There is Living Hope

There is a story this week, as I was preparing the sermon that God reminded me of. Not too long ago, as a first responder I was sharing stories to a good friend of mine on some of the tragedies we’ve experienced on calls. My friend was telling me of one where he was called out to a guy who was unconscious. So, he rushed out there with lights and sirens.

He gets there, runs over to the gentleman, checks for a pulse, no pulse. Checks for breathing, no breathing. And as he is evaluating this lifeless guy, he tells himself. This guy is 100%gone. He looks around and notices some evidence that he had maybe taken some drugs. So he reaches into his medical bag, pulls out some narcan, and he begins to give the unconscious man chest compressions. The thing with Narcan is, that it’s kind of like a miracle drug.

One minute a person can be laying limp on the ground and once Narcan is administered, within minutes the person can be on their feet, talking as if nothing had happened. He administered the drug, and this man instantly came back to life, got up and my friend guided him towards the ambulance. He looked at the person, said “man! Do you realize that you were just gone?, You had no pulse, you weren’t breathing, and if it wasn’t for someone walking by and finding you, you wouldn’t be here right now.” The man looked at my friend, their eyes met and locked and he said something to my friend that he had never forgotten.

The man shrugged his shoulders and said, “So, what?” In that moment, he looked and he realized that this man had no hope. There was nothing in his eyes that said there’s something in the future for him. There was no hope in his eyes of the future, there was no hope of what was to come tomorrow, there was no hope of the next day or what he was going to do with his life, or what God was going to bring him to, or what salvation was waiting for him.

There was no hope inside of him in that moment. I often think of the state of the church. How’s it that when we are resuscitated and brought to new life, we get up, turn away from Christ and give this shrug of indifference towards the grace he has given and continues to give. How is it we can show up to church week after week but yet still feel hopeless about life?

Where’s the joy of our Hope? Where’s the expectation of something greater and better in store? Where’s the willingness to step out by living faith? And so I ask the Lord…. Where is that hope? Where’s the hope that keeps us focusing on Jesus no matter the storm were in? Where is the passion to make a difference in the world, to be captivated by a savior and to search and to reach the lost?

All of these things come down to one answer that has two words… Living Hope. Peter reminds us in our Scripture today: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to his great and mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” If you are here today, and you're looking for hope. Well, guess what?

It’s available to you. But how? Where does it come from? What’s the foundation of this hope? What is the future of this hope and what present experience can we have now that we have this hope. That’s the three things I want to talk about today when it comes to two words found in our Scripture, Living hope. Foundation, expectation and experience. In the midst of living hope we witness at the very core…

God’s great mercy. Peter says, ”according to his great mercy!” Mercy is where everything starts. Mercy is what makes the difference in everything we feel when we have been rescued from death and torment. When it comes to our walk with God, mercy is on the forefront of our understanding of coming to Jesus. Mercy is co-joined with God's grace. If love was a coin, then grace would be one side and the other would be his mercy.

Mercy is a compassionate love to the weak, and grace is a generous love to the unworthy. So, what is mercy like? Think of it this way. You’re home watching tv when suddenly there is a knock on the door. You open the door to see a kid dressed in their baseball/softball outfit selling candy bars. You answer the door and the kid goes, Hi would you like to buy a candy bar for 2 dollars for our little league team.

You reach into your pocket and pull out two dollars and take an almond chocolate bar. In that moment there was no mercy given. What had happened was a transaction. It was nothing more than a moment of supply and demand. Mercy is when that young kid comes to your door, offers you a 2 dollar candy bar, and you have compassion for the kid and their cause, so you take a candy bar give the kid a 20 and tell him to keep the change.

They don’t deserve the extra 18 dollars, but yet you feel generous. That is God towards us. We’re born again not because there is a sticker price on us and he paid it. We’re not walking around here with our sins hanging from our noses like a used car lot hoping that God has enough credit to purchase us. No, he’s sufficiently able to do so, and willing to do so through abundant mercy.

He went infinitely beyond the sticker price. It’s not him who is deficit, it’s us in our sin that is deficit. All of my hope and being born again are by the underserving kindness of God, which should fill us with this great confidence. I didn’t earn it. It was free. I’m just praying every week that we as a church would get that. It would be an amazedly sweet thing, when we as a church realize that when the church is filled with people who know everything we have is from mercy.

It would changes everything. It changes the way we treat each other. It changes the way we serve together. It changes everything at the board meetings. It changes the way we see ministry and worship services. It changes us because we no longer come to church expecting to be served, or expecting to get away with the bare minimal of our faith. It changes everything in worship services when everybody looks at everybody else saying, “I don’t deserve anything.

I don’t deserve your friendship. I don’t deserve you to be nice to me. I don’t deserve the sweetness of this worship. I don’t deserve a family of believers, I don’t deserve life, and I don’t deserve breath. Everything I have, especially my living hope, is free because of mercy.” Mercy changes everything. It changes because through God’s great mercy, when we are born again we are then united with the resurrected Christ.

When we are born again, it’s through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. When we are born again, it happens here.. In our heart, in our souls, in our Spirit. When the Holy Spirit invades our life, he comes comes into our life and he causes us to be reborn, we become a new person. A new Spiritual being that the Holy Spirit knits to our Spirit and a new person is coming into being.

What he is doing is, the Spirit is uniting us to Christ. Romans 6:5 reminds us: “If we have been united to him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united to him in a resurrection like his.” That’s the foundational work of the Holy Spirit. It’s not the only work of the Spirit, it’s just part of the foundational work. It’s a miracle. Do you know that? When you and I came alive in Christ that was a miracle.

The Holy Spirit knits and unites with our soul, with our Spirit so that the death of Jesus counts as our death. My debt has been paid. And because of this, because of His great mercy and the Holy Spirit invading our lives, another part of this foundational living hope is this: We are born again. Paul said: “According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope.” Everything I just talked about, mercy and knitting of the Holy Spirit is all internal.

It happens within here. We don’t see it, but we experience it. Remember, I’ve mentioned before, we never really believe in something unless we experience it. So, let me ask…What was your experience like? For me, God has through His prevenient grace pursued me since I was a kid. In a home that did not know him. In a home that did not pursue Him, but yet in His infinite mercy and abundant and sufficient grace he pursued me even when I was pursuing other things in my life.

What was your experience like when you were made alive in Christ? Was it amazing? Did it break chains? Did it cause you to weep? Did your life change? Are are you still bound by the things and the sins of your former life? Peter tells us in chapter three: “Always be ready to make a defense, to give an answer to the one who asked you for the reason for the hope that is in you,” What changed?

One minute you were pursuing things of the world, then all of a sudden you’re not! What happened? What’s the difference? One day you weren’t the least interested in the things of God and now there is this huge desire to read the Bible, to pray, to walk in truth and light. What happened? How do you explain it? If someone comes to you right now and says, there’s something different about you.

What’s your reason for hope. How would you answer? It’s hard to answer that kind of question unless there has been something miraculous and amazing that has happen within you. How would you answer the new birth? I’d answer it like this: Christianity all seemed boring and weird, and untrue to me, but then someone shared a story of grace and mercy with me. I heard that I may not have a father in my life, but there was a heavenly father who loves me.

I heard that he was a personal God. I heard that he created the world. I heard that all humans have become sinful and we naturally walk away from Him, but he doesn’t want that for us. And guess what, I have experienced all of this. Im fatherless, I don’t feel loved, I see that some of the things I do are very selfish and not kind, or gentle or good.

Honestly, at this point I am living a wild life that is all about pleasure. I’m living a life of humanism, a life that brings joy to me. A life that says that at the end of the day, the goal is to bring myself happiness and pleasure. So, in God the Father’s great love for me he sent his only Son, Jesus Christ, who died a humiliating death on the cross so that I, a sinful man did not need to die eternally away from Him.

So in three days, he rose from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, and he is going to come again one day. He’s gathering people. Together… and he’s uniting them. I’ve heard that story, and something happened. I didn’t see it, there was no shock, or thunderclap, or holy light from the sky shining down on me that I or others could see. But in my heart, deep within my heart I beheld the glory of God, and I felt a presence that I’ve never felt before and I saw with new eyes the beauty of God.

It was as if instead of feeling of falling backwards, something tipped me and now I was slowly falling forward by living faith and a new hope towards the loving arms of Jesus Christ. I am now compelled and I can’t fully explain it. But I pursue it with a burning affection. That’s what it’s like for me when I was born again. And that is the foundation of my living hope.

Mercy, union with Christ through the Spirit and a new birth all wrapped up as a gift of grace and placed within my heart so that every time I begin to turn from Him, I am reminded of a better love and a better life. Now, that’s a foundation to hope in…? What about the expectation to come? Well, living hope is placing our trust in Christ for something better to come.

We live with hope because it’s not just a foundation but also an expectation to come. Paul reminds us this: “You are born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,” here it is, “to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, unfading, kept in heaven for you.” The word inheritance refers and implies to something in the future. Our Inheritance is when we receive something through a birth right.

It’s linked with the word hereditary. It’s handed down and passed on. And Paul reminds that we are born again into the family of God and what’s to come isn’t going to be lost. He said, it’s imperishable, unfading and kept in heaven for you. You and I can’t lose it. Thank the Lord, because if I had to keep hope with with me now, tucked away somewhere in my house, I’d lose it.

I can barley remember where my credit card and car keys are half the time. When I was like 10, my aunt and uncle bought a house from a sale and it still had all of the stuff in there from the previous owner. So, before they could move in, they had to get all of that stuff out of the house to make room for all of their stuff. When we came, they said, Matthew, if you see something you like you can have it.

Otherwise were just going to throw it all out. So I went into the garage and began going through all the cool things this person had accumulated throughout their life and there in the corner was this golf bag. So I bought it out and my aunt and uncle said I could have it. I sat outside playing with it until I decided to unzip one of the pockets and low and behold there was 5 freshly crisp one hundred dollar bills.

Immediately someone saw my amazing gift that I just inherited but before long I had to give my inheritance to someone else. Now, that was unfair. That was my $500 dollars. It’s not like that with our future hope. It’s not given to me and then taken away by the world. How is it that we can walk through fire, and go through the storms of life and have still have unshakable hope?

How is it that we can be ridiculed for our faith, or to endure being criticized by others. Or even put down by others claiming to be christians. It’s because we have a living hope in what’s to come. I treasure Christ more than anything we can have here in this life. Everything I own, everything I have is nothing compared to the treasure I have in Christ that is secured for me in heaven.

What do we have to hope for in this living hope? It’s an inheritance that’ll never let us down, and when he comes and brings us into His glorious presence… there we will experience our greatest gift and reward…. The treasure above all others treasures…God himself. Our greatest reward is Jesus! And the best thing about this reward… is that it’s not only something to come and a inheritance that is before us, but we also get to experience it now!

That’s the third and final thing… Living hope has a foundation, it has an amazing future expectation but we do not need to wait. We get to experience the goodness and awesomeness of this hope now! Real quick here is what we experience today. Faith. Verse 5 says: “Being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” Verse 8: “Though you do not now see him, you believe in him.” We walk this life by faith guarded by faith.

You and I do not see him, but we believe in Him. We’re believing. We’re trusting. And were resting in Christ as our living hope. We experience that now. Love. We love Him. Verse 8: “Though you have not seen him, you love him.” Awhile back I taught this one truth. Love is not spacial, it’s relational. We have a tendency to think, “that the smaller the church the better intimacy there is” Intimacy doesn’t come because a church remains small, that’s small thinking and a wrong perspective on love and relationship and it severely hinders church growth and it hinders reaching people for Jesus.

It puts a requirement on growth. Once we reach this number, we need to stop or else we will outgrow our intimacy. no… that’s just wrong thinking… Intimacy is when we’re intentional on pursuing relationships with others, because Jesus pursued others intentionally. What hinders intimacy is the fact were not willing to grow our sphere of influence with others. We’re not willing to allow more people to be a part of our lives.

Would you like to experience love… find a person that is obedient to the Holy Spirit and watch them. Find a person who will love the undeserving, the outcast, the ones who society has forgotten. Find a person that urges you to step out by faith and love those who are invisible. Every month I head to the Retirment home and you’ll be amazed by how many times when you see someone sitting in a wheel chair, or sitting there all alone and when I walk by, I will look them in the eye and say, Jesus sees you, and I see you.

You’re loved. Almost immediately tears begin to well up, and then you will see a smile and if you stay long enough to talk with them, you’ll experience the third thing that we get to experience in this life of living a life of living hope. It’s Joy. It’s Joy! There is joy inexpressible and glorified! Verse 6: “In this you rejoice,” that is in this keeping that God does of you, and in this inheritance you rejoice.

Then verse 8: “Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory,” We’re filled with joy as we walk this life of faith, love and living hope. If you feel your life slipping and no hope is available. Then more than likely you’ve taken your eyes off of Christ. You’ve lost the truth. Christian joy is more than just happiness, it’s more than this good feeling.

It feels good, it is amazing but christian joy is joy produced by the Holy Spirit that causes us to see the amazing wonder and beauty of Jesus Christ in the word and in the world. Philippians 3:1 says, “Rejoice in the Lord.” How do you rejoice in the Lord if you don’t know anything about the Lord? How do you rejoice in the Lord if you are not seeing things about the Lord that cause joy to rise up in your heart?

That is the work of the Holy Spirit. It’s not a switch you turn on and off. The Holy Spirit is given, according to John 16:14, to glorify Jesus Christ, which means the Holy Spirit opens the eyes of my heart to see the beauty of Christ. When I see Christ in all that he is doing, and all that he is, then my heart is drawn out in joy towards him.

Church, you have living hope. It’s right here. It’s right in front of us and before us, and with us. Living Hope is the truth that Jesus has loved us to call us to walk by faith, to find joy in this life to be Him more than anything else in this world. You have a living hope because God is great in mercy, because Jesus is raised from the dead, because you have been born again, unto this living hope, which is an inheritance that will never fail you.

It will never be defective in any way. It will always be perfectly suited to satisfy you forever, and now, in this present time, you believe him, you love him. You rejoice in him, and maybe, best of all…. You’re willing to walk with him all the days of your life.. if that is your hope this morning.. won’t you say amen? *