Our Living Hope

Intro…

Welcome to the Cornerstone Baptist church podcast. My name is Justin Wheeler, I am the preaching pastor for Cornerstone Baptist Church in Wylie, TX.

It is still March of 2020 and we are in week 2 of shelter-in-place orders as a result of COVID-19. Things around us continue to be up in the air and I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can use a little gospel encouragement right about now. So, this week I want to talk to you about the hope that we have as Christians, or as Peter refers to it in the first chapter of his letter, Our Living Hope.

I Peter 1:3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 6 In this you rejoice,

Many of you have heard of or even read the opening section of John Piper’s book Let the Nations Be Glad. There’s one powerful paragraph that goes like this,

“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man. When this age is over, and the countless millions of the redeemed fall on their faces before the throne of God, missions will be no more. It is a temporary necessity. But worship abides forever.”[1]

The worship of God is the ultimate goal of the church and it is also the goal of our life. When Peter writes in verse 3, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!” he is calling us to worship. The word bless means to worship or praise. It means to express gratitude toward God and to express joy in what He has done.

Then Peter goes on to tell us what God has done. In other words, he tells us why we should worship God.

Transition…

We should worship God because of who He is and because He is the One who has given us hope in Christ. We worship Him for His mercy, for causing us to be born again, for giving us a living hope and we worship God because of the inheritance that He has promised us.

Let’s look at each of these things in turn.

Podcast Focus…

1. We worship God because He has given us hope in Christ.

"A man can live three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without air, but he cannot live three seconds without hope”

Hope by itself is a powerful thing, but our hope in Christ is the most amazing hope there is. Our hope is made up of flesh and bones that came back from the dead. Our hope is in Christ himself who lived and died and rose to live again. But we need to remember that we didn’t always have this hope.

Ephesians 2 reminds us that at one time we were without hope in this world. Before God brought us to Christ, we were dead in our sins and we had no hope of saving ourselves from the wrath to come. But now in Christ Jesus we have a living hope.

He is our Lord, Peter says, which indicates that we aren’t simply dabbling in religion, but we are submitting to Jesus Christ as Lord. We worship God because He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

2. We Worship God for His Mercy

V. 3 - According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again

The definition of mercy is a kindness shown to someone when it is within one’s power to punish them. For God to sh