Show Notes
Titus 1:1-3
Pastor Stephen Lauer
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Let's pray.
[00:00:05] Our gracious God, how we rejoice as we consider the hope that you hold forth to us in your Son, Jesus Christ, that not only are we delivered from all of our misery and rebellion and delivered from the wrath to come in Christ, but he brings us not to some neutral place from whence we have to claw our way forward and somehow earn good things, something we could not do. But in Christ Jesus, you hold for us. Hold forth to us the promise of. Of seeing you as you are, of joys forevermore in your presence.
[00:01:02] We thank you that in Christ Jesus you have made a way, the way, the truth and the life that we might draw near to you.
[00:01:13] And we thank you that we have his promise that he will return one day and we will see him face to face.
[00:01:23] And we will be changed to be made like him, and that we will be with him forever.
[00:01:31] And being with him, we will be with you.
[00:01:35] Our God, O Lord, our God. Your Word unfolds these truths to us clearly and plainly.
[00:01:44] And yet we confess that we have many doubts.
[00:01:49] And in those doubts our eyes turn away from Christ and to ourselves and to other things.
[00:01:57] We confess that when we fall into sin, we become fearful again of your anger and our hope wavers.
[00:02:08] And, oh God, we confess too, that this world and the pleasures and lusts that it holds forth to us so often draw our eyes away from you and from the hope of eternal life.
[00:02:25] O Lord our God, we beg your forgiveness and mercy in Christ.
[00:02:30] And we ask that by your word and by the power of your Holy Spirit, tonight you would wash us clean, removing all of these things and filling us with the vision of the Lord Jesus, that being drawn to him, our faith would be strengthened and we would be ready to live in hope of eternal life. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
[00:02:56] Our sermon text is from Titus, chapter one, Titus one. We'll read the first four verses.
[00:03:21] Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, for the sake of the faith of God's elect and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life, which God, who never lies, promised before the ages began and at the proper time manifested in his word, through the preaching with which I have been entrusted by the command of God our Savior, to Titus, my true child in a common faith, grace and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus, our Savior.
[00:04:01] As far as God's word, you may be seated.
[00:04:20] We're approaching that time of year when little children begin to remember something that not too far in the future, something really Good is coming.
[00:04:35] Maybe they remember when it came around last year.
[00:04:39] Now you don't have the snow, fall and the bitter cold that up in the north and the Midwest would remind children that the season is approaching.
[00:04:53] But I'm sure children down here still remember and they begin to hope.
[00:05:00] They begin to think about what kind of gifts are going to be under that tree, right.
[00:05:06] Talking about Christmas.
[00:05:09] Children remember the good things and the wonderful times, I'm sure too, with family and friends of celebrating Christmas. And children begin to expect and to long for Christmas Day to come.
[00:05:25] What is it about less than two and a half months out, just over two months.
[00:05:35] Some children are talking about Christmas in the middle of the summer, but over the next month they're going to start talking about it, right? And they're doing that because they know about this good thing that they've been promised.
[00:05:46] Maybe their parents have asked them what they want for Christmas. Write a list, I don't know what your family does, something like that, but children begin to get excited and they begin to expect what's coming. And then maybe early December, maybe it's right after Thanksgiving, whenever your family does it, you begin to put up the Christmas decorations and the children's excitement and expectation and hope gets bigger and stronger and the more decorations are up and the trees up, and then eventually the there's boxes and bags wrapped up under the tree and they know that Christmas is coming and they're going to get goodies.
[00:06:25] Well, that's a simple illustration for hope and what another word for hope, which is just simply expectation is here. The third aim for the Christian ministry that Paul gives is that the Christian ministry is to aim at, he said, first, the faith of God's elect, secondly, the knowledge of the truth, and thirdly, the hope of eternal life. That in his preaching ministry, Paul and all other preachers are constantly to be aiming at building up and strengthening the hope of eternal life in the Christian's heart. Now, there's certain times when you see this, so maybe we can use a different illustration that some of you have probably seen and maybe some of you are experiencing even now.
[00:07:14] One of the places that many of us see hope shining brightly is when we get to know an older believer. Maybe you go visit someone who's homebound or struggling with aches and pains and the difficulties that come with the end of life, and you talk to that dear brother or sister and what does he talk about? Well, of course, sometimes maybe they talk about their grandkids that came to visit recently or memories of good things in Life, joyful things. But often their mind begins to turn to the hope of eternal life, of going to be with Jesus, of knowing that when I go to be with Jesus, the troubles and trials that I've lived all my life long through and now have come to a head in my pain, my misery, my sufferings, the things that have left me bedridden.
[00:08:11] That hope is what's carrying me through. And I can't wait to go to be with Jesus. Maybe you've known someone that was experiencing that.
[00:08:19] That's the hope of eternal life that Paul in his ministry was aiming for in every Christian and that all pastors are to be aiming for.
[00:08:28] You see it if you remember one more last illustration of it. You see it in the Apostle Paul in his words and the letter to the Philippians in the first chapter especially.
[00:08:41] There he is. He's in prison at Rome. He's in chains. He's suffering greatly, but his mind isn't on any of his sufferings.
[00:08:50] What's it on? It's on two things. It's on the gospel going forth.
[00:08:56] He says, yeah, I'm in prison, but I rejoice because the gospel is being preached. And then he comes to the fact that he's about to face death.
[00:09:07] And he says that famous phrase, for me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
[00:09:13] And there you see his hope. His mind is filled, his heart is filled with the hope of eternal life. He says, if I live on, it's better for the church. I get to continue my ministry of building up the saints and calling in the elect through the gospel.
[00:09:29] But for me, to die means I get to go to be with the Lord. And that is far better than anything else. You see a man who's gripped by the hope of eternal life.
[00:09:40] It wasn't just his ministry goal. It was also what filled him and what he wanted the church to be full of.
[00:09:48] So we're going to look at this hope of eternal life and also how it's a ministry goal this evening.
[00:09:54] First, we're going to kind of define, work through defining what this hope of eternal life is.
[00:10:02] We use words like hope and eternal life in sort of Christianese because they're biblical terms. We use them commonly. What does Paul mean by them?
[00:10:13] Start with eternal life. So hope is the expectation of the desire for eternal life. What is it that Paul is saying Christians need to be expecting when he says eternal life?
[00:10:29] We could put it in several different ways, but here's the approach. We're going to start with God made man for eternal Life.
[00:10:39] When God made Adam and Eve and he put them in the garden.
[00:10:43] That time in the garden was meant to be temporary. It wasn't permanent, it wasn't eternal.
[00:10:52] He made man in his own image, in his own likeness, to be like him in a certain way. And you can study the image of God and man. But one key aspect of man being made in God's image was that God made man so that he could have friendship with God, so that we could know God.
[00:11:10] We're like him in certain ways so that we can know him. We can be friends with him, we can have fellowship or communion with him. And when God put Adam in the garden, God would come and talk to Adam and be Adam's friend and have fellowship with him. But it wasn't full fellowship and it wasn't permanent.
[00:11:33] And we know that for several reasons. One, it ended right.
[00:11:37] Man rebelled against God and said, God, basically, I don't want to do things your way. I don't want to be your friend. I don't want this fellowship. I want something else more. I want to be like you. And so, of course, he took from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He sinned, he rebelled against God, and God threw him out of the garden.
[00:11:55] So you can see that the communion, the fellowship and friendship that Adam had with God in the garden was temporary. It wasn't permanent. And so man was cut off from God through his sin and rebellion.
[00:12:08] But on the other side, God had pictured for Adam and for Eve that there was a fuller, greater and more permanent and eternal communion and eternal life that Adam could have if he would obey God. If he weren't to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But if you were to obey God, love him and serve him perfectly, God would give him eternal life.
[00:12:33] That eternal life of having full fellowship with God was what God made man for. That's what he made you for. You were created for this end. That was your purpose, to fully enjoy God and have fellowship with him, be friends with him, see him face to face.
[00:12:51] That was your created purpose.
[00:12:53] And we deviated from that. We turned away from that, of course, in our sin.
[00:12:59] And the tree of life that God put in the midst of the garden was the symbol of that.
[00:13:04] One day, God would let Adam eat from the tree of life. He would live forever, and he would no longer live in the garden, but he would live with God forever in God's presence.
[00:13:14] Not just a little while, a few times a week or something like that, but forever.
[00:13:20] Beholding God face to face when man lost that temporary friendship, partial friendship with God, and was thrown out of the garden, God made a way so that Adam could once again have eternal life.
[00:13:36] He could have the thing that he was made for.
[00:13:39] After the fall, God promised that he would send a Savior, and that through that Savior, he would bring man this eternal life, this fall, full friendship with God. And the Old Testament longed for that.
[00:13:51] The Old Testament saints knew because of God's promises and his prophecies, he knew that one day God was going to give man a savior. And through that Savior, we would get to be with God forever and see him in all of his glory and have perfect friendship with God, something greater and better than the garden.
[00:14:09] So we sang from Psalm 16, verse 11. You make known to me the path of life.
[00:14:15] In your presence there is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. And if you remember the previous couple verses, it was through death and resurrection that on the other side of death, God would raise his saints, and that after the resurrection, they would be in God's presence forevermore. There would be eternal life, or the very next Psalm, Psalm 17:15.
[00:14:40] As for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness.
[00:14:45] When I awake, I shall be satisfied with your likeness. The Old Testament saints believed that one day, through the work of a Savior, God would unite his people to himself, not here on earth in terms of the garden, like Adam, but in a fuller, greater way, seeing God face to face and forever.
[00:15:06] And they longed for that, and they looked forward to it. We're going to sing again after the sermon from Psalm 73, and we hear the same idea. You guide me with your counsel that is in this life, and afterward you will receive me to glory. We read from Romans 5, the hope of glory.
[00:15:28] The Old Testament saints had that same hope. They would one day see God face to face, behold his glory. And everything that was good and wonderful about this life, it all comes from God, right? And when we behold God face to face in eternal life, we're going to get that infinitely in fullness, in abundance, with no end.
[00:15:51] God promised a Savior. He promised that his people would be with him, behold him face to face, eternal life.
[00:15:57] He sent that Savior, Jesus.
[00:16:02] And when Jesus came, he came promising his people, I came to give you eternal life what God offered Adam, and Adam failed to receive in the tree and in tree of life what God promised his people. In the Old Testament, Jesus came saying, I am actually going to give this to you.
[00:16:23] He prays for his people in John 17:3. This is eternal life that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
[00:16:35] That's eternal life, to know God and his Son Jesus.
[00:16:42] He says later in that prayer, I desire, Father, that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am to see my glory that you have given me because you love me before the foundation of the world.
[00:16:55] Jesus says, father, I have a glory that you gave to me because I'm the Son of God. And I want you to bring my people to be with me so that they can behold the fullness of God's glory revealed in the Son of God.
[00:17:12] What Jesus is saying is that he is the one through whom eternal life, through whom union and fellowship and friendship with God will happen in all of its fullness.
[00:17:24] One more verse. The apostle John, reflecting on Jesus and his ministry and on what he's one day going to do, he says, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared.
[00:17:40] We're not there yet. We're God's children, but we haven't received the fullness of glory.
[00:17:45] And then he says, we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
[00:17:54] Those who are the children of God now have a hope of eternal life. That is, of seeing God face to face as he is.
[00:18:06] And to cap this picture off for you, what was pictured of the tree of life in the garden, the apostle John sees that same tree of life in. In the eternal state in heaven. In Revelation, chapter 22, When God is united to his people on the last day and his people are gathered around the throne, John sees the vision of a river of life flowing from that throne of God and from the Lamb.
[00:18:32] And on either side of that river of life is the tree of life.
[00:18:38] And in that vision, John was seeing a promise that what God offered Adam in the garden and Adam lost, Jesus is going to bring for us.
[00:18:51] And that's our future hope of eternal life. To be with God and to see him forever.
[00:18:58] That's the thing that we're hoping for.
[00:19:01] What is hope?
[00:19:04] That's a wonderful thing. Sounds like a good thing. To be with the good Creator who made everything, who wants to be our friends, to be with him forever.
[00:19:13] That's wonderful. That's truly good. But what is this hope business?
[00:19:18] Hoping? Expecting for Christmas presents. What is hoping for eternal life?
[00:19:26] It has to do with a future blessing, right? A future promise of eternal life, of being with God.
[00:19:33] It sounds similar to faith, doesn't it?
[00:19:37] We have faith in Jesus Christ. We trust in God's promises, right?
[00:19:42] Hope and faith are similar. In fact, the New Testament frequently connects three things.
[00:19:49] Faith, hope and love.
[00:19:51] The end of, for example, 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, there's three things that remain faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. If you read through Paul's epistles a number of places, you see faith, hope and love going together. And if you look back here in our verse, Titus 1:1:2, you see that faith is there, hope is there, and the knowledge of the truth which accords with or which results in godliness. That's kind of similar to love, isn't it?
[00:20:28] Really? Paul's describing faith, hope and love here in this verse, but he's describing them not in terms of as they are in us, but as ministry aims or goals. But really what you have here is again faith, hope and love. So faith and hope, they often go together, but they must be different, right? So let's distinguish hope from faith.
[00:20:52] We say that by faith we receive God's promises.
[00:20:57] God promises us that if we put our trust in Jesus and we repent of our sins, he will forgive us. That's his promise, right? Faith says, I trust in Christ.
[00:21:08] And by faith we receive that promise and it becomes a reality for us.
[00:21:13] You know this because you experienced it when you came to saving faith in Christ in your conversion. Maybe that was as a child, you don't remember when it happened. Maybe it happened as an adult. But that's what happened. By faith. That promise became a reality, a now present reality.
[00:21:32] And you experience that again and again in the Christian life. You fall into some sin. Your heart is troubled because of that, right?
[00:21:40] And you say, I need to be forgiven of this sin. I must turn to God and repent and seek forgiveness in Christ. And you do that by faith, trusting in God's promise that he will forgive you. What happens? God does forgive you, and that forgiveness becomes a reality for you. And then you experience the peace in your heart that flows from that. We read about that in Romans 5. We're justified by faith in Christ.
[00:22:08] And now we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:22:12] Faith lays hold of those promises and and they become now present realities as God applies them to us, Christ and His work to us through faith.
[00:22:24] But hope's a little different.
[00:22:27] Faith lays hold of something and it becomes ours. Now hope is an expectation.
[00:22:33] It's looking forward to something that we don't have yet.
[00:22:37] It's a little different.
[00:22:40] Hebrews 11:1 says that faith is the substance of things. Hope hoped for the evidence of Things not yet seen.
[00:22:50] There you see that distinction. By faith, we receive the things that are promised.
[00:22:57] But hope is the expectation of the things that are promised.
[00:23:04] Hope looks forward to expects for what God is going to give us in the future.
[00:23:13] Let's maybe press even further into the nature of what Christian hope is. It's an expectation. What is an expectation or a hope?
[00:23:24] It's an inclination of our hearts.
[00:23:28] Faith is also an inclination of our hearts or a propensity of our hearts. It's our hearts, in the case of faith, not just knowing the truth about God's promises in Christ, but being inclined to lean on Christ to trust in Christ, Right?
[00:23:46] Hope is similarly an inclination of the heart and the will and the desires.
[00:23:53] In this case, in expectation, looking forward to something with certainty.
[00:24:01] Paul says in Romans 8:25, if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
[00:24:10] Do you see the distinction there in hope? We haven't received that eternal life yet. We know that it's coming. We know one day we're going to enter God's presence and see him face to face. And we're looking forward to it. We're expecting it, and we're waiting for it patiently.
[00:24:28] Now there's probably one more thing, at least more. One thing we can say about the Christians hope as we're kind of defining it here, and that is that it's not a wish.
[00:24:40] Your hope of eternal life is not just a wish.
[00:24:45] We can wish for things. And a lot of times when children are thinking about Christmas, what they're doing is wishing.
[00:24:52] They're wishing, they're desiring that they might receive this present or that present.
[00:24:59] But they don't have a sure and certain expectation as to what they'll get right. We can say they have a hope, a fairly certain hope that they'll receive gifts from their parents.
[00:25:10] But they only have wishes as to what those gifts will be right. And wishes aren't certain, are they?
[00:25:18] When we wish for things, we want them to come true. We want this or that to happen, but we don't know for certain that it will happen.
[00:25:28] The Christian's hope is not a wish. It's a sure and certain thing.
[00:25:34] You can know for sure and for certain that one day you will see God face to face, that one day Jesus will come, that he will raise you from the dead, that he will glorify you and change you so that you have no more sin and no more imperfection, and that you are made ready and able to be in God's presence forever. You can have a sure and certain expectation of that.
[00:26:02] It's not a wish.
[00:26:04] These things are certain.
[00:26:09] It's a sure and certain expectation.
[00:26:13] One last thing I want to point out about the hope of eternal life, and that is that when we use this phrase, eternal life, and we speak of the hope of eternal life, we can say a little more precisely, you might say, what the object of our hope is.
[00:26:37] The object of our hope what exactly that we are expecting for, looking for, know that we are going to receive with certainty.
[00:26:46] The object of our hope is God himself.
[00:26:51] It isn't some amorphous eternal existence.
[00:26:57] Eternal life is receiving God himself.
[00:27:02] And that's what God promises in the covenant of grace. The covenant God made with us, with Christ and with us in Christ, is that he would give himself to us.
[00:27:17] That's our inheritance.
[00:27:19] That's what God promises us. That's at the heart of our hope of eternal life, is that we will receive God himself.
[00:27:33] Can you think of anything greater to hope for?
[00:27:39] Anything better?
[00:27:42] Everything good you experience in this life, everything that's wonderful, the best music, the best food, the most majestic experiences, climbing on mountains or maybe going skydiving. I imagine that's a pretty massive thrill. I'm not recommending it, but I'm sure it is. And I'm sure there people capture something of. Of God's majesty as they're falling through the sky and seeing his creation and that you know just about anything that you can think of where you see some glimmer of goodness and beauty and you marvel at this creation you're gonna receive, the one who made all of that, who's greater than all of that.
[00:28:24] Now, I can't wrap my mind around it, but I know it's true. And you can know that too, that He, God himself, is your greatest hope and expectation.
[00:28:37] Do you have this hope?
[00:28:42] Paul says that an aim, one of the three chief aims of pastoral ministry, of his ministry as an apostle, Titus ministry as a pastor, my ministry as a pastor is that the elect would have this hope of eternal life, that they would be waiting expectantly for the coming of Christ and being ushered into the presence of God to behold his glory.
[00:29:08] Do you have this hope?
[00:29:13] What are you focused on in life?
[00:29:18] What maybe, especially is it that you look to and think about when you're having troubles of all sorts?
[00:29:26] Financial troubles, relational troubles, emotional troubles, physical troubles. Things in this life aren't working out the way you hoped and wanted.
[00:29:36] What do you look to and meditate on and think about when you're going through those problems?
[00:29:43] What Is the hope that carries you through life?
[00:29:47] Is it the hope of eternal life? Do you really have this or is it just a wish?
[00:29:53] If it's just a wish, you don't have the hope of eternal life yet. If it's just that you want this or that you're wishing you're wanting that, maybe you'll get that you don't have the hope of eternal life.
[00:30:10] Mary explained that eternal life comes through the Savior, Jesus Christ.
[00:30:16] It only comes through Him. He says, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but through me.
[00:30:24] He says to Philip, if you know me, you know the Father.
[00:30:30] If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.
[00:30:35] Have you seen Christ Jesus?
[00:30:38] Do you know Him? Do you have saving faith in Christ? Are you leaning on Christ depending upon Him?
[00:30:45] When you have troubles in this life, do you throw yourself on Christ?
[00:30:53] If Christ is in you, if the knowledge of him is in you, if you're depending upon him, if his promises of salvation are precious to you, then you have eternal life.
[00:31:06] And so you have the hope of eternal life.
[00:31:09] But if you don't know him, if you're not leaning on him, then you don't yet have this hope.
[00:31:17] Let's ask it from a different angle.
[00:31:21] What do you look forward to?
[00:31:24] What do you place your expectation in?
[00:31:28] Is it your bank account that's done really well, and your investments?
[00:31:33] Is it that you have a sense of safety because you know your insurance policies will kick in?
[00:31:41] Is it that you figure you can get through anything in life because you're pretty smart and you're sharp and you know you can succeed because you have in the past?
[00:31:55] Is this what you hang your hope on in life?
[00:32:01] If it is, you may not have the hope of eternal life.
[00:32:06] Or there's another angle.
[00:32:09] Some people think that they have the hope of eternal life because they attend church, because they've been baptized, because they've taken the Lord's Supper, because they say their prayers in the morning.
[00:32:22] They say, I do these things.
[00:32:25] So I'm pretty sure that on the last day, God's going to give me eternal life.
[00:32:33] Some people think that way.
[00:32:35] If that's you, then your hope is in those things and not in Christ. Your trust is in those things and not in Christ.
[00:32:45] And you don't have a true hope of eternal life.
[00:32:51] Eternal life comes only only through Christ.
[00:32:56] Consider eternity.
[00:32:58] Most of the things we've been talking about are earthly this life things.
[00:33:03] Think about a never ending future.
[00:33:07] Is that future in the presence of God?
[00:33:11] Are you certain about that?
[00:33:13] Or is that future outside, like Adam being thrown outside of the garden, separated from God?
[00:33:21] And as we're told in various places of Scripture, subject to the wrath of the Lamb?
[00:33:29] Has your heart weighed the size of eternity, its duration, which is unending?
[00:33:38] Have you considered that you really need this hope of eternal life?
[00:33:45] There's only one way.
[00:33:47] The promise of eternal life is only through Jesus.
[00:33:51] And so the hope of eternal life is only founded in Him.
[00:33:57] You need to come to know Jesus.
[00:34:01] He's a gracious and loving God, a gracious and loving Savior. And He's a gracious and loving man who knows your weakness. He knows your doubts. He knows your struggles. He understands what it's like to be tempted to sin even.
[00:34:18] He understands your sufferings.
[00:34:20] He understands how hard this life is. And he came to save you from all of it.
[00:34:29] He says, come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
[00:34:35] And he's not just talking about rest in this life. He's talking about the rest of eternal life.
[00:34:45] Those who come to Christ receive hope.
[00:34:49] If you're a Christian and you know Christ, if you have faith in him, then God has given you hope. I want to say that again.
[00:35:01] God has given you hope. We said that hope is an inclination or propensity of the heart, of the soul towards expecting the coming of Christ and entering into God's presence.
[00:35:15] Hope isn't a thing you conjure up in yourself. It's a gift that God gives you. He gives you the gift of faith. And when he gives you the gift of faith, he does that by regenerating you, giving you a new heart and a new set of desires, a renewed will.
[00:35:32] And from that, he generates faith so that you're able to trust in Christ.
[00:35:38] But the Bible tells us that hope is also an inclination and a desire and longing of the heart that God gives His children.
[00:35:46] He says this in 1st Peter 1, verse 3.
[00:35:50] Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:35:53] According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope.
[00:36:03] If you're a child of God, he gives you hope as a gift.
[00:36:09] He implants hope in your heart the way he implants faith in your heart.
[00:36:17] He gives you the seed of hope in regeneration.
[00:36:21] Now that's a hopeful thing, isn't it?
[00:36:25] This isn't something that we just pull up our bootstraps and say, I'm going to start being hopeful.
[00:36:31] No. This comes because God by His Holy Spirit, is working in your heart to cause it to long for the coming of Christ in the presence of God.
[00:36:43] That's a blessing, isn't it?
[00:36:46] It's a blessed hope.
[00:36:51] Now that's the beginning of it.
[00:36:53] That's the beginning of the hope of eternal life. God puts the seed of it in our hearts.
[00:36:59] But then Paul seems to indicate that it must need to grow.
[00:37:04] We saw that same pattern when we looked at the faith of God's elect as a ministry aim. When we looked at the knowledge of truth that leads to godliness as a ministry aim, we saw in both cases that this is a thing that God creates in us by the power of his Spirit. But then, all lifelong as a Christian, faith and knowledge and godliness are to grow.
[00:37:28] These are things that God causes to grow in us. And the same is true with hope.
[00:37:36] So you may be sitting there as I was asking those questions to probe, do you have hope of eternal life? You may have been sitting there asking yourself, boy, I don't think about this hope all that often.
[00:37:48] And when I do, I don't always feel so certain about it.
[00:37:52] That's a normal part of the Christian life, that lots of things can kind of cloud our hope or even push it out.
[00:38:03] Never goes away, just like faith never goes away for the Christian.
[00:38:07] But this hope can.
[00:38:11] It can have competing influences.
[00:38:15] Hope is founded on the promises of God to us in Christ Jesus.
[00:38:20] And sometimes we're not thinking about those promises.
[00:38:24] Sometimes sin clouds our mind and our understanding so that we're not seeing those promises of God to us in Christ clearly.
[00:38:33] Sometimes because hope flows out of faith, right? We're justified by faith in Christ. We have peace and access to God through faith in Christ. And then hope flows out of that.
[00:38:47] Sometimes our faith is weak.
[00:38:50] Sometimes we're beset by doubts and hope begins to wane.
[00:38:58] That makes sense. As our faith is challenged, what happens?
[00:39:02] We see less of Christ. As we see less of Christ, we see less of the promises of glory, and our hope is lessened.
[00:39:10] And then when we fall into sin another way that our hope is attacked, what happens?
[00:39:17] We're beset with fears. Does God love me? Will I ever stop this sin? Can I ever break out of this cycle of whatever sin it is that's besetting me? And what. And we become terrified either about the sin, our own weakness, or God's anger towards us. And where does hope go? It goes away, doesn't it?
[00:39:37] All sorts of things can attack our hope and make it difficult for us to have that sense of certainty and certain expectation that we will one day behold God.
[00:39:52] What do we Do?
[00:39:56] What do we do when hope is waning?
[00:40:01] Where does hope come from?
[00:40:03] It comes from God, who implanted it in our hearts when he regenerated them. Just like he implanted faith.
[00:40:10] God caused us to be born again to a living hope. If we need more hope and we want more hope, what should we do? We turn to God and we cry out to Him.
[00:40:19] God is our refuge. God is our strength. We're weak.
[00:40:24] Do we need hope? Yes. What do we do? We turn to him, we cry out to him and we say, God, these are my problems. These are my challenges.
[00:40:34] And I can't see glory, and I need to see it. Help me. Help me to grow in hope.
[00:40:43] Now, if the ministry of the gospel is, has, as is one of its aims, that you would grow in the hope of eternal life.
[00:40:52] That's because the gospel itself is, you might say, the food upon which your hope feeds. If the gospel leads us to Christ, it's the food upon which our faith feeds and is nourished and strengthened. As we see more of Christ in the gospel, our faith grows. The same is true with hope.
[00:41:11] So what do we do? We turn and cry out to God for help. And we turn to the gospel. We turn to his word. Here are the precious promises of faith and salvation in Christ.
[00:41:23] Where do you go? All sorts of places.
[00:41:27] How about John 10?
[00:41:29] Jesus says, I lay down my life for the sheep because I'm the good shepherd.
[00:41:38] My sheep know my voice and I'm calling to them and they follow me.
[00:41:44] That's you.
[00:41:46] Jesus says, I'm calling to you.
[00:41:49] And when I call to you, my sheep, you will come to me.
[00:41:55] And then what does he say about eternal life?
[00:41:57] My sheep follow me because they hear my voice and I give them eternal life and no one can snatch them away from me.
[00:42:08] And then you begin to have hope again.
[00:42:13] Because Jesus loves me, because he died for me, because he called me to himself, because he's holding me, not because I'm holding Him, because he's holding me.
[00:42:24] I have eternal life. And now I can begin to look forward to that again.
[00:42:33] That's where we go for the hope of eternal life. Now, there's all sorts of good things that hope does for the Christian in his life.
[00:42:42] All sorts of blessings.
[00:42:45] We rejoice in hope. We read in Romans, chapter four, and then Paul talked about how suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.
[00:42:58] There's this long Christian life in which there's all kinds of problems and God's using them to work on you to go through a process over and over again of realizing I don't have hope, realizing it needs to be rekindled, realizing I need to look to Christ again and be regenerated and renewed in that hope.
[00:43:20] And one of the things that flows out of that is that we can learn to rejoice in hope. And what does that look like? Oh, that looks like so many things.
[00:43:28] One of the things it looks like is that as you contemplate the object of your hope, what are you doing? The object of our hope is God himself.
[00:43:37] So you contemplate the fact that I have a sure and certain expectation that I will behold God face to face.
[00:43:45] And when that happens, he promises me that he will wipe away every tear, all of my sufferings that I'm going through, he's going to take them all away.
[00:43:57] All of the sadness you experienced in this life because of your own sin, because of family problems, because of whatever it is God says, when you see me, I'm going to wipe all that away.
[00:44:08] It'll be gone. That's your home.
[00:44:11] And what's going to be in its place? You're going to be talking to God in his presence.
[00:44:19] And what does that mean? Well, think about rejoicing here. Think about what Jesus says again. Jesus, the shepherd says. What does he say? He says, I lost the sheep and I left the 99. I went to get the sheep. He went and he died for us.
[00:44:35] And he found the sheep in trouble. He picked the sheep up, he put the sheep on his shoulders, and he goes home to the Father rejoicing over the sheep.
[00:44:48] And then Jesus tells us that there's basically a big party going on in heaven as God the Father and God the Son and the angels are rejoicing over his lost sheep that he found. And that's you.
[00:45:01] It's not just that God's going to wipe away your tears and your troubles and your sorrows, and yes, those will all be gone. But you are going to a God who delights in you and rejoices over you.
[00:45:12] You're longing to see him. You're expecting to see Him. That's your hope.
[00:45:17] He can't wait for you to be ushered into his presence.
[00:45:23] That's something to delight in.
[00:45:25] There's all sorts of other things as you go through the scriptures. We're going to wrap this up now, but Paul says that the hope of eternal life, that we will always be with the Lord is. Is something we're to comfort one another with.
[00:45:39] When believers die and when they go through trials, one day we will all always Be with the Lord.
[00:45:46] So our hope is a comfort.
[00:45:48] Our hope purifies us. We read from John first. John, chapter three.
[00:45:54] Look for the things that this hope of the eternal life serves you as a Christian. And you can maybe begin to see now why this hope of eternal life is so important. That the apostle Paul says, this is a ministry aim. One of the three chief things that every time I stand in the pulpit as a preacher, I'm supposed to aim for, where's your hope? Your hope is in God. Let's pray.
[00:46:22] O Lord, our God, we thank you for the wonders.
[00:46:32] Things that the apostle Paul saw in heaven when he was lifted up.
[00:46:38] Things that eye hath not seen or ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man. Things that Paul, when he saw them, said are too wonderful, things that he's not permitted to speak about. They're so majestic.
[00:46:53] O Lord, our God, what a blessed and glorious hope you have given us in Jesus Christ, your son.
[00:47:01] We ask, O God, that you would look upon each of us in our weaknesses, in our doubts, in our struggles, and especially where our hearts are oriented to earthly things, especially sinful things.
[00:47:14] O God, sanctify and purify our hearts that we might be filled with this hope of glory that flows forth from Christ and his work.
[00:47:24] Draw us evermore to him. Help us when we are straying, to be turned back to Him. Help us where we are wounded and hurting to see that there is healing in Him.
[00:47:35] Help us when we are so weighed down by our guilt and sin and we think that there is no hope of anything.
[00:47:43] Help us to turn to him and be renewed and refreshed.
[00:47:48] Fill us, O God, by your spirit, with the knowledge of Christ.
[00:47:54] In his name we ask, Amen.
