Sermon Transcript

We’re so glad you’re here today! If you’re new to Harvest, we welcome you. And if you’re new to Harvest, we get a little excited about the reality of the resurrection, so thank you for indulging us. We’re going to do that again before we’re done here today, so just catch your breath.

Open your Bible to 1 Peter—almost to the end of your Bible. We’re going to read a little section written by one of the twelve disciples of Jesus. This was a man who actually lived and walked with Jesus and was one of the first people to see the empty tomb. And he’s got something to say about the resurrection! We’re going to see that in just a minute. Let me give you the theme for today. It’s simply this:

 

Hope is alive because Jesus is alive!

 

When I was nineteen years old, I had a really odd job. It was probably the best job you could have as a nineteen-year-old boy in college. I worked at a funeral home! You say, “Well, what would be good about that?” It was just…interesting. You ask, “What did you do?” Well, we did a lot of different things. One thing I got to do was unload the caskets.

Every week, Batesville Casket Company would deliver these caskets, and they came in various sizes and shapes, and different metals or woods, and different colors—and we had a whole showroom. You could walk in there and pick out whatever casket you felt like you wanted to spend the rest of your time in while you were here on earth. And it was just kind of interesting, getting those things dusted and polished up and making them look so nice, so that dead people could get in them. It was interesting.

Every now and then, someone in our city would die. It happens. And they would call the funeral home and say, “It’s time for you to come and prepare the body for burial,” and so we would go pick up these dead people and bring them back to the funeral home and get them ready—and make them look as nice as they could.

You know, you always kind of waited for that family member to come around and say, “He looks…great!” And, as a nineteen-year-old sarcastic young man I had to bite my tongue, so as not to say, “He’s dead! He may look great; he’s not doing great.” Unless, he’s actually alive in another place.

A lot of people struggle with the concept of the after-life. Do you remember the guy that used to have the talk show on CNN, Larry King? Larry King used to always ask his guest this question. Every guest, he had to ask them. “So, what do you think about the after-life? Do you think this is it?”

He was so fixated on death. As a matter of fact, a few months ago New York Times Magazine did an article on Larry King, and he kind of opened up about the way he felt about death and why he was so obsessed with death, and this is what he said: “I fear death. My biggest fear is death, because I don’t think I’m going anywhere. And since I don’t think that, I don’t have a belief—I don’t have a faith. I’m an unbeliever…” in all this stuff you guys are so excited about this morning. Larry doesn’t believe the way that we believe.

Here’s his alternative. Larry says, “I want to be frozen!” I would invite him to come live in Northern Indiana, if he wants to be frozen. We’re frozen here about half the year! But he’s talking about permanently, like Hans Solo. Larry says he wants to be frozen, “…in the hope…” there’s our word, “…that they’ll find whatever I died of and bring me back!”

The slim hope—the glimmer of hope—that he has is that, somehow, years from now, after he’s dead, scientists will discover what killed him, inject him with a solution, and he’ll wake back up! His wife…his seventh wife, by the way…told him he needs to stop talking about death, because he’s scaring the children.

So, Larry’s looking for something, but he hasn’t found the living hope that is offered to those who simply believe that Jesus came and died a death in my place, and He rose again and lives today to bring resurrection power and living hope for every one of us who believe in the risen Savior! Do you have a hope today?

Is there a sense of hopelessness when you turn on the news and you find out that terrorists have committed another violent act? And you look at the political climate and the candidates that we get to choose from and you’re like, “Really? Is that where my hope is?” Or you look at your bank balance or you look at your debt and you wonder, “Really? Is that ever going to get paid off?”

What is hope? Let’s look in the Scriptures. Let’s read the words of Peter, this man that lived with Jesus. We read in 1 Peter 1:3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!” Do you see the word “blessed,” there? That’s an exclamation; it’s an exultation! It’s a verb that says, “I am coming to offer to you the thing that God wants most out of my life.”

Do you understand that you and I were created to be a blessing to God? And yet, you and I usually don’t live there, right? Usually, our prayers go like this: “God, would You bless me? God, did you see how hard I worked for you at church this morning? And, God, did you see how many calories I burned during church this morning? I mean, surely you can bless me now, right? Could You just kind of fix my finances and fix my marriage—and fix my kids, Lord?”

We come kind of expecting Him to bless us, but do you know what Peter understood? That his life was meant to offer a blessing to God. What we did in the last thirty minutes in our worship time was our best effort to give a blessing to God, and let Him know the value and the worth and the honor and the glory that belongs to Him. Our lives were created to be a blessing.

Peter continues, “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…” So, Peter mentions this living hope. What is this living hope? Let’s give it a definition:

 

Hope is the confident expectation that something better is coming tomorrow!

 

How was your week? Did you have a bad week? If you had a bad week and you’re a Christian, you can live with hope that next week is going to be better! Some of you say, “Trent, I didn’t have a bad week—I’ve had a bad life! I mean, the last thirty years—the pain, the agony and the hurt, the abuse – what’s happened to me, and the failures.”

And yet, if you’re a Christian, do you understand that the living hope gives us a confident expectation that something better is coming, even after this life! Hope is what all of us want, it’s what all of us need, and it’s what is offered to us. We’re going to learn three things about hope this morning, and here’s the first thing:

 

1. Hope is something that is caused. (v. 3)

 

Even as we talk about hope, you’re probably sitting there like, “Yeah, I should be more hopeful, so I’m gonna try that this week. I’m going to try to grunt out some hope,” you know. You feel guilty for being hopeless, so it’s like, “Okay, I’m not going to be hopeless anymore. I’m going to really try to be more hopeful.” You will never be able to pull that off! Hope is not something that is worked up from the inside; hope is something that is caused by believing something on the outside. Hope is caused.

I want you to see it here: “According to your great mercy,” is what 1 Peter says. Do you know what mercy is? Mercy is God not giving me what I do deserve. Does anybody here need any mercy? Is anybody hopeful that God’s going to be merciful to you? A lot of times when I’m trying to talk to people about their faith, I’ll ask them this question, “Are you confident that if you died right now you’d go to heaven?” Do know what people often say to me? “I hope so!” But, they’re not expressing to me that “I have a confident expectation that I will be in heaven.”

So, we use the word “hope” in a lot of different ways. Some of you say, “I’m going to watch the basketball game this afternoon. I hope we win.” But that’s not a confident expectation based on a promised provision by God. So, hope is something that is caused by God’s mercy—and you and I are candidates for God’s mercy.

Let’s think about mercy for a minute. I’ll tell you about a sad reality that happened a few weeks ago. There was a crime committed by someone in our church. A ten-year-old member of our congregation, who happens to share the same address as me, decided to exercise his Second Amendment rights and grabbed his BB gun and went into the backyard of a neighbor, a partner in crime, who was also armed with a BB gun. Looking for some target, they happened to find the neighbors’ recreational vehicle. You know where this is going? Taking careful aim at three of the windows in the RV, the criminal pulled the trigger and committed the crime.

The criminal was caught; he was apprehended and brought before the judge. It was determined that about $500 worth of damage had been done. The criminal was marched to the owner of the RV, and the criminal pleaded for mercy and offered to pay for his crimes. There is only one problem: the net worth of the criminal is about three-dollars-and-fifty-cents.

Have you found yourself in the story yet? You and I are the guilty criminals! And, with no conscious comprehension of what we are doing, we have often pulled the trigger and created great damage, and violated the law of God—not understanding the assault that we are making upon the perfect will of God. You and I stand as guilty criminals, and what we need is mercy. The only hope that you and I have is that we’ll stand before God and He will extend mercy to us. “I hope I get mercy!” But, remember, hope is a confident expectation.

How can you know-that-you-know that-you-know, that when you stand before God, He will not treat you as a criminal? Because, if you believe that He treated Jesus as if He pulled the trigger, He can treat you as if you have never sinned. It is caused by something Jesus did, not earned by something I do.

A guilty criminal—he can find a lot of different ways to try to pay off his debt. “I know I pulled the trigger, I know I caused the damage, but I’ll work it off!” You can never work to pay off the debt, because the crimes that you’ve committed have an infinite price tag. You don’t have enough lifetimes to pay it off.

And so, you and I stand as guilty criminals, and our only hope is that God would cause mercy to be extended to us. And it results in two things: notice here, 1 Peter 1:3, again: “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. . .” Hope is caused by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

But listen, that event that took place two-thousand years ago. You’ve heard of it, I’m sure. You’ve seen movies. There’s the story and there are songs. You know the story, right? How does an event that took place two-thousand years ago have any bearing on you today? You can only hope for mercy if God has not only raised Jesus from the dead, but He’s raised you from the dead.

Do you understand that you and I are born into this world as guilty criminals and, as a result, sin has killed us spiritually? We have a terminal disease; we’re all spiritually dead. Some of us just think, “Nah, I’m just a little spiritually weak,” or, “I’m a little spiritually sick,” but it’s really hard to admit: “I don’t have any spiritual life in me, whatsoever.” If you’re here this morning, and you were kind of looking around like, “What are all these people so jazzed-up about?” If there’s not any spark of emotion in you to relate to what was going on this morning, it could be because you’re spiritually dead!

You say, “Working in the funeral home, weren’t you scared?” No! “Why?” Because these people are dead people! They can’t do anything to me. I am a lot more afraid of the people who are still alive! The people who are dead are no threat. Dead people don’t respond; dead people don’t react.

And if, when God speaks, you don’t respond and you don’t react, it could be because you’re spiritually dead. When everyone else is hearing the voice of God, and everybody else is celebrating the resurrection from the dead, if there’s a not a spark of life in you, it could be that you’re spiritually dead.

Now, listen. You ask, “Why are you beating me up, telling me I’m dead?” It’s because I want you to be spiritually alive. And your only hope is that God would spark spiritual life in you and cause you to be born again. God brought life in an empty tomb, and God needs to bring life in a dead, cold, empty heart—in you—this morning. Come out of your spiritual grave. Come alive spiritually, respond in faith and repentance to the story of the gospel, and believe today that hope is caused by you being born again!

Have you heard that phrase “born again?” It’s used in the Bible a lot, and a lot of people kind of make fun of that term – being “born again.” It’s really not that hard to understand. Do you have a birthday? If I asked you, “Do you know your birthday?” On the count of three, you tell me your birthday, I’ll tell you mine. One, two, three. Some of you left off the year because you’re ashamed of how old you are! But you have a date, right?

Don’t you remember that day? Don’t you remember that wonderful experience of being born? Remember being all cuddled up there with mom, and all of a sudden there are bright lights and everybody’s pulling on and you get whacked on the bottom and you scream? “Whoa, this is the greatest day of my life!” Do you remember that?

No, don’t remember that! What if I looked at you and said, “Well, then, how do you know that you were really born?” You’re like, “I’m here!” There are signs of physical life, right? You have ears that hear, you have a heart that beats, you have senses, you have movement, you have progress, you have growth. It’s all evidence of physical life, right?

Well, listen. When Jesus says, “You must be born again,” do you know what He’s telling you? “You need a spiritual birthday, too!” A lot of times when I ask people, “Are you a Christian?” they’ll say to me, “Well, I’ve always been a Christian!” No, no. You’ve always been dead, spiritually, and you need a spiritual birthday that makes you alive to the things of God!

Our eyes are opened, we hear the voice of God, we feed on this Word. We have an appetite, a spiritual hunger. There’s spiritual progress, there’s spiritual growth; there’s spiritual muscle that carries spiritual weight. There are all these evidences of spiritual life. If the evidence of spiritual life is not there, do you understand what it says? You’ve never had a spiritual birth.

If you’ve never had a spiritual birth, you need to be resurrected this morning. You need a spiritual birthday. March 27, 2016 can be your spiritual birthday! I’m going to give you an opportunity, here in just a few minutes, to invite Jesus Christ to take over control in your life, and to bring spiritual life where there’s only been spiritual death. You can walk out of here with hope—a living hope—because you are now a living spiritual person that has spiritual signs of life! If that’s never happened to you, make it happen. Do you have a spiritual birthday?

Tell me your spiritual birthday on the count of three. I’ll tell you mine. One, two, three. August 28^th, 1982. It was a little quieter in the room at that point, wasn’t it? Now, you may not even know the day and the hour—it’s okay, you don’t have to know the day and the hour.

But listen. If you do not have spiritual birth, you do not have spiritual life. If you don’t have a conversion story, you don’t have a conversion. If you can’t look at a time in your life when things changed, when you died to your old way of life, where you turned from the things that God hates and now you love the things that you once hated and now hate the things that you once loved. And there’s been this complete turn-around in your life. If you don’t have spiritual life, then you don’t have hope. Spiritual birth is something that is caused by believing in the resurrecting power of Jesus Christ!

Not only is hope something that is caused,

 

2. Hope is something that is kept. (v. 4-5)

 

Look at 1 Peter 1:4 and 5; here’s what we have to look forward to: “…An inheritance that is imperishable…” That means it never ends—no expiration date. “Undefiled…” That means it’s unpolluted; not like this world at all, not under the curse. “And unfading…” which means that we’re going to get to see it in all its glory. “…Kept in heaven for you.” Are you looking forward to that day?

We live in this world with its aches and its pains, and its cancer and its Alzheimer’s, and we realize we were made for a world that we’ve never seen. There’s an inheritance waiting that gives us hope beyond the grave. Do you have that hope – a confident assurance that you’ll be there? Larry King never found it. I trust that today you’ll understand.

And I would say this, do you realize that the inheritance waiting for us…a lot of people, when they think of heaven, they think of, “Yeah, a big mansion with gold bars on it. Yeah, God is going to make so much of me when I’m in heaven.”. No! Would you want to go to heaven if Jesus wasn’t there? Then, you want to go to heaven for the wrong reason; you want to go for a selfish reason. We want to go to heaven because it’s there that we will be set free to worship Him, unhindered by this body of sin. So, hope is kept.

Notice it says, all of that inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, is kept for you in heaven but it’s also guarded on earth. Look at verse 5: “…Who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”

Sometimes when I ask people, “Do you want to become a Christian; do you want to put your faith in Christ?” they’re hesitant because they don’t believe they can live up to the commitment. Welcome to the club.

You see, faith is not something that just gets us into heaven, faith is something that preserves us until we get to heaven. And God is the One who’s guarding our faith. God is the one who strengthens our faith. Our ability to get to heaven is not dependent upon my ability to have enough faith—it’s dependent on my ability to have the right object of faith. The fact that Jesus died on that cross for me—that’s where my faith is, and God will guard that faith until I receive that in heaven.

Here’s the third thing that we learn about hope:

 

3. Hope is available! (v. 6-9)

 

Hope is available to you today!

Here in verse 6, Scripture says, “In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”

 Do you see there in verse 6, Peter mentions two words that seem to be contradictions, “joy” and “grief”? Do you know that only in a Christian—only in someone who has been born again—can you experience joy simultaneously operating with grief? It’s the unique hope of a Christian.

If you are a Christian, you can find something every day that would give you a reason to grieve. And if you are a Christian, you can find something every day that will give you a reason to hope. We grieve, not like those who have no hope. We rejoice, even though we have circumstances and situations that bring tears and pain. That’s why we need hope beyond this world.

How do people go to funerals and say “goodbye” to loved ones, with no hope that they would ever see them again, that there’s no hope beyond the grave? The Christian hope is that God has a resurrecting power that brings dead things back to life. Not only does He bring dead people back to life, He brings dead marriages back to life. He brings dead faith back to life. He brings dead churches back to life. Hope is available for every person who is facing a fiery trial.

And then the passage says in verse 8, “Though you have not seen him, you love him.” Hope is available for everyone who has never seen, with their eyes, this God that we speak about. You say, “That’s impossible. How can you love someone you’ve never seen?” Think about who’s writing this. Peter’s penning these words, and yet he’s writing these words about sixty years after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He’s writing to a generation of people who never physically laid eyes on Jesus.

And he was identifying a love in these people for Jesus, though they’d never seen Him. They’d heard the story. They’d heard the story of the cross, they had heard the story of the resurrection, and there was something in them that gave them the ability to love Jesus. Do you love Jesus? Or do you just like Him a lot?

Listen, being a Christian is not about being an admirer of Jesus—thinking Jesus was a good person and a good moral teacher. Being a Christian is believing that Jesus is alive today. God never gave us the option of just admiring Jesus and thinking He was a good moral teacher, but dead and buried—in a grave—and the resurrection was a hoax. Every person who ever came to Christ either loved Him or hated Him. And those are your only two options. To kind of be an admiring fan from a distance, but never want to love Him, is not the Christian life. If that’s you, you need a new love, and that love comes from a new hope—a resurrected love.

 “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.”

Here’s the reality: There is an immaterial part of you, that a surgeon can’t cut open and take out. Do you know what’s there? It’s the part of you that God made to connect with Him. And when we read about death in the Bible, it’s different than the way we think about death. We think about death as being the cessation of life.

The Bible doesn’t describe it that way. The Bible describes death as the separation of the soul from the body. The soul lives on. And you will live on. You have a soul that will live in one of two places forever—either with God in Heaven, or apart from God in judgment in hell forever.

Do you have a hope, a confident assurance that you know that-you-know that-you-know that you will be with Him forever in heaven, worshipping and rejoicing? And by the way, if you kind of endured the first half of this service, you’re going to be really out of place in Heaven. Why would you want to go to Heaven if you didn’t enjoy the first part of this service? That’s what we’re going to be doing for eternity. You say, “Well, I don’t really want to be doing that.” Well, then, maybe your soul needs to get right with God. Maybe you need to come alive spiritually.

You ask, “How do I do that?” It’s real simple. You acknowledge you’re spiritually dead; your sin has created a spiritual cancer that has killed you. You have a terminal disease, spiritually, and it has separated you from God. You’re spiritually dead; your soul is separated from God. How do you get spiritual life? You repent of sin, you put your faith in a resurrected Christ, and God breathes new life in you, and you are resurrected, and  you connect with God and worship Him, and you love Him and serve Him with the rest of your life. Is that you? I hope so!

You have a confident assurance that something better is coming because there is a resurrection that has happened to Jesus, and there is a resurrection that has happened to you.

Under your seat there’s a little card. Would you pull that out right now? Just dig through the confetti. You’ll find a little card there, it just says “Response Card.” There’s a place for you to put your contact information. Just put your name there, maybe an email address.

Do you see the four boxes? The first box says this: “Today I have trusted Christ as my personal Savior and Lord.” In just a minute, I’m going to ask you to bow your heads, close your eyes. If you’ve never been born again, I’m going to invite you to commit your life to Christ and ask God to give you a living hope—unlike anything you’ve ever had before. And maybe, at the end of this service, you can say, “Today is my spiritual birthday, March 27, 2016!”

Look at the next box: “I have questions about my salvation. I’d like to talk to somebody.” You may say, “Trent, now you’ve really confused me. I thought I had it figured out, but then I came to church and now I’m confused. I’ve got questions.” Our pastors will be here at the end of the service; you can come and talk to any of them. If you’ve checked that box, we’d like to get back in touch with you and let you know how you can know that you know that you know that you have a hope in heaven.

Third box: “I’m confident that I’ve previously trusted Christ as my Savior and my Lord.” You know what you’re saying? “I know my spiritual birthday. I was twelve,” or “I was twenty-six,” or “I was thirty-five,” or “It was three months ago.” But, “I remember when I came alive spiritually.” You can check the third box.

The last box says, “I’d like to be baptized.” If you checked the first box, you should check the fourth box. What is this business about baptism? Do you know what baptism is? It is the picture of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ! Baptism is the picture that Christ gave to every follower, to publicly proclaim, “I’m with that guy!” It’s not only a picture of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection — it’s a picture of your death, burial and resurrection – the sign of new life and new birth. That you come up out of that watery grave to live a new life given to you by a living hope in the resurrected Christ.

So, I’m going to ask you to bow your heads right now; everybody, heads bowed, eyes closed, nobody looking around. I just want to give you a moment. Is there someone here today that needs a new hope? Someone that came in here spiritually dead? Your soul, your spirit, has never been connected by God? You need new life. If that’s you, why don’t you just open your heart to Him right now and say, “Lord, I believe that You died on that cross for my sin. I’m tired of living my life apart from You. I confess I need a Savior; I confess that none of my self-righteous religion can save me. I want the joy that You offer in the midst of grief. I want the hope, the confident expectation that I have a home in heaven because of what You’ve done on that cross for me. I want to live this new life as an act of worship to You. Help me never to be ashamed of You. In Jesus’ Name.”