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 show us mercy means that He withholds from us the wrath we rightly deserve. He owes us nothing but judgment, and yet He holds back that judgment from us.
God’s mercy is the divine restraint that keeps Him from unleashing the righteous wrath our rebellion demands.
Notice in the text that God’s mercy toward us is great. We are the recipients of His abundant mercy. Our God is merciful and this means that His desire and ability to withhold what we deserve is like a storehouse so full that it is constantly overflowing the top (Lam 3:23). God is full of mercy toward us, the mercy He has for His people will never run out and we praise Him for this.
But there is another side of the coin when it comes to mercy.
Divine justice demands that our sin be punished, which means that for God to withhold punishment is to short-circuit His justice, unless the punishment we deserve is poured out on another. That is where Jesus steps in. Friends, this is what makes the gospel so beautiful.
You see Jesus stepped in to receive the justice of God that we deserved. He bore the wrath for you and me, so that we could be free. So, we worship God for His great mercy.
3. We Worship God for Our New Birth (3)
On account of God’s great mercy, He has caused us to be born again. The first time we heard about the new birth it came from Jesus in John 3. He told Nicodemus that in order to see the Kingdom of God one must be born again. In our first birth we were stamped with the image of Adam, but the new birth emblazons us with the image of Christ. This new birth is given to us as a gift from God. He is the cause of our new birth.
But why do we need to be born again? The Bible teaches that by nature we are dead in our sins and children of wrath. This is what our first birth in Adam has afforded us. We need to be brought from death to life and Paul tells us how this happens in Titus 3.
Titus 3:4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, 5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit
We weren’t born again because of our good works; it was God’s mercy that fueled our new birth. The new birth is not the result of your prayer, or your baptism, or your trip down the aisle to talk to the pastor. The new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit in you.
The Spirit brings life where there was death. He opens our eyes to see the truth of the gospel that we hadn’t seen before. He gives us a new heart of flesh replacing the heart of stone, and the result is that those who possess new life will respond with faith and repentance.
Faith and repentance are not the cause of our new birth; they are the evidence of it meaning that we praise God for our new birth.
4. We Worship God for Our living Hope
What does Peter mean when he tells us that we have a living hope? What He means is that the source of our hope is not an idea it is a person. This would have been especially important to Peter, because of his own life experience.
Perhaps you remember that before Jesus’ crucifixion, Peter had boldly claimed that he would stay by Jesus’ side even though all the other disciples ran away. But the reality was that Peter ran away as well. He denied Jesus. He failed His best friend. He failed to keep his promise and then Jesus died before Peter had a chance to make it right. The crucifixion robbed Peter of hope.
But the resurrection of Jesus was a life-changer for Peter. When the girls came in from the tomb on Sunday morning and told Peter that it was empty, can you imagine what this did to his heart? His hopes had been dashed to pieces, but this news was enough to cause hope to flicker in his heart again.
Peter heard this news and then flew out of the door to go and see for himself and when He saw Jesus His hope was restored. But it was a new kind of hope. It wasn’t a false hope, a misplaced hope, a blind hope, a fond hope; it was a living hope.
Peter’s hope was not based on an idea it was based on a person, a person that was and is alive and for whom death has no hold. So, when Peter writes to us about our living hope he writes from personal experience. His hope is alive because his hope is in Christ and Christ is alive.
Sure, there’s so much going on in our world right now that it is easy for us to forget what God has done for us through Jesus. It’s easy for us to let our hope fade a little bit, or even a lot. But passages like this put our real-world difficulties into eternal perspective.
Yes, our lives have been sort of turned upside-down due to Coronavirus, but God truly turned our lives upside-down when He began to work in our hearts through the gospel. Yes, there is much for us to think about and plan for with all that is going on, but we can’t forget about God’s mercy.
We can’t lose sight of the fact that we were born into this fallen world, but we have been born again in order to prepare us for the world to come. This world and all of its trials are not the ultimate expectation for us, we have a living hope in a living Savior, who died but rose again.
And we have an inheritance that is to come that we can hardly imagine. We will look at that next week, but I hope this little bit of encouragement has been helpful to you today.
Conclusion…
If you want to learn more about Cornerstone Baptist church, you can find us online at Cornerstonewylie.org. You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram @cbcwylie. You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/cornerstonewylie. You can also subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or google play to stay up to date on all the new content.
Thanks for listening.
[1] J. Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad (Baker Academics) pg. 17
