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Easter Message: A Living Hope

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3).

This week at our church, something wonderful happened. A young couple in our church had a beautiful baby.

What better picture of hope can there be than a newborn baby? When you see that new life, you feel a sense of hope. Life will move forward. Good things will happen. There is a future.

And that’s the picture that Apostle Peter used to describe Easter for us. We have a new birth to a living hope! For a long time, it may have seemed like there was no hope. Then, there was a new birth. A new birth of hope. Life will move forward. Good things will happen. There is a future.

It’s easy to get focused on the small picture, especially when we are suffering. When we feel loss, rejection, or frustration, or when we experience physical suffering, it’s easy to think that there is no hope.

We must remember that even if there are hard parts to our story, the ultimate outcome is going to be not just good but glorious. That’s why Peter calls it a living hope.

Every good story has moments when hope looks in doubt. Think of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia story, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Four human children are needed to break the White Witch’s reign. Then, Edmund betrays his brothers and sisters to the White Witch. It looks like there is no hope. But, then, Aslan shows up, and you know that there is hope. Things will turn out well in the end.

That’s how a lot of stories work, and that’s how the story of the human race will turn out. History is ultimately a story of hope because God will bring it to a glorious end. History is His story. It is God’s plan working itself out. There may be dark moments where we weep, but joy comes in the morning, a living hope.

It’s important to remember that hope here isn’t a hope that can disappoint us. We may hope the lockdown ends this month, but it may not. That hope may disappoint. When the Bible speaks of hope it means a hope that doesn’t disappoint. It means a certain hope. It means we firmly expect that God will do us good.

So we can be confident that all things will turn out well. We have an inheritance that can never perish, spoil, or fade. Everything will be put together in the right way. We will enjoy what we were created for—forever! That’s where the story is going.

Why can we have hope?
Why can we have this hope of such a good end? The resurrection of Jesus Christ. Peter says that God has given us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

How does this give us hope? This tells us where history is going. What God is going to do for us and all creation at the end of history, God did for Jesus in the middle of history.

Out of all bad things that can happen to us, death is the worst. It is the ultimate enemy. It comes for us and everyone we love. Jesus tasted this death, as Peter says, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God” (1 Peter 3:18). That’s why two thousand years ago, Jesus’ body was dead in the grave. He died for the sins of you and me.

But that wasn’t the end. At one particular moment, on a glorious Sunday morning, life returned to His body. Life came back in such a way that he didn’t merely stumble out of the tomb. It was power and abundant life, and it was glorious. Jesus could shine like the sun like the angels did who came down to roll away the stone. The crack, tough Roman soldiers melted in fear because of them.

Then, Jesus walked out of the tomb, His body filled with life. He walked out of the tomb in glory into the beautiful Garden fresh with the new flowers of spring time. That was Jesus’ resurrection.

So, Jesus has broken the power of death. The greatest enemy of the human race has been defeated. Death will not have the last word. Life, abundant life, is now the destiny of all who put their trust in Jesus. That is our living hope.

What hope is there now?
Well, that’s great, you might say, that we have hope that things will someday be good. But what about now?

We can enjoy this hope right now. This glorious end gives us cause to rejoice. Whatever happens, we know that it will turn out well. Having hope that it will all turn out well can help us in the present.

But we can say more. What we are experiencing now are trials that purify us. “These [trials] have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:7).

The language here is taken from metallurgy. Gold is not found in a pure state. It is mixed with other metals. So, ancient metallurgists would go through a lengthy process of mixing the gold with other metals and then heating it up in a blast furnace to get the purest gold possible.

That’s how our faith is. We’ve got it mixed with other things, other loves, other attachments. We think our life is dependent on this or that situation or this or that person, so our faith doesn’t shine forth like it should. God puts us through situations that purify our faith. These situations may sometimes feel like a blast furnace, but they make our faith shine forth. We realize that what matters is ultimately His love and care for us, not having the right clothes, the right vacations, the right job, or even the right people. These things may be nice and helpful, but God is the one we ultimately need, and He is enough.

I’ve watched people get purified. It’s an amazing thing. Right now, in the midst of this crisis, I’m seeing your faith shine forth. It’s beautiful. It’s not that you’re indifference to the world. When people don’t need the world to make them happy, they can serve the world because they have everything they need from God. That’s how faith shines forth like pure gold.

How does having this faith benefit us? It gives us access to an unspeakable joy. “Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy” (1 Pet. 1:8). That is a foretaste of the glory to come.

And that, my friends, is the power of faith in the hope that comes from the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Conclusion
As we consider our situation right now, we might ask, how bad will this be? How will it affect our economy? How long will it last? I have some thoughts like you probably do probably, but I could certainly be wrong.

But no matter what happens, no matter how rough it gets, I know this for sure. “Hope” will still be alive. It will still be the dominant theme of our story because we are born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. That won’t change.

That is the message of Easter, and so we can with the Psalmist speak to our souls today, “Yes, my soul, find rest in God. My hope comes from Him” (Psalm 62:5).

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To Be Brave Is Not the Same As to Have No Fear

Josef Pieper (1904–1997) was a Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher from Elte, Westphalia, Germany. He imbibed the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas but thought deeply about the rest of the Western tradition, ancient and modern (read a little more about him here). I have found his work a particularly helpful guide to thinking deeply and clearly about what it means to live rightly as a human being. His most famous work is Leisure: the Basis of Culture. If you want to get a sense of the breadth of his work, An Anthology, which he compiled at the end of his life is a great place to start.

In his book, The Four Cardinal Virtues, he describes the four virtues that the ancients considered basic to any good and virtuous life: wisdom, justice, courage (which he calls fortitude here), and temperance or self-control. In this scary time, I think we need very clear thinking about courage and fear. I found these few paragraphs a really good summary of the best I have read on the subject in the Western tradition:

To be brave is not the same as to have no fear. Indeed, fortitude actually rules out a certain kind of fearlessness that is based upon a false appraisal and evaluation of reality. Such fearlessness is either blind or deaf to real danger, or else is the result of a perversion of love. For fear and love depend on each other, and he who loves falsely, fears falsely. One who has lost the will to live does not fear death. But this indifference to life is far removed from genuine fortitude, it is, indeed, an inversion of the natural order. Fortitude recognizes, acknowledges, and maintains the natural order of things. The brave man is not deluded; he sees that the injury he suffers is an evil. He does not undervalue and falsify reality; he “likes the taste” of reality as it is, real; he does not love death nor does he despise life. Fortitude presupposes in a certain sense that a man is afraid of evil; its essence lies not in knowing no fear, but in not allowing oneself to be forced into evil by fear, or to be kept by fear from the realization of good. Continue reading “To Be Brave Is Not the Same As to Have No Fear”

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Thy Will Be Done

Grief and loss. That’s a good way to describe what people throughout the world are experiencing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Loss of normalcy. Loss of connection. Loss of church life. Loss of vacations. Loss of school. That’s a lot of loss.

I remember a few weeks ago when I began to feel the loss in my own heart. Once I began to realize what was going on with the pandemic, I realized also that my normal American life was going to be severely interrupted. I did not like it. I was grieved. I realized that church would not be the same, and I love going to church! It was a loss, and I was going to miss it.

We need to talk about these losses, and we need to recognize them for what they are and the grief they cause. We need to let them soak in and wait patiently for the time when we will adjust. That time does come, and God speaks comfort to our hearts.

When we experience grief and loss, it’s easy to think that God is distant or far away from us. However, the Bible teaches us that grief and loss are part of God’s plan.

Jesus’ Experience of Grief and Loss
Jesus Himself entered into the world of grief and loss. I want to look at one particular example of that in His life: the Garden of Gethsemane. It was a time when Jesus contemplated the severe grief of the cross and struggled with it in the depths of His being. Continue reading “Thy Will Be Done”

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Stoicism and Christianity

I am doing a series on insights from Stoic philosophy for how to live well. Some people may wonder, why focus on the Stoics when you have the Bible? Isn’t what is best in the Stoics contained in the Bible? If so, why not just use the Bible?

Here’s a few answers. First, the Bible is not meant to be read in isolation from the world. The Bible gives us a framework for understanding reality. Knowledge of reality and a framework for understanding it go hand in hand. The more we know of reality, the better we will understand the Bible and vice versa. In addition, on our own, we can only learn so much about reality. We need other people to help us understand it. The Stoics are just one group that I’ve found particularly helpful. Continue reading “Stoicism and Christianity”

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