Sunday 05 • 19 • 19

Let's read together our passage. First Peter chapter one verses three through five. We're going to read it together. I'm going to count to three and we're going to go. Ready? One, two, three.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. To an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. — 1 Peter 1:3-5

Let's pray. Lord God, please bless this reading and hearing of your word. Lord, speak through Mark. Lord, use this time to transform us according to your word. Make us more into the image of Christ. We pray this in your name. Amen.

Thanks, James. I've never been introduced really as the Canadian gymnast, so thanks for painting that image for everyone here. I'm really glad to be here. As James said, we worshipped here for about a year and a half before we left, and we left with a couple families. I've never met a church before that was like, "Hey, we want to send families with you." So thanks for that.

We were here for a little bit and left with a couple families. I remember a church where the leadership was like, "Hey, take some of our people with you." I'm like, "Wait, what?" In fact, when we started worshiping here, people questioned us like, "Why are you here? Are you here to take our people away?" I'm like, "No, we just need to go to a church."

What's interesting is Jeff told me to come here and said, "Hey, make sure you encourage people to go to your church and feel free to take them with you." And I'm like, "Really? That sounds great. Just make sure you don't do the same to my people."

So it's a privilege once again to be here. I am so grateful for this church. We love you, although many of you I've never met. When I look across to see faces, this church has done just so wonderfully over the past few years. The Lord continues to bless you, and it's because you have amazing leadership with Jeff and James and Elliot and Dax and Dwayne. Stephanie has helped us with Children's Ministry. It's just been such a blessing. And so even though you may not know some of that, I would think that we would not exist or would not exist the same way if it wasn't for this church. So I want you to know how great of a blessing it is to be here, how humbling it is, and what a privilege it is to bring the word.

If you have your bulletins open, please follow along. It's a real short passage, right? We're dealing with verses three, four, and five, and we'll be walking through them this morning.

Hope in the Midst of Suffering

I want to begin with talking about Pandora's box. When we say to someone, "Don't bring up that issue with that person because it's like opening up a Pandora's box," it means don't open up that issue because a bunch of other issues are going to come out of that. It's going to spiral out of control, and you're not going to like where you go with that.

Pandora's Box is a reference to an old Greek myth. It was actually Pandora's jar. Pandora means "all gifts." She was given a jar filled with what was called beautiful evils. Pandora has this jar filled with beautiful evils, told never to open it because what will come out will be inflicted upon humanity. Curiosity got the better of her and she opened the lid, and out came all these beautiful evils that were then inflicted upon humanity. All but one. One remained inside the jar. She closed it just in time before hope was able to leave.

There's a lot of debate as to what that means—the significance behind the fact that hope stayed in the jar. What does it mean that hope stays in a jar, contained, preserved, or protected from humanity? It suggests that living without hope is better than living with hope because the hope that you have will be constantly dashed. The hopes that you have, you'll be constantly disappointed.

Friedrich Nietzsche says this about hope. It's a famous quote. He says, "Hope is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment." In other words, hope is sort of like this invisible carrot that we're chasing. And of course, Nietzsche was a nihilist, which means he didn't believe in anything.

So at the end of the day, when your life is done here and you close your eyes for that last time and you take that last breath, nothing happens. You're done. Your time of existence is over. For Christians, we have a hope, and this passage talks about a living hope. So we're going to talk about what that living hope looks like because we present a narrative that is so different than what Nietzsche and many others present to us.

We're going to do that by going through this passage again. We're going to talk about what is our end game? I want you to think of that question as we keep going through this sermon. What is your end game? As a kid, people would say, "Let's just play this game for fun." I'd be like, "What? How's that fun?" I want to play and I want to win. I want a goal in mind. And so for Christians, we have a hope in mind. We have something to shoot for.

So what we're going to do is we're going to look at the author of hope, who is God. We're going to talk about the access to hope, which is Christ. And then we're going to talk about what is the hope that Peter's actually talking about. Then we're going to offer two types of application. One is a word of comfort and one is a word of warning.

Let's jump into our text here:

Blessed be the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope. — 1 Peter 1:3

At the beginning of this passage, it says that God, through God's grace, through what he has done for us, we have been begotten—therefore reborn, rebirth. To say the word begotten or to beget is a word we don't usually use. In fact, if you Google it, you'll see the trend has gone down pretty significantly since the nineteenth century. We don't use the word begotten. But the Father, God, has begotten us. Therefore, we've been reborn. The Christian has been reborn to a living hope.

So let me ask you this question. What did you contribute to your birth? What did you contribute to your first birth? Other than existing and resisting, what did you contribute to your birth? Not much. In fact, you would have preferred to stay in a nice, cozy environment and not be brought out to the cold and all that the world would have to offer. It's warm in there. Why leave?

And the same is true for the Christian rebirth. This is something that while we exist, we also resist. We would have preferred not to be reborn because that would have meant dying to ourselves and rising with Christ, and that's hard. So we resist, and it takes God to come in and beget us so we're reborn.

Rebirth and Discipleship

The reason why I think this is important to talk about is because in today's evangelical culture, we use the language often of rebirth. Like, "Are you born again?" I can't remember a time in my life personally where I never sang the song "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so" without really believing it. But I was asked the question as my years went on—"Have you been born again?" I'd say, "Well, when? I don't know." And so I'd come up with different milestones along the way where I made decisions to follow Christ.

There is that element where we do need to make that active decision to say, "No, I want to follow Christ." But even that—what happens in that moment is the Holy Spirit working in our heart. The question "Have you been born again?" can be dangerous. What happens is that we say, "Yes, I made a decision then." And then what we can do is create a culture of decision makers rather than disciple makers.

Scott McKnight, who wrote a fantastic book called The King Jesus Gospel, talks about how we have to be careful not to create a culture of salvation versus a culture of gospel. Salvation culture versus gospel culture. He pits them against each other because he says, okay—if we primarily start with Jesus as savior and we need to make a decision for him, then we've made a decision and that decision has dictated me being a disciple rather than a disciple being someone who follows Jesus for the rest of his life.

Where gospel culture does not begin with my decision. Gospel culture begins with the very title of your church's name: Christ the King. Right in the very name of your church is the proclamation of the gospel. If the gospel was printed on the publication of any newspaper, it would be that statement alone: Christ the King. And because Christ is the King, he gave up himself and became like one of us and lived his perfect life, and every miracle that he performed pointed towards the kingdom, pointed towards him being the King.

And of course, as the king died as a mocked king with a crown of thorns on his head, with the sign behind him saying that he is the king of the Jews, and he dies, and then he rises on the third day, and he now reigns and rules in heaven. And because he is the king, he's the savior who comes and redeems sinners like me. The gospel, by the way, what I'm saying is it doesn't begin with you. It begins with Christ the king, who's come to redeem us mere sinners.

And so before we move on, let me just ask you, are you a decider or are you a disciple? Are you a decider who's transformed into a disciple? Are you a decider and said, no, that's good. I'm good. I made that prayer. I did that thing. Or is it part of your everyday experience? God is the author of hope, folks. Now, we're going to deal with how he did that through his son, Jesus.

So, if you keep reading in our passage here, it says, he's caused us to be born to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. So we have access to this living hope today for the future because of something that happened two thousand years ago. So you see what's happening here? We have a living hope today because of something in the future because of what has happened in the past. And what has happened in the past is that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead.

Now how does that give us hope? Well, it gives us hope because Jesus was resurrected. And as resurrected, he had a resurrected body. And with a resurrected body, he gained something that was eternal. Of course, Jesus was always eternal. But his body with scars in his hands and in his feet and in his side has a resurrected body that will never spoil, that will never perish, that will never fade.

And so what happened to him two thousand years ago is something that we need to participate in. There's a great word in Greek called anamnesis. When Jesus says the words, "do this in remembrance of me," he's saying that we need to participate in communion in remembrance. But it's just not a memory. It's how the memory and the remembrance gives shape and identity for the present. We don't have a word like that in English. It takes a lot for us to unpack that, but what I mean when I say you gotta have an anamnesis experience with the death and resurrection of Christ.

To be a Christian is not only to make the decision "I will follow," but it's to participate in that process of dying to yourself, picking up your cross daily, following Christ in order to also rise with Christ. I love how when the proclamation of Christ the king is the gospel, we named our church Resurrection Life to name and claim the experience Christians have when they have died and risen with Christ. We get to experience resurrection life today. Not merely in the future which we will experience in all its fullness eventually, but even in the here and now, we have the experience of resurrection life. That for the Christian, when we close our eyes, it is but a blink and we need to take our last breath. It is just a moment. And we are with our savior. And we are with our king.

The Hope Peter Describes

So, what is the actual hope that Peter is referring to here? If God is the author of our living hope and if Jesus is the access to it, what is it that we're actually talking about? Well, in this particular context, what Peter is talking about is this future inheritance that we will receive. And it's a type of inheritance that's received that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. Those three things Peter describes for us in our text. And as such, this inheritance that we'll receive will be also guarded and kept safe by God himself.

So, this is such an important investment for God that he's not going to delegate the responsibility of saving and making sure that we receive this eternal inheritance with his cherubim or with special superheroes he's got flying around in heaven. No, this is God himself guarding and protecting our future inheritance so that we too will experience resurrection life and have the same kind of body that Jesus experienced post-resurrection. Kept and guarded by God himself. Not angels, not cherubim. God has assured your inheritance. It's incredible how Peter writes that and how that is intended to give us comfort.

And so I have two points of application here that we're going to focus on this morning and that is a word of comfort and a word of warning. The word of comfort is a word for those of you who may doubt, who may struggle with faith, who are not quite sure whether or not Nietzsche is more right in this, and you're just taking a chance on faith. For you doubters out there, I want to share with you a story of my grandfather who struggled a lot with faith. He was a man who immigrated from Holland back many decades ago.

He has since passed. When we moved here from Canada in 2013, shortly afterwards, my grandfather passed away. We went up to his funeral, and my uncle Ken, who's also a pastor, preached the sermon. He described my grandfather this way: it was as if my grandfather had two baskets—one was a faith basket and one was a doubt basket.

This is a man who grew up in the church, served as an elder many times throughout his life. He loved the church but struggled with faith. Whenever we'd get together, he'd bring things up that made me very uncomfortable because I wouldn't know what to say to them. He was much older than I was, very wise, and it challenged me. He'd say, "Let's talk about this. Let's talk about that."

The biggest thing that he struggled with was why he didn't suffer more. Sort of ironic. But why did he have all this family—seven children, 35 grandchildren, a whole slew of great-grandchildren? Why did the Lord bless him so much when he knew how bad of a person he was inside? He knew he was filled with sin. He knew he was filled with doubt. Sometimes he'd let things go and say things that you're like, "Grandpa, that's just downright wrong." But at the end of the day, my uncle said in his sermon, at the end of the day, grandpa always put his eggs in the faith basket.

He always would take these vulnerable pieces. Grandpa owned a chicken farm. He had a lot of laying hens. He knew the value of an egg—not only dollar-wise, but when you drop it, that thing's gone. So he knew the delicate care it would take to carry those eggs back into the faith basket and keep them there.

I bring that up as a comfort to you who may struggle with doubt. Because that process of carrying those eggs and bringing them in the basket is not something that you need to do. That's the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. The Holy Spirit gives us assurance, gives us comfort, where he takes all these vulnerable things, these struggles—"Why did this happen to me? Why did this happen to her? Why did this happen to my child? Where are you, Lord, when I was struggling?"—all these eggs, and he takes them and he places them into the faith basket.

I pray for all of you who struggle with doubt, to imagine the Holy Spirit doing that in your heart even in this moment and in this sermon, on the spot. Imagine that happening because it's a promise the Lord gives us. We are, folks, the new Israel. And Israel is one who wrestles with God. So give yourself permission to wrestle and invite the Holy Spirit to bring those eggs in the right basket.

Perishable and Fading Hope

The second point of application is a word to those who hold on to perishable or defiled or fading hope. I want to paint for you a different type of picture.

Several years ago, my wife and I had the privilege of joining a ministry. We were invited to travel through different sections of India to experience a ministry called Seva Bharat, or Mission India, to see what they're doing there. We went to a bunch of ministry sites, and one of them was in Varanasi. My wife's family, many of whom still live in India, said, "You're going to Varanasi? Are you sure you want to go to Varanasi?"

Varanasi is a place where you wake up before the sun rises. You want to get to the shores of the Ganges in Varanasi very early in the morning to witness this grand sojourn of people coming from all over the place. Thousands of people marching towards the Ganges River to clean, to bathe, to worship.

I want to share with you a journal entry that I wrote the day after visiting Varanasi to give you a picture of what it was like as this Westerner going there and experiencing this event of thousands of people coming to worship and sojourn to the Ganges. It's a rather long journal entry, but I encourage you to try to put it on—try to think hard and listen well here.

There we are, getting off the bus surrounded by thousands of people on a narrow street making their trip to bathe in the Ganges. Beggars line the street one after another after another. There is a hopelessness to their begging that is so different than beggars back home. There's a hopelessness in their eyes, an awareness that this begging activity is something they'll be doing for the rest of their life. It's all aimless and empty. Why? Because there's a religious spirituality to their begging. That's what they do. That's what they are. They will beg until they die. Arms continue to stretch, but their hands grasp air and emptiness.

As we get to the river, a man looks my way and waves. He dips and waves. He's so proud to show off his god, the river Ganges, to me. He's immersing himself with holy water.

Before we got to the river, I assumed there would be a sense of shame for those who wash based on me watching them and taking pictures of them, but the opposite is true. He's looking at me and my ignorance as if to say, you stupid, ignorant westerner. I wave and smile because I am one with God while you sit on a boat on top of her.

On our little boat trip on the Ganges, we travel upriver then back downriver. And what held this whole experience together are factories of death, crematories. They burn bodies all day long. They burn the dead bodies to the point that it's shriveled but still recognizable. And when the fire stops, loved ones carry it to the foot of the Ganges and they step down ladders, bamboo ladders, and place this body that can no longer float deep into the Ganges, the god that will preserve a corpse but cannot give life, hopelessness, and darkness. It's a spiritual descent.

We walk back to the bus and observe more images of near naked holy men, of more arms outstretched, of westerners sitting reverently under umbrella to receive a dot between their eyes. Has the church so completely messed up that she travels to the Ganges for answers?

We get near the bus and a girl nudges my forearm and she draws her fingers to her mouth, a gesture asking me for food. And I can't ignore her. I look down and smile and say no. I say no again. I say no again. I say no again. Why is she tormenting me? Why must she persist? Why, God, is she down there stuck in a circle of destruction, and I'm about to get on a bus to leave to the Ramada?

The Factory of Hopelessness

Now I share this journal entry with you for a purpose. It's not meant to poke fun or make fun of Hinduism. It's intended to make us understand that the factory of hopelessness we experienced there, we have the same kind of factories of hopelessness here, just in a more sanitized version.

If you do any research on the Ganges River, you will read the fact that the Ganges River is literally disappearing. About six hundred thousand people die a year because of malaria and diarrhea caused by the Ganges River.

What we put our hope in apart from Christ will kill us. Anything apart from Christ, any endgame apart from the living hope we receive through the resurrection of Jesus Christ is folks a complete waste of our time. Because we, someday, will experience this resurrection life, and we are here. So we that's there, and this is here. And every point along the way, we have a purpose, and we have meaning.

Your Endgame

And this is an invitation for you to consider the hopes you have that are perishable, that are defiled, or that are fading. Do they exist in your life? Because what you aim for is that will dictate your activity. What you aim for will dictate your deeds. And so what is it for you? What is your endgame?

Is it having a really nice retirement package? Well, it's not a bad thing to have a retirement package. But apart from Christ? Yeah. There's a problem there. Is it to start your own business? Is it to have a lot of letters behind your name to look successful? Is it to find identity apart from Christ, where you're following all these western versions of gurus looking for that dot to be placed on your head, looking for affirmation, looking for I made it.

What is that for you? And you need to kill it. Because resurrection assumes a death happened. It's not a resuscitation. It says resurrection. And so when we die and rise with Christ, we need to take our false hopes, all these dangling carrots that are in front of us that we think are most important and we need to leave them in the tomb with Christ. We need to die to it in order to rise with Christ, to proclaim his Christ, the king, and for us to experience resurrection life today.

Your endgame, folks, is important and worth serious consideration because we need until the end game comes, we need to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus' author and perfecter of our faith.

Prayer

Let's pray. Dear gracious lord, we thank you for this amazing passage that focuses on resurrection, focuses on rebirth, focuses on the hope that we have in the future. Thank you for the ways in which this sets up for participating in communion, where we get to celebrate together with each other in faith communion. And as we experience communion with each other and communion with Christ, we pray that we will do so not merely with remembrance but with amnesis.

And we pray that your Holy Spirit will work along inside our hearts, developing us as disciples, moving us beyond decision makers, and really get into the nitty gritty of what it means to follow Christ until we experience that eternal inheritance. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.