Something Greater To Hope In
What are your hopes for the future? What are you stoked about that could be in your future? Maybe it’s purchasing a singing family home…or getting to the point where all of your kids are out of the house so you can travel…or maybe reigniting the spark in your marriage. 1 Peter 1 shines an immense amount hope into our life: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” God should be blessed because he has given us something, given His chosen people something. He’s given us new birth. God radically transformed our lives through Jesus to the point that we were born again, with new life, new purpose, new joys and hopes. And we were born into a living hope. An active hope. We’re so stoked about our future that it effects how we live right now. And he did all this in our lives through the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus’ resurrection gives us a new, living excitement about the future! Here’s what you can get excited about:
WE HAVE AN INHERITANCE
Look at verse 3 again: “Because of his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” Something is coming to us in the future, and it’s going to be ours. That’s good, exciting news, right? You have a massive inheritance coming your way.
What is it? What’s our inheritance? We see it in verse 5: You’re being guarded by God’s power through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. Did you see it? A salvation. God’s guarding us for a salvation. Our inheritance is salvation. We’ll be saved from any punishment for sin, because Jesus took that for us, and we’ll be saved to be with God forever. Our inheritance is that we get to spend forever with God.
But we all know that sometimes we don’t get the inheritance we planned on. We hoped we’d get more, or get something, but it didn’t work out that way. Bill Gates has said that he’s not leaving his fortune to his kids. Thanks dad. So how do we know that it’s going to be there for us?
Look what God tells us in verse 4: our salvation is imperishable. It won’t get old. It won’t wear out like a shirt or a house or a car. It’s not going to get used up and not be good anymore. And, it’s undefiled. There’s no sin in it. There’s nothing to mess with is so that it’ll be ruined somehow. There are no strings attached or hidden clauses. It’s unfading. Our inheritance won’t get boring. It won’t fade and get dull. Being with God forever sounds like it could get lame after a while but He’s promised us that it won’t! And it’s kept by God. It’s totally secure. We don’t have to worry that someone could snatch it away or that we could mess it up. Our inheritance will be there, we will have salvation. God goes out of his way here to tell us four different ways that our salvation is guaranteed, and that we’re guaranteed to enjoy it.
WE ARE SECURE
Now look at verse 5: “You are being guarded by God’s power through faith for a salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.” We’re being guarded by God’s power, and what’s that look like? Faith. We, the people who have faith in Jesus, God himself is guarding us. We are so secure. That’s part of our living hope. We are so secure in who God says we are, because it’s He himself who’s guarding us; guarding our faith. We can’t even mess this up guys! Even when we doubt, even when we sin, God is guarding us and won’t let us go, He’ll draw us back to him.
WE HAVE JOY
Look how verse 6 begins: “You rejoice in this…” We have immense joy. We can rejoice! We can have real joy, right now in this life. In this broken, sinful, tragic world where terrible things happen, where brokenness is all around us and even in us, we can have real joy. That’s the best news ever! It’s why we come and sing, sing so much as a church! We’re bursting with joy at what God has done for us, that we could never do for ourselves.
WE WILL SUFFER
Look how verse 6 goes on: “You rejoice in this, even though new for a short time, if necessary, you suffer grief in various trials.” Here’s the fourth thing that doesn’t sound so good at first: we will suffer. Now, for a short time, we suffer grief in various trials. Christians with a living hope aren’t people who are naive. We don’t tune the world out and it’s brokenness and act like everything’s fine. We live in the messiness of this world, in the trials that come with being a follower of Jesus. Temptations to doubt, to sin. Persecution. People rejecting us for following Jesus. We really suffer those things. But look how it goes on in verse 7: “so that the proven character of your faith — more valuable than gold which, though perishable, is refined by fire — may result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” We will go through these trials. We’ll go through terrible things that test our faith. But when we come out on the other side still believing that God is who he says he is then we will receive praise, glory, and honor from God. Like gold fire impurities comes out beautiful. How amazing is that! God will guard our faith, make sure we don’t lose faith in him during trials, and when we don’t lose faith, he’s praise US for our faith! He’ll praise us for the thing He’s doing in us! It’s just amazingly good news for us.
WE WILL BE SAVED
And we see the fifth part of our living hope look at verse 8: “Though you have not seen him, you love him; though not seeing him now, you believe in him, and you rejoice with inexpressible and glorious joy, because you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” We have the salvation of our souls. That salvation from the wrath of God that we deserve, and the salvation to being with God forever. That’s what we’re saved for; enjoying God forever and being enjoyed by God forever.
This is our amazing hope. We have it because of God’s great mercy. We have it through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If Jesus isn’t raised, this hope vanishes. But since he is, it’s all ours!