A sermon for Dalkeith Road Church of Christ November 2020
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13 ESV).
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13 NIV).
There is a symmetry to Paul’s argument. He first of all mentions three things that will pass away—prophecies, tongues and knowledge (v 8)—and now in v 13 he mentions three things which remain—faith, hope and love. Faith, hope and love are central to the Christian life. We may get by without prophecies, tongues and knowledge, but the Christian cannot survive as a Christian without faith, hope and love. Spiritual gifts are useful but faith, hope and love are much more important. Christians have different spiritual gifts to one another. But every Christian must have faith, hope and love.
Faith, hope and love are all important but different. Faith looks back towards the cross on which the Saviour died and then to his resurrection from the dead. Without faith we would not be Christians at all. Hope looks forward to the day when the same Saviour will return in glory with all his holy angels. There is a future when all the sadness of this life will be over forever and we hold onto that future through hope. Love is different to faith and hope because it lasts forever. In every interaction and in every relationship we have in the present we must have love. But this will always be true. There is no end to love. Therefore, love is the greatest of the three. Today, we focus on hope.
As Christians, we are warned to avoid putting our hope in the kinds of things which other people hope in. Paul told Timothy, “Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain, but to put their hope in God, who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Tim 6:17). Many Australians are putting their hope in finances to give them what they want. People hope that their health will hold out or that doctors will be able to restore health. Some hope for love in a relationship of some kind. Almost everyone hopes that happiness will come their way. If it does not come today then perhaps it will be just around the corner. These are not the things which Christians are to pin their hopes on. Riches, health and lack of conflict in life are merely time-bound things. They come and go. Sometimes you can have them and sometimes they disappear. 2020 should have taught us this very lesson. The Christian hope is far more solid.
What do we hope for? The Christian hope is described in several different ways. We hope for the glorious appearance of our God and Saviour Jesus Christ (Titus 2:13). We are to “set our hope on the grace to be brought” to us when Jesus comes again (1 Pet 1:13). We have the hope of eternal life (Titus 1:2; 3:7). We hope for righteousness (Gal 5:5). And we hope for the glory of God (Rom 5:2). But the thing the Bible describes as the Christian hope most often is the same thing the Jews of Jesus’ day hoped for, that is, the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:6; 24:15; 26:6-7). So the Christian hope is that the Lord Jesus will return, bringing grace, righteousness and glory with him, so that we will live eternally in the presence of God in new bodies that will never be sick or injured and will never die.
The Christian hope is centred on the truth that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. The whole of 1 Corinthian chapter 15 is dedicated to the topic of the resurrection of Christians. It begins with a summary of the gospel, emphasising the fact that Jesus rose from the dead.
1 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. 3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Cor. 15:1-8 NIV)
The resurrection of Jesus is the basis for our resurrection. “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor. 15:20 NIV). The firstfruits are the first part of the harvest. What Paul is saying is that the resurrection of Jesus is just the beginning of the resurrection of the dead. Every person who trusts in Christ will also experience the resurrection when Jesus returns for us. We know that our “citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself” (Phil. 3:20-21 ESV). Jesus can never die again and when we are resurrected, we will also never die again.
We should not confuse the Christian hope with what people often mean by hope. We are not crossing our fingers and hoping for the best. Hope is not a platitude. It is not just a happy thought about something that might happen in the future. The Christian hope is solid because it is based on God’s faithfulness (Heb 10:23). We know that God is faithful because he raised Jesus from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus is the demonstration that everything that God promised is true. No matter what happens in this life now, we can be sure that our hope of the resurrection is certain because God is faithful and he has shown that faithfulness already.
Our hope is not based on something temporary but rather it is hope in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God. Jesus Christ is our hope (Matt 12:21; Rom 15:12; 1 Tim 1:1). He is not distant from us but lives in us through the Holy Spirit. Therefore, Paul can say, “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27). Our hope is not a vague wish that something will happen in the future. Rather our hope is based on the relationship that we have with the risen Jesus Christ. It is therefore not a wish but a surety. He who dwells with us and in us gives us hope because he has secured the future. So putting our hope in Christ is far more sensible than placing hope in money, medicine or other temporal things.
What we hope for cannot be taken away from us because it is “stored up in heaven” for us (Col 1:15). What we have here and now are things which can be taken away. Money is temporary because it can be stolen or lost; people sometimes go bankrupt. Houses can be damaged by storms or gutted by fire. Possessions can be stolen or ruined. Health can be precarious. But our hope is secure because Jesus has already experienced what we wait for. He has already been raised. That can never be undone. Since we are “in Christ”, we are sure that we will share in what he has already experienced, the resurrection of the dead. Hebrews 6:19-20 assures us “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf.” Hope anchors us to the one who has gone there before us.
But because our hope is for something in the future we need to be careful. Paul warns us: “But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (Rom 8:24-25). We must be patient and not expect that everything will be to our liking in the present. We may be discouraged and disappointed if we expect that every disease will be healed and every problem resolved in the present life. This would give us no reason to hope for something further. It is possible to get caught up in expectations that go beyond what God has promised for this broken world. We have hope for something way beyond this broken world in which people invariably die.
We need this hope in Christ and the resurrection of the dead because suffering of various sorts is inevitable in the present world. Everyone has experienced this. People get sick, some have incurable cancer, some are in pain constantly, others are suffering because of unemployment and money is tight, disappointments abound, sometimes your friends betray you or your family rejects you, there is loss and grief. Ultimately everyone dies. We cannot escape that. But in Christ we have hope.
When the resurrection of the dead arrives, all the hurts, pain, sickness, disappointments, betrayals, persecution, sorrow and grief will be undone. We will have such joy that it overpowers everything that has gone before. It is because of this hope that Christians throughout history have gone to their deaths for the sake of proclaiming Jesus. The same hope enables us to endure life’s trials because we are sure of the resurrection of the dead. That hope enables us to choose the hard road that honours God rather than to give in to what is easy and dishonouring to him. We know that what we do for Jesus is never in vain. The final verse of 1 Cor 15, the chapter which discusses the resurrection of the dead, is our promise of this. “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58 NIV).
By way of application or illustration I want to contrast the hope that my mother had as a Christian with the lack of hope my father had as an unbeliever.
Back in 2006 my Dad was dying of leukaemia. He lived with us for the last six months of his life. I grieved each day for those months up to Dad’s death, and after. Dad was in total denial about dying right up to the end. His health was clearly getting worse and he was losing weight. He was so thin I could have picked him up myself. He kept on speaking about things he would do later in the year. Even in the hospice two days before he died, he wanted me to get him a power of attorney form and was talking about how to deal with the next family event. He simply did not accept that he was dying.
Then there is my mum. Many people in this church will probably remember my mother, who attended DR in the late 70s and early 80s. Unlike my father, my mother surrendered her life to Jesus around 1980. When mum passed her 80th birthday her health declined. Her back was disintegrating painfully and she had repeated falls and could not get up off the ground on her own. She found it increasingly difficult to look after herself and went into a nursing home. She had dementia, which got worse very quickly. It was hard to watch her decline and I grieved over her every time I went to visit her. Mum died just over two years ago.
The difference between Mum and Dad was that Dad did not have faith in Christ and actively refused to listen to the gospel, while Mum was a Christian for nearly 40 years. Since my father died without surrendering his life to Jesus, he was afraid of death and would not acknowledge that he was dying. I will never see him again because he is outside of Christ. On the other hand, although I grieved my mother’s decline in physical and mental health, all along I had hope. I know that I will see my mother again. She is with Jesus now. She is no longer unhappy or forgetting what is happening. She will be raised from the dead and her new body will never give way under her. She will have all her faculties. There will be no more pain.
There is hope for the Christian. Jesus has been raised from the dead. He promises us that we too will be raised to eternal life in new bodies if we put our trust in him. Death is inevitable but hope can be ours. It will give us the stamina to live with the suffering and the grief and the pain we experience in the present. Because we have hope, we can have courage to suffer for the sake of Christ. That is why hope is so important.