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In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, the basis of the Christian faith are these. We live in faith towards God, we live in love toward our neighbor, and we abide in hope for the life to come. Faith in God, love for the neighbor, and hope for the life to come, and those three things are tested in times like these.
I was reading this week a letter that Luther wrote. It was in response to a question; they said, can you flee in times of the plague? And Luther wrote and said, look, we all have this natural instinct to stay alive and that’s good. We should follow that natural instinct unless it conflicts with faith or love or hope. If you want to run away from the plague because you don’t trust that the Lord can take care of you in sickness or even in death, if you don’t trust that the Lord is merciful to you and loves you and forgives all of your sins, then the plague comes as a great test of that. You have to stay.
Or, if it conflicts with love, if the Lord has given you a vocation to love your neighbor, to care for those around you, you are not authorized to care for yourself before you care for those that the Lord has given you to care for. But times like this also test our hope and that’s what I really want to consider this morning, Christian hope. The opposite of hope is despair or meaninglessness. I suppose when things get really rough that’s the temptation for us, the temptation to despair. So we want to combat the devil’s temptations by reflecting on this gift of hope.
Now there are two types of hope discussed in the scriptures. There’s an earthly hope and there is a Christian hope. In fact, as I was learning ASL, I think maybe Aaron was teaching me, that there has to be two different signs for the word hope. The normal sign that you see for in ASL for hope is this. I’m just making sure that I’m doing the right sign. Is this, I hope, I hope it’s gonna be warm today. I hope that my team is gonna win the game if even they start playing games again. I hope that the stock market is gonna rebound. I hope, that’s an earthly hope. I hope, but I’m not sure. I’ve got my fingers crossed, but I’m very uncertain.
But the Christian hope is different. You can’t use the sign. It’s not a maybe, it’s not a wishing. The Christian sign is, I hope, I’m checking to make sure that I’m doing this one right as well. I hope, I know that the Lord has spoken, and I’m waiting for that promise to come true. So that our Christian hope is built on the foundation of God’s promises, and it’s centered around the resurrection.
Now we’re going to come back to that, but I want you to consider right before that, that the scriptures, St. Paul especially, will distinguish the Christian from the non-Christian by the presence of hope. In other words, for the Christian, hope is something that we have, that the world does not. Consider, for example, Ephesians 2, verse 12, where Paul writes this, “Remember that you were at one time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.”
Or again, Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4, verse 13, this beautiful text, “but we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others who do not have hope.”
In other words, Paul says that the difference, at least one of the main differences, between those who belong to Jesus and those who do not, is the presence of hope. Now here’s what Christian hope is. Hebrews chapter 11 verse 1: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.” In other words, Christian hope is the confidence that God keeps his promises. Christian hope is faith directed towards the future and Christian hope is centered on the resurrection.
There are two things that I want to kind of dig into right now: that hope is built on the promises of God and that hope, Christian hope, is centered on the resurrection. So first, hope is built on the promises of God. We often hope for things that have not been promised. Now I want you to meditate on this and think about this. I think that one of the things that afflicts us most in this world are those times when our expectations have not been met. We had hoped for something, but our hope wasn’t fulfilled. We had expected something, but that expectation didn’t come to pass.
We see it in the text with Mary and Martha. In fact, there’s one line that’s repeated word for word, first by Martha and then by Mary. When Martha comes to meet Jesus and then when Mary comes to meet him again, they both said this, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. We sent for you, remember we sent for you? When he was just sick, we asked you to come. And we had hoped that you would have come and that you would have made him well. We know that you can do that. We’ve seen you do those kinds of miracles before.” But they were now disappointed that Jesus had not met their expectations.
Now, I’ve seen this a couple of places very profoundly. The first is that every time that I’ve spoken, well, maybe not, almost every time I’ve spoken with atheists or people who have stopped believing in God, this is their main accusation: that God did not live up to their expectations. Take, for example, the problem of evil. Why is there so much difficulty in the world? Why are there so many problems? How can things be so bad? Or even personal difficulty that they had in their family, or in the church, or just in life in general, and that God has disappointed them. He hasn’t lived up to their expectations.
Now the question that I want to put, if this is a struggle for you, I want to put before you is this. Did God promise that everything was going to be great in the world? When we look to the scriptures, do we see the Lord saying that everything is going to work out just like you think it should? No, it’s the opposite. The Bible tells us that this world is full of trouble. In fact, it goes into great depth about why there’s so much trouble. It tells us the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, eating the fruit, inviting upon themselves and on all of the world, death.
It tells us about the assaults of the devil. It tells us about the tribulation that we have in this world. It tells us about the weakness of our own flesh. The Bible doesn’t tell us that everything is gonna be great. It tells us, in fact, the exact opposite. And does God promise an easy life? The answer is no. In fact, the very opposite. Jesus says, “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart; I have overcome the world.” In other words, when things go bad, that’s not proof that God doesn’t exist. It’s in fact proof that the Bible tells the truth. It’s proof that Jesus is true when he says that this world will give us trouble.
But you see what happens is that we have these expectations from God and from life and from the world that God never promised, and then we’re disappointed when they’re not met. Now this means that to have a true Christian hope, we have to establish our hopes not on what we want, but on what God has promised. If we want our hope to stand, we have to build our hopes on the promises of God.
And here they are. Jesus has promised us that he will always be with us. He says, “I do not leave you as orphans. I will be with you always, even to the end of the age. I will never leave you or forsake you.” We build our hope on his promise that he sends to us his Holy Spirit who lives in us and who gives us confidence and faith and peace. He has promised that he will forgive all of our sins, that that’s what he was doing when he was dying on the cross, to win for us everlasting life and he has promised that he has conquered death and on the last day he will give us his own victory over death.
And this gets us to the second point, that our Christian hope is centered on the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Now one of the problems, the spiritual problems that we have in the church today is that we have almost forgotten about the resurrection. I hear things kind of floating around like this where people say that heaven is eternal or when I die I’m done with my body. No, no. Death is the temporal separation of body and soul but it only is a little while and the day is coming when Jesus will stand on the earth and will call us out of the grave.
Consider this conversation that Jesus has with Martha. Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall not die forever.” The word is there in the Greek, by the way, in verse 26. Forever. It’s not in any of the English translations. It’s odd. It should be. It’s just very plain as day. “Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die forever. Do you believe this?”
And she said to him, “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.” Jesus is the resurrection and the life. He is the firstfruits of the resurrection and that means that there is more to come and the more to come is you and me, all the baptized, all those who trust in Christ.
Now this is important because our conscience tells us that there’s something that’s not right in the world. There’s something that’s not right with death and that’s true. There’s something that’s not right with a pandemic. There’s something that’s not right when we see people injured and wounded. We know that we were not meant for this, for sickness and death. The Bible tells us what we were meant for, for the resurrection and for life eternal.
Consider just a couple of texts, Romans 8:22 and following. “We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in pains of childbirth until now, and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies, for in this hope we were saved. Now, hope that’s seen is not hope, for who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
Or this from 1 Corinthians 15, Paul’s chapter on the resurrection. He says, “If the dead are not raised, then even Christ hasn’t been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you’re still in your sins. And those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. But if in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people the most to be pitied. But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.”
So, dear saints, we abide, we abide in hope, the hope that God’s promises are true, the hope that one day Jesus will return. And when he does, he will stand on the earth and he will call us forth from the dead. Just like he stood and called Lazarus out of the tomb, he will also call you out of the tomb. Come forth, and you will come forth to life, to a life that has no end, to a life that looks at the face of Jesus, to a life that has no sickness and no death, to a life that is full of the Lord’s blessings.
So these days test our faith and our love and our hope. But we abide in hope. Here’s how Paul ends his letter to the Romans: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope.” May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen. And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
