend over and look into something, like you would lean over the edge of a well to see what’s at the bottom.

And that image goes all the way back to the beginning of Israel’s worship. When God told Moses to build the Ark of the Covenant, He placed two cherubim on top of the mercy seat — and their faces were bent downward.

Not looking outward. Not looking up. Looking down, toward the place where blood would be sprinkled for the sins of the people.

Angels, permanently fixed in a posture of gazing at mercy. And now Peter says the angels are still leaning in. The shadow became flesh. Christ shed His own blood. And the angels are still stooping down to look.

Angels do that. They do that when they look at you.

And did you catch what Peter said just before that?

Though you have not seen him, you love him.

The angels see God. They have always seen Him. They see the face of God and they worship and they have never had to trust, because trust is what you do when you can’t see.

But you — you have never seen His face. Not once. You have never heard His voice with your ears. You have never touched Him.

And you love Him. You love someone you have never seen, and your love is so real that it produces joy you can’t even put into words.

The angels see and worship. You believe without seeing and love anyway. And something about that is so foreign to their experience that they can’t stop looking. So here is the question I want to walk through with you this morning.

What are the angels looking at? II THE EXCHANGE Not Me, Never Me So what is it about my life that angels are astonished with?

I think about that. I think about my life — what I’ve accomplished, what I’ve pursued, what I’ve tried to build on my own.

I think about the things I’m proud of and the things I don’t talk about. I think about who I am when nobody is watching and who I pretend to be when everyone is.

And I cannot find the thing that would make an angel stop gazing at the throne of Almighty God and look at me.

And then the Bible tells me why.

Romans 1 says we are creatures after our own glory. Paul says that humanity — not some distant pagan civilization, but us, all of us — exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.

We had the glory. It was right there. The most beautiful, the most weighty, the most satisfying reality in existence, and we looked at it and said, “No thank you. I’d rather have something else.”

And this is not just something we read about in the Bible where Adam and Eve made a wrong choice and now all their descendants choose sin. We inherit it. It’s originally ours. We own it, we live in it.

David said it this way in Psalm 51:

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me. And Paul said it in Ephesians 2:

We were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.

By nature. Not by accident. Not by bad luck.

John Wesley said that the human heart after the fall is bent inward on itself. We were made to look outward toward God in worship, but instead we curve back toward ourselves. We choose ourselves first, defend ourselves first, justify ourselves first.

That is the shape of sin. It is not just what we do. It is what we are.

And do you know what we traded the glory for? Paul says images resembling mortal man. We traded the glory of God for ourselves. That’s the exchange. I didn’t trade God for some obvious evil. I traded God for me.

And every day I’m tempted, and sometimes the natural in me takes over. It looks like waking up in the morning and the first thing I reach for is not God — it’s my phone.

And I tell myself I’m checking the time. But I’m not checking the time. I’m checking to see if anyone needs me, if anyone noticed me, if anything happened in the world that I need to have an opinion about.

Before my feet hit the floor, I have already made myself the center of the story. It looks like rehearsing a conversation in my head — one that hasn’t happened yet, or one that happened yesterday — and in every version, I come out looking right. I rearrange the words until I win. My mind defaults to a story where I am the hero and the other person just didn’t understand.

It looks like sitting in the car in the driveway after a long day. The engine is off. The house is right there.

And you don’t go in.

Because inside that house there are people who need things from you. Your wife needs you to be present. Your kids need you to be engaged. And you have nothing left.

So you sit in the car and scroll your phone for ten more minutes because at least out here, nobody is asking you for anything. At least out here, the algorithms know you and know what you desire, and they are designed to feed you — although you never realize that they’re actually consuming you.

It looks like snapping at your kids and then feeling guilty.

But the guilt isn’t really about them. If you’re honest — and this is hard to be honest about — the guilt is about your image of yourself. You’re not grieved that you hurt them. You’re grieved that you’re not the parent you thought you were.

The idol cracked and you saw what was behind it and you didn’t like what you saw.

So you apologize, not to restore them, but to restore the image. To get the idol back on its pedestal. That is the exchange. Every day. Not Adam’s exchange. Mine. That is not something an angel would bend down to look at. Angels have watched human beings choose themselves over God since the garden. It is the oldest and most boring story in the universe — a creature choosing itself over its Creator.

So if the angels are not looking at me, then what are they looking at? III WHAT THE ANGELS HAVE NEVER TASTED Maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s something happening in me.

What does mercy really look like? Not out here — not as a concept, not as a word we sing about. What does mercy look like when it lands on a heart that was made to receive it?

Because the angels have never known.

They stand in the presence of God. They see His face. They sing Holy, Holy, Holy and they mean it with everything they are.

But they have never once said, “Forgive me.” They have never once heard, “You are mine.” They have never once felt the arms of the Father close around them after they wandered away, because they never wandered.

Mercy is something they can only watch.

But you — you know what mercy feels like from the inside.

You know what it’s like to be the one who was wrong — not theoretically wrong, not doctrinally wrong, but wrong in the way that costs you something.

Wrong in the way where you looked at someone you love and saw the damage you caused in their eyes.

Wrong in the way where you sat on the edge of the bed at two in the morning and couldn’t sleep because you finally saw yourself clearly and you didn’t like what was there.

You know what it’s like to carry that. The weight of it. The way it sits in your stomach. The way you avoid eye contact with God the same way you avoid eye contact with someone you’ve hurt. You don’t stop believing He exists. You just stop looking at Him. And then mercy comes.

And it doesn’t come the way you expected.

You expected conditions. You expected a lecture. You expected God to say, “We need to talk about what you did.” Because that’s what every human relationship has trained you to expect — that forgiveness has a cost, and the cost is your dignity.

Peter knew that feeling.

Peter was the one who looked Jesus in the face and said, “I will never deny you. Even if everyone else falls away, I won’t.”

And then the worst night of his life happened. Three times someone asked if he knew Jesus. Three times he said no. And the rooster crowed, and Luke tells us that Jesus turned and looked at him.

And Peter went out and wept bitterly.

That is a man standing in the wreckage. He didn’t just fail privately. He denied Christ publicly, while Christ was being led to His death. The strongest disciple, the one who swore he’d die before he’d deny — he crumbled in front of a servant girl by a fire.

And after the resurrection, Peter went back to fishing. He went back to his old life. Because what do you do when you’ve failed that completely? You go back to what you were before. You assume you’re disqualified. And Jesus found him there. John 21. Early morning. Peter is on the boat. And Jesus is standing on the shore.

And He doesn’t lecture him. He doesn’t say, “We need to talk about what you did.”

He makes breakfast.

He builds a fire on the beach. And then He asks Peter three times — once for each denial — “Do you love me?”

Not “Are you sorry?” Not “Will you do better?” Not “Can I trust you this time?”

Do you love me?

And Peter, broken, says, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” That is mercy. Not a transaction. Not conditions. Not a lecture followed by probation. Jesus made the man who denied Him breakfast and asked him about love.

That is what mercy looks like when it lands on a heart that expected to be disqualified. And that is what God does with you.

He looks at you — you, the glory-exchanger, the one who sat in the car because you had nothing left — and He doesn’t ask for an apology. He doesn’t demand a plan for how you’ll do better.

He says, “You are mine.”

Not after you cleaned up. Not after you proved yourself. While you were still in it. While the idol was still warm in your hands.

And I need to stop here for a second.

Because I’m not just telling you about this. This is my story. I am the man who sat in the car. I am the man who avoided God’s eyes. I am the man who kept the idol warm in his hands and heard God say, “You are mine,” and I did not deserve a single syllable of it.

And if that doesn’t break you, I don’t know what will.

Because it breaks me. Every time. Not because I’m emotional. Because it’s true.

The God I traded for a mirror looked at me and said, “Come home.”

And He meant it. And He means it right now, for whoever in this room has been avoiding His eyes.

That is what mercy looks like when it lands on a heart made to receive it. And the angels have never felt it. They have never stood in the wreckage of their own choices and heard God say, not “I told you so,” but “come home.”

They can worship it. They cannot taste it. IV THE SPIRIT OFTHESON The Cry the Angels Have Never Cried And now we come to the part that, when I first saw it, I had to put my pen down and just sit there.

Because it’s not only that God forgave us. It’s what He put inside us.

Paul says it this way in 2 Corinthians 4:

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” 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, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.

God shone in our hearts.

The same God who spoke light into existence at the beginning of the world spoke light into you. And that light didn’t just illuminate you. It didn’t just show you the truth about God from a distance. It moved in. It took up residence.

The glory of God — the very thing we exchanged for the mirror — came back. And it came back not as something you look at, but as something that lives inside you.

We have this treasure in jars of clay. That’s you. That’s me. We are the clay. And the treasure is inside.

And the treasure is not silent. The glory of God does not move into a human heart and stay quiet. It speaks. It cries out.

Listen to what it says.

Romans 8:15: For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”

And Galatians 4:6 says it even more stunningly:

And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”

God sent the Spirit of His Son into your heart. And that Spirit does something inside of you that you could never do on your own.

It cries out, Abba. Father.

That is not your cry. That is the Son’s cry.

The same intimacy that the Son has with the Father from all eternity — that relationship, that closeness, that voice — is now happening inside of you.

Inside a rebel. Inside someone whose heart was bent inward. The Father put His own Son’s voice inside your chest. But here is what I want you to see, because I think these two verses are telling us something about the whole journey of the Christian life.

In Romans, we cry. In Galatians, the Spirit cries.

And if you’ve been a Christian for any length of time, you know the difference between those two cries. You know it in your bones.

You know what your cry sounds like. Your cry has self in it.

Your cry says Abba but it also says, “Am I doing this right?” Your cry says Father but it also says, “Do I mean this enough? Am I sincere enough? Is God hearing me or am I just talking to the ceiling?”

Your cry is real. It’s not fake. But it’s divided. Part of it is reaching for God and part of it is watching yourself reach for God, and those are not the same thing.

So what does the Spirit’s cry sound like? I think we hear it in Gethsemane.

The night before the cross, Jesus falls on His face and prays. And Mark tells us exactly what He said:

Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.

Listen to that prayer.

It is intimate — Abba. It is honest — remove this cup.

There is no performance in that prayer. There is no self- watching. Jesus is not wondering if He sounds sincere enough. He is not checking to see if the disciples are impressed.

He is face down in the dirt, bleeding, and the only thing coming out of Him is the truth of who He is in relationship to the Father.

That is the Spirit’s cry. Intimate. Honest. And it leads somewhere we don’t always want to go.

Not my will but yours.

Not because worship forces us into surrender, but because when you are that close to the Father — that intimate, that honest — surrender is just what happens. It’s not a decision you make. It’s the natural posture of a heart that is actually with God instead of performing for Him. And here is what I think has gone wrong for so many of us.

Do you remember the first time? Do you remember when the dust and grit were rubbed from your eyes and you heard “come” and it was the most real thing you had ever experienced?

The glory was there. Christ was there. And you didn’t have to manufacture anything. You just responded. The cry came out of you and it was genuine and it was the Spirit’s cry moving through you and you didn’t even know the theology of it yet.

You just knew it was real.

And then you spent the rest of your life trying to get back there.

You tried to recreate that moment with your own effort. More service. More prayer. More Sundays. More bracelets and verse walls and worship playlists.

And it didn’t work.

And you got disappointed. And you thought something was wrong with you. Or something was wrong with God. Why doesn’t this feel like it used to? Why am I going through the motions?

And so you worked harder. You served more. You showed up earlier. You stayed later.

And the disappointment deepened. Because the harder you tried to produce the cry, the further you got from the real thing. You were manufacturing praise. Manufacturing devotion. Manufacturing a spiritual life that looked right from the outside but felt hollow from the inside. And that manufactured life — that powerless, relational-less life full of duty and disappointment — that is what happens when your cry replaces the Spirit’s cry.

There is a terrifying moment in Matthew 7 where Jesus looks at people who did things in His name and says, “I never knew you.”

Not I never saw what you did. I never knew you. The doing was there. But the being — the intimacy, the honest cry, the heart that is actually with God — was missing.

This is why what God puts inside you matters more than anything you do for Him.

Because the Spirit’s cry doesn’t come from your effort. It comes from His presence.

When the Spirit of the Son enters a dead heart — a heart that was bent inward, a heart that had exchanged the glory for the mirror — something happens that you cannot produce on your own.

You begin to feel Christ. Not know about Him. Feel Him.

You begin to walk with Him. Not perform for Him. Walk with Him.

You begin to yearn for Him the way you used to yearn for the things you put in His place.

And your cry becomes genuine. Not because you tried harder. But because the Spirit is actually crying through you now.

The gap between Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6 is closing. Your voice and His voice are becoming one voice. Not because you strained to sound like Him. Because He filled you so completely that His cry and your cry are no longer two things. That is what it looks like when the light of Christ doesn’t just open your heart but renews it.

His voice, moving through you, the way breath moves through a flute. The flute doesn’t make the music. The breath does. But the music comes out shaped like the flute.

And wonder comes back. Not as an emotion you chase. Not as a feeling you try to recreate from that first moment years ago. Wonder comes back because you are actually with God again instead of working for Him.

And when you are with Him — genuinely, intimately, honestly — you cannot be bored. You cannot be disappointed. Because He is not disappointing. Only the manufactured version of Him is.

You become an extension of God’s own presence — the glory of heaven, alive inside clay, shining out through the cracks.

And the angels have never cried that cry.

They have called Him God. They have called Him Holy. They have called Him Almighty and Everlasting and Wonderful.

But they have never called Him Father.

That word — Abba — belongs to the Son. And now, by the Spirit, it belongs to you.

That is what the angels are looking at. Not your performance. Not your prayer life. They are looking at jars of clay full of glory. They are looking at rebels calling God Father in a voice that isn’t even theirs. V OPEN THE EYES OF MY HEART

Have you ever watched a child on a swing?

You push them and they scream with delight and the second they slow down they say, “Again! Do it again!” And on the fifteenth time you are exhausted and you think, surely by now they’re done.

But they’re not. Because for a child, the fifteenth time is just as miraculous as the first. They have not yet learned to be bored by what is right in front of them.

We have.

Somewhere along the way, we grew out of wonder. We learned to see the sunrise and not notice it. We learned to hold our spouse’s hand and not feel it. We learned to hear the gospel and nod instead of weep.

But God never did.

God looks at the sun every morning and says, “Do it again.” And it rises. And He is not tired of it. He has made the sun rise ten billion times and He still delights in it.

Because God is strong enough to find wonder in what we have decided is ordinary.

The angels are like that. They have been gazing at mercy since before we existed. They watched the blood hit the mercy seat. They watched the prophets strain to understand. They watched Christ go to the cross. They watched the tomb open.

And they are still leaning in. Still stooping down. Still staring. The wonder has not worn off. Not for them. Not for God.

Only for us.

We are the ones who tasted mercy and let it become familiar. We are the ones who heard the Spirit cry Abba from inside our chest and stopped noticing. We are the ones who stood in the presence of the living God and checked our phones. And I stand here this morning as a man who has done all of that. And I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I have let the most astonishing reality in the universe become background noise in my life. I have traded wonder for duty.

And I am tired of living that way.

So I’m not going to ask you to try harder. I’m not going to give you steps or strategies. I’m going to do the only thing I know how to do when I’ve run out of my own effort.

I’m going to surrender.

I’m going to stop being the subject of the sentence. I’m going to stop performing. I’m going to stop manufacturing a cry that was never meant to come from me.

And I’m going to ask God to do the one thing I cannot do for myself.

Open my eyes. Because that’s what this has always been about.

From the beginning — from the cherubim bending over the mercy seat, from the prophets searching and inquiring, from the Spirit testifying about the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow — it has always been about seeing.

And we have gone blind. Not because the glory left. Because we stopped looking. So this morning, I’m asking God to rub the dust from my eyes one more time.

To let me see what the angels see.

To let me feel what Peter felt on that beach when Jesus didn’t lecture him but loved him.

To let me hear the Spirit cry Abba from inside my chest and actually be undone by it instead of managing it.

I want to see His glory again. Not the manufactured version. The real thing. The mercy of God, alive inside a jar of clay, shining through the cracks.

And I want to be the man who looks at that and says, with everything in him — Do it again, Lord. Do it again. The angels are looking. Not at you. At the mercy of God, alive inside of you, calling out in a voice that isn’t even yours.

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord. I want to see You. Share the Hope — Week 1 Falcon Community Church of the Nazarene