Please turn to Romans 15.
Romans 15:13:
Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
And then Hebrews 10.
Hebrews 10:23:
Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering; for He who promised is faithful.
Let us look to the Lord.
Father, we do look to You today. We look to You for Your opening the Word to us and speaking to us. Lord, it is no good, anything we do here today, unless You are speaking, unless You are working.
And so, Lord, we come and beseech You and ask that You would speak to us from Your Word, that we would know what is on Your heart and what is in Your mind, and that You would tell us the things that You want us to know.
Lord, we are looking to You. Our eyes are upturned, our hands are empty, and we come to You and ask for You to fill us. We give this time to You and Your Holy Spirit, to open a word to us.
We pray that Your Word would come pure, unadulterated, straight from the throne. And we ask this in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Amen.
Well, I guess you can tell by the verses that I read that the subject I would like to approach is hope. I noticed that a number of people, in their prayers this morning, mentioned hope.
First, I really do not want to say, “I am going to tell you what hope is,” but I am—in seed, anyway. If you look it up, the Greek word in these verses is elpis. What that means is a favorable—favorable, ain’t that wonderful?—and confident expectation.
It is not wishful thinking. It is a favorable and confident expectation.
It is not myopic. Now, myopic means nearsighted. It is not something near. We do not usually hope for something that is near, something that is going to happen right away. It has to do with the future and with what is, at the moment, unseen.
It is kind of like, as February comes around, the beginning of spring training for baseball. Every team comes with the idea that, “We are going to win the pennant.” In other words, they are looking forward. Their hope is forward. They have that confident expectation.
But that confident expectation is from themselves. They are thinking, “Yeah, we are going to do it. I am going to have a good year,” and such.
But a Christian’s hope—and really, that is what I wanted to bring before us today, a Christian’s hope—as Christians, is given to us by God.
It is an expectation that God gives me concerning His plan and His purpose for my life. It gives purpose to my life. It gives me a higher perspective as to why He saved me.
This is what our hope is. It is something given by God to us. It is not something we have just dreamed up on our own: “I want to be this. I want this to happen.” No, it is given to us by God.
That is why, when we read things like Genesis and we have the dream that Jacob has—the ladder stretching from earth to heaven—that was given to him by God for a purpose: that he would have a hope.
When Joseph had those dreams of his brothers bowing down to him, and his mother and father bowing down, that was given to him from God so that he might have a hope and endure unto the purpose that God had called him for.
It is the same way for us. This hope that God gives us is for us. He gives it to us for a purpose, and it enhances our perspective of why He has called us and why He has saved us.
God gives it to me, but it is my hope. He gives it, but it is mine. It is something that I possess in my very spirit, in my very soul. I take possession of it. It is mine.
And I see it from where I am now. That is an important thing because, when Jacob had his dream, he was not in a good place. He was fleeing from his brother Esau. It just seemed like things were not good, and yet God gave him a hope.
It did not matter what was going on in Jacob’s life. That was an opportunity for God to say, “Look, I am stepping into your life, and I am giving you this.”
For Joseph, it was just the opposite. Everything was hunky-dory for him, and God gave him that hope. Then that hope was tried. So, in other words, I see that hope from where I am now.
It does not matter what my circumstances are. It does not matter what lack I have. It does not matter what blessings I am knowing now. Our circumstances and ourselves do not even matter, because it is God who gives it.
And is it not wonderful that God reaches out to us first while we are yet sinners? That is a great thing, and He gives the hope.
So hope does not depend on who we are, on what we have, on where we are, or even on what we know. It is a gift from the sovereign God, and He calls us into the hope He gives us.
So that is basically what hope is. That is the definition I am going to give you for hope, and I am sure you might have others.
Now, this is really the crux of the matter: What is the hope of a Christian?
A Christian has a hope that people in the world do not have. Again, the hope that people have in the world is like spring training: “Yeah, I have hope we are going to win the pennant.” It is drummed up out of our own hearts. “I am going to be the champion of the world,” all these things.
But we as Christians have a hope. Where do we look to find our hope?
Well, let us state the obvious. Where do we look for our hope?
Jesus, yes. Here we are, Christians, so the pat answer for every Sunday school question and every Sunday school lesson is Jesus. And I am not making fun of this, because it is true. Jesus. We look to Christ. After all, He is our hope.
That is true. But let us consider the hope of Jesus Christ, because He had hope. When He came down in the form of man and laid aside all His deity, God gave Him a hope.
He then becomes the sign of what our hope is. Just like in John, He gives signs that tell about Who He is, He gives a sign in His own being and in His own life of what hope is for His followers.
In Him, I see that hope. When I see what His hope is, then I realize that is my hope as well.
So I want to consider two things in the life of Jesus Christ that show the hope that was given to Him by God. I am not saying these are the only two things. I am just saying that, as I was thinking and praying about these things, these are the things that came to me.
First, Jesus had the hope of the resurrection. That was one hope He had throughout His life, as we read in the Bible.
Then, when we look at John 17—what people call the high priestly prayer—He had the hope of bringing not only His disciples, but all who would believe afterward, into glory: that they may have a place with Him and share His glory.
Jesus, as a man, had the hope of the resurrection. If you go through the Gospels, I think in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, eleven times specifically—three in Matthew, two in Mark, two in John, and three in Luke—He says this.
He speaks to His disciples and says, “The Son of Man is going to be given up to the Gentiles, and they are going to crucify Him; but on the third day, He will rise again.” Eleven times, that is recorded in the Gospels.
Then there are another three or four times where it is recorded that He says, “I will give you no sign but the sign of Jonah, who was three days in the belly of a whale. The Son of Man will be three days in the belly of the earth.”
So He had that in His consciousness as a man. That is the thing about hope: hope is in our consciousness. We are conscious of the hope that God has given us.
That is why, a lot of times, when we are going through hard times, we cling to that hope. We go back to that hope and lay hold of it to see us through, to bring us through to the place where God wants to bring us.
Then He made that wonderful statement in John 11: “I am the resurrection.” So we see in Jesus that He had the hope of resurrection. He lived His life in the light of that hope.
Hope gives us a light by which we live, so that we can go through things that, without this hope, we would fold.
How was this hope manifested? How could you see this hope in Him? Well, just a couple of things. When you look at the Gospels, brothers and sisters, it is always good to read the Gospels. His epistles are good; I am not saying otherwise. But in the Gospels, we see the Lord Jesus as that Man, and that really gives us encouragement because He became like us.
He did not fear men. Think about that. How is that the hope of resurrection? He did not fear what men would do to Him, could do to Him, or wanted to do to Him.
Even if it was good—for example, in John 6, they wanted to make Him king. They wanted to take Him by force and make Him king, and He was not going to bow to that. He was not going to bow to their wishes because He had this hope of resurrection.
He did not bow for acceptance by men. For example, when the Pharisees wanted Him to toe the line of the traditions of the elders, He did not bow to that. He was not afraid of men. He was not afraid of what men could do, nor was He afraid of what men thought of Him.
He did not fear the power of the Roman government. The Roman government was the power in that part of the world at that time, and He did not fear it. He did not fear its power to crucify Him, nor did He fear its power to release Him or give Him clemency.
Instead, He stood as One who was of another kingdom, who was not of this world and was not of the kingdoms of this world.
He did not fear death. Is that not a wonderful thing for us? How often we think of getting a disease that is going to kill us, or that we are not going to finish our lives the way we would like to. He had no fear of that.
Think of this: How old was He when He was crucified? In His thirties. Boy, if we were facing death in our thirties! He did not fear that. He did not fear death, and He did not fear the death of the cross.
In other words, He did not fear so much that He died the death of a sinner. Not just that He died, but that He died the death of a sinner—an ignoble death, one where people looked at Him and said, “He is cursed of God.”
As a matter of fact, I think one of the reasons Paul had trouble believing Jesus was the Christ was because Jesus hung on the cross, and Deuteronomy says that those hanging on a tree were cursed. He did not realize that Jesus became the curse for us.
So He did not fear even the death of the cross, because He could commit Himself—and He did commit Himself—to God, who would raise Him from the dead. This was His hope.
Well, how does this hope of resurrection transfer to me? What does that mean to me? Jesus has already risen from the dead. What does this mean for me? What does that mean to all Christians? Why this hope of resurrection?
The resurrection puts us on an eternal plane. It puts us in eternity. This is important because it means that this world does not have the final say in our lives.
When they crucified Jesus, they said, “It is done. It is over.” But it was not, because He rose from the dead. So the world is not the final say in our lives. We see things now through the lens of eternity.
History shows us how transient this world is. Take the big things: the Han dynasty in China—four hundred years, one of the great dynasties in China, and it only lasted four hundred years. The Gupta Empire in India, a few hundred years. Egypt. Greece. Rome. Persia. The British Empire. And, should I say, the United States.
How long is the shelf life of an empire? It is not eternal. They go and they come.
Let us bring it down to our own ideas. The fads of fashion—how long do they last? Bell bottoms lasted a long time, did they not? Long hair for guys. Afro. Look at fashions, how they change.
Trends in literature, trends in philosophy, trends in politics—they are all transient. All of them are transient.
But since we see life through the lens of eternity, it changes our whole perspective on what life is all about and what things are lasting.
When we go through struggles, even suffering, trials, severe trials, and persecution, because we see through a lens of eternity, these things can be counted as momentary light afflictions. We have a different perspective.
We are not undone. We might be undone to the place where we give ourselves up to God again, but we are not undone wholly—cast down, but not done in.
What is death to eternity? What is death in the light of eternity? Without eternity in view, it is final separation from life and all that life is thought to be by those without God. It is that final separation.
No wonder it is feared: to be finally cut off, with no hope of anything beyond. That was the thing the Lord used to drive me to seek for eternity—the idea that there was nothing beyond. It was so—I cannot even describe it. I know what it was, but I cannot find the word right now.
But to a martyr, to one who assuredly knows that he is in Christ, when he faces death, he has no fear of man, no fear of governments, and no fear of death.
One of the books my wife got me—not this last Christmas, but the Christmas before—was a book on Christian history in a year. She got it, I think, at a used bookstore or garage sale. It was the stories of many different people.
In a lot of these stories, there were martyrs. A lot of them were martyrs from Scotland. We do not think of the English martyring people for their faith. We think of them cutting off heads for politics, but not for faith. But, man, there were thousands who died in England over their faith.
The thing that struck me was that, in every one of them, there was no fear at all. Whether they were going to be burned at the stake, hanged, or whatever it was, they had no fear.
As a matter of fact, a lot of these men went to their deaths encouraging their families to go on in the race, to hold fast to the faith, and encouraging their friends. But you never saw in any of them any fear of dying, because they were all saying, “I am going to be with the Lord.”
That was so real to them. That was their hope, and soon it would be the reality.
So when you think of this whole idea of resurrection, we have no fear of men, of government, or even of death. As a matter of fact, death has lost its sting because we do not fear it in that way anymore.
I am not saying that we do not tremble at it when we think about it. I know great saints have had trembling moments as they lay dying on their sickbeds. But for us, because of that hope of resurrection, there is no fear of death.
How free we are. How free we are to practice Christ, to walk with Christ in the world. How free, because we have no fear. That is what the hope of resurrection is all about: we have no fear.
I do not fear man. I do not care if somebody berates me for giving out a tract. Brother David was sharing with us where they said they were going to arrest him, and he said, “Boy, I thought about that twice.”
But you come to the place of saying, “Even if that happens, I am with it, because I am doing what God would have me do.” And in that, there is no fear.
Now, the second hope is the hope of glory for His followers. He had this in Him.
In Ephesians 1:18, Paul prays for the believers there. His first request is that their eyes would be open to see the hope of their calling. What is the hope of this calling? Where is this calling leading us? What is the goal of this calling?
John Bunyan, one of those men who was in prison for preaching in England in the 1600s, wrote a book called The Pilgrim’s Progress while he was in prison.
It begins with a fellow named Christian. He enters through the wicket gate because he is fleeing from the City of Destruction. A character called Evangelist points him to the wicket gate and says, “This is the way. Flee, and go through the wicket gate.”
But getting inside the gate was not the end of the story. Really, that was the beginning. His goal was to reach the Celestial City, the heavenly city. That was his goal.
That is our end as well.
Let me go to a couple of verses here. In Hebrews 12, beginning with verse 22:
But ye are come unto Mount Zion,
And unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
And to innumerable hosts of angels,
To the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven,
And to God the Judge of all,
And to the spirits of just men made perfect,
And to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant,
And to the blood of sprinkling that speaketh better than that of Abel.
Then in Romans 8:29-30:
For whom He foreknew, He also foreordained to be conformed to the image of His Son,
That He might be the firstborn among many brethren:
And whom He foreordained, them He also called:
And whom He called, them He also justified:
And whom He justified, them He also glorified.
We get the idea of being predestined and being called. We revel in the thought of being justified. But how many of us dwell on being glorified?
That is like a million miles from me. I do not know about you. I do not know about the world you live in, but the idea of being glorified—and it is not a glory of our own, but being glorified in Christ.
This is the whole idea. This is His hope for His followers: the hope of glory.
Jesus had the hope of glory. That hope was realized on the Mount of Transfiguration. He was glorified before those three disciples, and He could have walked right into heaven, glorified, and left. Everybody would have said, “Wow, Jesus—Enoch too.”
He could have walked into glory because He had the testimony that He was pleasing to God, a Man pleasing to God. But He refused to do that.
Was He out of His mind? He refused to go into that glory alone.
Because God the Father gave Him the hope that, in doing His Father’s will, He might lead many sons into glory with Him. That was His hope: bringing many sons to glory.
That was His prayer in John 17: that they may be with Me where I am. That was what He wanted.
What is glory? It is one of those words that Bible commentators and theologians do not have a grip on, so I went to an English dictionary. I mean, they cannot figure it out—Webster can, right?
Here are some of the definitions the dictionary gave: glory, honor, majesty, splendor, exaltation, adulation, distinction.
I want to hold on to that word distinction. Some of us think of glory as Jesus being transfigured, our clothes getting really bright, or maybe having a halo. That may be glory to us. But take this word distinction.
The root word of distinction is distinct. What does distinct mean? Distinct means one who stands out from or above others because of who they are or what they have done.
With that in mind, the idea of one who stands out from others, the God of glory appeared to Abraham in Ur of the Chaldees, in a city full of gods and idols. A God distinct from all others appeared to Abraham.
How was He distinct from all others? He was alive. He was alive. He spoke.
Romans 8:19-23 tells us that all creation is waiting for, looking for, the revealing of the sons of God. How will they recognize them? They will be distinct from all other men.
What will they look like? The spirits of just men made perfect. The spirits that live within men—not the flesh, but the spirits that are ruling in them. That spirit which was born again by God is made perfect.
What does that mean? Spirits of men not just alive, but awake to God—alert, vibrant, intuitive to the will of God, willing and eager to do His will, presenting themselves fully and giving themselves fully to God as instruments of His good pleasure and purpose.
One commentator put it this way: all creation will recognize their real substance, the spirits of just men made perfect. The real substance. This is it. The weight will register.
This is just one facet of glory meant for us who are in Christ—one facet. But is this not what we see in the Lord Jesus Christ as He walked on earth? The spirit of a just Man made perfect: alive to God, vibrant, intuitive to His will, ready, willing, and eager to do His Father’s will.
In The Pilgrim’s Progress, there is a character called the Muckraker. When I first got Pilgrim’s Progress, I cannot remember whether Joe Taylor or Marguerite Harrison gave me a copy, but it was an illustrated copy.
It was old English, so it was like reading King James, and that made it even more enduring for some reason. The illustrations were done in the 1800s or something like that, and they were glorious. Some of them were even in color.
But the Muckraker—there was this guy, and he was an older guy like me. He had a rake, and he was raking muck. Muck is just junk: muddy, strawy, all that kind of stuff. All he was doing was raking muck.
Then right behind him was an angelic being in the picture—I think it was Christ—and Christ was holding a crown. The Muckraker never lifted his head, so he never saw the crown.
He was so busy raking the muck. All his attention was focused on the muck, and he never saw the crown that was being offered him.
Bunyan said something to the effect that this crown was being offered to him, and he just did not see it. He was content—that is a bad word, but you know—he was content to rake the muck.
When we think about that, the question I ask myself is, “Do I see the crown?” That is why I said that, when we talk about glory, we do not fathom glory. We do not even look to it.
I know myself, I am too busy trying to clean myself up. I do not fully see what God has called me to because I am trying to clean myself up.
I do not see that, if I saw what He was doing, I would forget trying to clean myself up, because I would realize that I have already been cleansed. That has already been taken care of, and I could put my heart on higher things if I would only look up.
So, do I see the crown? Why is it so hard for me to see it? Maybe because I do not believe that He would actually give it to me.
Jesus Christ secured glory for us. We sit here at the table, and we revel that we have been redeemed. We revel in how much the Lord paid for us to have our sins forgiven. But that is the wicket gate. That is the wicket gate.
He has paid for our way to the Celestial City—not just to get there, but to dwell there. And not just to dwell there, but to dwell there in His glory, dressed in His glory.
Not having a glory of our own, but having His glory. Paul said, “I do not want to have a righteousness of my own, but I want the righteousness that comes through faith.”
I do not want to have a glory of my own. I cannot even see having a glory of my own. I am too steeped in the muck. I want the glory that He has for me. I want the glory that is His, that He says, “I want to share this glory that is Mine with you.”
And He paid for it. “I paid the price for Me to do this for you.”
Is that too high for us? Is that too hard to believe? How wonderful is the grace of God? Why limit it?
Well, I limit it to the idea that it is just the forgiveness of sins, and maybe that I can live a moral life. How puny that is in comparison to sharing the glory of the Son of God.
J. N. Darby wrote a hymn. You know how many hymns are in this book? No peeking. Like eight hundred seventy-two, something like that. Hymn number 862.
I do not know if you have ever looked in the back and seen what some of the other hymns are. The title at the top of it is “Forever with Christ.” Listen to him. Generally, I do not like Darby, but boy, I like what he wrote. Listen to this:
And is it so? I shall be like Thy Son?
Is this the grace which He for me hath won?
Father of glory, thought beyond all thought,
In glory to His own blest likeness brought.O Lord Jesus, who loved me, like to Thee,
Fruit of Thy work, with Thee, too, there to see
Thy glory, Lord, while endless ages roll,
Myself the prize and travail of Thy soul.Yet it must be: Thy love had not its rest
Were Thy redeemed not with Thee fully blest;
That love that gives not as the world, but shares
All it possesses with its loved co-heirs.Nor alone: Thy loved ones, all complete in glory, round Thee there,
What joy shall meet!
All like Thee, for Thy glory like Thee, Lord,
Object supreme of all, by all adored.
I look at that second stanza where it says, “Myself the prize, the travail of Thy soul.” I think what Darby is saying there is that he sees himself in that place of glory, and Jesus seeing him in that place of glory is the joy set before Him that allowed Him to endure the cross and despise the shame.
The shame. I always thought “despised the shame” was our shame. It is the shame of Him becoming sin. He could despise that because He saw the fruit of His labor.
There is another hymn, number 31, “Father, to Thee a Joyful Song.” In verse 3, it says, “How precious to Thee, how near, how dear, are those He brings to share His place.” ’Twas thus that Thou didst plan.
In eternity past, when God was thinking of redeeming man, He was not thinking of just forgiving his sins. He was thinking of restoring him to the place that was meant for him to be: in His glory, sharing that glory, because man was made in that image.
Philip Bliss, I think, is the one who wrote, “I will sing of my Redeemer, and His wondrous love to me.” He spoke of Christ saving “my lost estate.” He did not only say, “my sins to forgive.” He said that in the first verse, but in the second verse he says, “my lost estate.”
That which I lost when man sinned, when Adam sinned—when I lost that place with God, that place of glory—has been given back to me freely by the act of Christ, by the act of God sending His Son.
Not just to forgive my sin, but in forgiving my sin, He then ascended and rose on high and sat at the right hand of the Father. We share that place with Him.
That is the fullness. That is the finished work. The finished work is not only all that was done for sin. The finished work is all that was done for sin, bringing us to the place of being seated on the throne, sharing His glory.
That, brothers and sisters, is the hope of a Christian. Do not let us go lower than that. That is not what God wants for us. God wants nothing lower than that.
He wants us seated with Christ in the heavenlies, and He has made it possible that that can be. Oh, praise His name. How can we not worship Him? How can we not?
When we see that crown and He puts it on our head, do you think we are going to say, “Oh, I want to see what this looks like in the mirror”? No. We are going to fall down before Him, and we are going to be like those elders in Revelation, casting it down at His feet and saying, “Thou art worthy.”
Oh, let me not belittle—God, do not let me belittle—what You have done. How great a salvation. I know John Blanchard says that all the time, but that is right. How great a salvation we have.
Oh, claim it. This is mine. This is my hope. God gave me this hope. I will not let it be taken away, by His grace. Oh God, let me enter into this hope. Let me dwell in that place that You meant for me to have.
I am sorry for getting loud. I would scare my students.
I want to end with this. In Psalm 42—this psalm was written by the sons of Korah.
The sons of Korah, oh, they come from a bad lineage. Remember, their father was swallowed up by the earth. How did your dad die? “Oh, he was swallowed by the earth.”
Psalm 42 was written by the sons of Korah, and many people say it was written while they were in exile. To me, I think that is a great ending for this.
The people were in exile, first of all, because of their sin. Then God sent them a message from Jeremiah, telling them of His promise, and He gave them a hope in exile.
I think that is wonderful because here we are, in a sense, in exile, waiting to go to our heavenly home again.
The sons of Korah were bemoaning their situation. They were saying, “God, where are You?” Then a couple of times in the psalm, it says:
Why art thou cast down, O my soul?
And why art thou disquieted within me?
Hope thou in God;
For I shall yet praise Him
For the help of His countenance.
In other words, God gives us this hope, but our hope is not in ourselves. Our hope is not in the muck. He gives us this hope so that our hope is in Him to bring it about. But that is another story. That is another message.
What is His countenance toward us? What is God’s countenance toward us?
Sometimes I think He is just so disappointed with me—just disappointed. He has that countenance that shows He is disappointed, shaking His head. “Go help your mother.” That is what my dad would say when I tried to help him: “Go help your mother.”
But the whole thing is, this is wonderful: the help of His countenance. Because of His wonderful grace through Jesus Christ, He looks upon us with great favor. Great favor. Believe that.
Remember, at the beginning I gave you a definition for hope that said a favorable and confident expectation. God looks on us with great favor because of His Son, not because of things you have done or have not done. It is because of His Son.
Everything is in the Son. All glory to His Son. That is the whole thing.
So His countenance, then—because we realize that He looks on us with favor. I mean, even Jacob. Look at Jacob. How can God look upon Jacob with favor?
And yet Isaiah 43 says:
Fear not, for I have redeemed thee;
I have called thee by thy name, thou art Mine.
What a claim. God claims the same for us. We are Jacob. He claims the same for us, so that the help of His countenance—believe His countenance toward us is favorable because of Jesus Christ.
Then the ending verse, in verse 11: because we have such a hope in Him, our countenance is transformed.
Our countenance does not just have to do with our face. Our countenance can be seen in our whole body. You know how, when we are down, our whole body shows it, not just our face. Shoulders slump, heads are down, we walk slow, we mumble. That is the whole countenance of our body.
But because of the favor of God, our countenance is transformed—our face, our body language, our attitude, and then our very lives.
It is not just the outer man that is transformed. It is the inner man. Our very lives are transformed to the praise of His glory through Jesus Christ.
Praise be to His name for such a hope that He has given us. Oh, brothers and sisters, believe in that hope. Believe in the God who gives that hope, because the hope that He gives, He gives to us so that it can be my hope and your hope.
By that hope, we can conquer and get on all the way through, just like Christian, and reach the Celestial City. That is the will of God for us all. Praise be to His name.
Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, forgive me that I think so little, or so limit what You have done through Jesus Christ.
Lord, I pray You, lift my eyes up. Lift my eyes up to see Thy Son, seated on that throne, having conquered sin and conquered me.
Lord, bring me to that glorious place. Fill me with Thy Holy Spirit. Fill us all with Thy Holy Spirit.
Let us walk with that hope in view, with that hope in mind, with that hope in heart, that we might truly drink of that wine with You new in the kingdom of heaven.
Lord, You have done such a great thing, and You have such a great thing before us. Lord, do not let us fall short.
Save us to the uttermost through Jesus. How we thank You and praise You for such a hope given to us through Jesus Christ. Amen.