SERMON STRUCTURE: Our Living Hope

1 Peter 1:3-12

CIT (Central Idea of the Text): By His great mercy God has given us a living hope and an imperishable inheritance in Jesus Christ. (18 words).

SERMON FOCUS: God also declares to us this living hope and imperishable inheritance.

MO: Consecrative

SO: Rejoice in the living hope of our salvation in Christ!

TITLE: Our Living Hope

Then … the completed sermon should be evaluated in terms of how well it adheres to the CIT and SF, and accomplishes its SO.

INVOCATION

OUTLINE OF 1 Peter 1:3-12

Overview

This passage is a prayer of thanksgiving and praise to God for what God has done for us in Christ Jesus.

1. “³A New Birth” (1:3-5).

1. “Into a Living Hope” (1:3)

2. “⁴Into an inheritance that is… (1:4, 5)

   1. ^“4…imperishable, undefiled, and unfading…” (1:4).

   2. “⁴…kept in heaven for you ⁵who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed at the last time.” (1:4, 5).

3. So the object of the hope, and the nature of our inheritance, is “…salvation ready to be revealed at the last time.” (1.5).

2. Rejoicing in Faith (1:6, 7).

1. “⁶In this you rejoice” — or, alternatively, as the imperative: “rejoice in this!”

2. And our rejoicing is not to be diminished at all by various trials or difficulties we may suffer “for a little while.” (1:6)

3. “⁷so that the genuineness of your faith … may be found to result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1:7)

3. Rejoicing in the Unseen Christ (1:8).

“and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy…” (1:8).

4. The Outcome of Rejoicing (1:9).

“⁹… for you are receiving the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (1:9).

5. The Revelation of God’s Salvation (1:10-12).

1. “¹⁰… the prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours made careful inquiry into this matter.” (1:10, 11)

2. “¹²It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves, but you ….” (1:12a).

3. These are “¹²… things into which angels long to look!” (1:12b).

SERMON DEVELOPMENT

Our Living Hope

1 Peter 1:3-12

Introduction

1. This is the Third Sunday OF Easter, not just the second Sunday AFTER Easter.

1. Easter is a continuous season that lasts 7 weeks, from Easter to Pentecost (sometimes called “Whitsunday”).

2. The liturgical color for this season is white; it remains so until Pentecost.

   1. Pentecost celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit; it is the so-called “birthday of the Church.”

   2. And the color for Pentecost is red — the brightest color of the church year, but the color most seldom seen.

2. You may remember that the first time, and in fact the only time, I have spoken to you about the meaning of Easter was at sunrise service on Easter morning.

1. The theme of those brief remarks was that the real evidence of Easter lies not so much in the Biblical accounts of the appearance of Jesus after His resurrection as in the power of His resurrection to transform our lives and make us into people that we cannot be on our own.

2. What I said on that day is that the resurrection of Christ does you no good unless it makes a meaningful difference in your life every day.

3. And today’s message is a follow-up on that same theme.

Scripture

1. But the setting for our Scripture lies many years after the resurrection.

1. Peter is writing “to the exiles of the Dispersion” (1:1)

2. Now the “dispersion” refers to the scattering of the Jews after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the people to whom he writes had almost certainly never seen Jesus in the flesh, either before his crucifixion or after his resurrection.

2. Let us hear, therefore, what he says to them.

1. Our passage is from Peter’s first letter, beginning at chapter 1, verse 3.

2. I’m reading from the New Revised Standard Version.

[Read here 1 Peter 1:3-12, NRSV.]

3. This passage is a prayer of thanksgiving and praise to God for what God has done for us in Christ Jesus.

4. We give thanks to God because by His great mercy God has given us a living hope and an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.

6. And the object of our hope, and the nature of our inheritance, is “salvation ready to be revealed at the last time.” (1.5).

Exposition

1. The audience to which Peter writes had never seen Jesus, yet their faith in Him altered their lives in such a dramatic way that Peter writes of it as “a new birth.”

2. This Scripture reading is usually used on the Sunday when the Gospel lesson is the account of the Apostle Thomas’ doubts about the resurrection of Christ, and Thomas’ subsequent confession “My Lord and My God!” when Jesus offers to let Thomas touch his wounds (John 20:24-29).

3. And so Peter may be thinking about Thomas’ confession when he writes,

“⁸Although you have not seen him, you love him, and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy.” (1:8).

4. Peter’s focus isn’t nearly so much on what has happened to Christ Himself as on what happens to believers who put their faith in Him.

5. In this brief passage, Peter introduces several themes:

1. A new birth in Christ. (1:3-5).

   1. A new birth into “a living hope.”

   2. A new birth into “an imperishable inheritance.”

2. Joy in Christ, even in times of suffering. (1:6).

3. A life that brings “praise and glory and honor” to Christ through the genuineness of faith. (1:7).

4. Faith in, and love for, the Christ who cannot visibly be seen. (1:8).

5. The outcome of faith: salvation in Christ. (1:9).

6. Let us notice two things about this “new birth”:

1. First, it is at God’s initiative: the Scripture says, “By his great mercy, [God] has given us a new birth….” (1:3).

God’s salvation for us is always at God’s initiative, never at our own.

2. Second, this “new birth” has two benefits:

   1. It is a “³new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1:3).

1. Does the term “living hope” actually make any sense?

2. Can hope really be “dead”?

3. “Hope that does not live can scarcely be thought of as hope.”¹

1. But the hope we have in Christ is the hope of resurrection, and it is therefore a “living” hope.

In the late 1980’s, on his nightly television news program “Nightline,” Ted Koppel asked Bishop Desmond Tutu if the situation in South Africa, with its apartheid, or forced racial segregation, was hopeless. Tutu replied, “Of course it is hopeless from a human point of view. But we believe in the resurrection, and so we are prisoners of hope.”

Prisoners of hope — that is an arresting image! We do not desperately clutch at hope. In the resurrection we have been taken captive by the hope that will never release us, but will liberate us from all hopelessness.²

3. And it is “³new birth into…⁴an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading.” (1:4).

4. And more than that, this inheritance is “being kept in heaven for [us] who are being protected by the power of God through faith.” (1:5).

7. What should be our response to this “new birth”?

1. Peter says “in this you rejoice” (1:6), as a declarative statement.

2. But these words can also be read, and maybe should be read, as an imperative — that is, as a command: REJOICE!

3. And why should we rejoice?

   1. Here we need to skip a few words in verse 7 (because, like this preacher, Peter sometimes goes off on a tangent and needs to be brought back to the main point!)

   2. So he says, “REJOICE! So that the genuineness of your faith … may … result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1:7)

4. Did you get that?

   1. Peter says, in a kind of parenthesis, that our faith “is more precious than gold” even though it is perishable, but that idea, as important as it is, interrupts his main thought:

   2. It is the “genuineness of our faith” that should “result in praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” (1:7)

5. So what does that mean?

   1. God gives us the gift of faith, to bring us into relationship with Christ.

   2. But part of the purpose of our faith is that others should see Christ within us.

   3. Or, in other words, God’s gift of faith to us is not for our benefit only (as important as that is for us), but also to bringing glory to God in the way we live our lives before God and before other people.

8. But there’s more!

1. Peter says that the genuineness of our faith is such that we can — and should — rejoice in Christ, even though we have not — and can not — see him. (1:8).

“⁸although [we] have not seen him, [we] believe in him, and even though [we] do not see him now, [we] believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy” (1:8).

2. And the outcome of our faith — and our rejoicing — is the salvation we have in Christ. (1:9).

⁹for [we] are receiving the outcome of [our] faith, the salvation of [our] souls.” (1:9).

9. And finally, Peter reminds us that the grace given to us in Jesus Christ — the living hope in which we are, in Desmond Tutu’s words, the prisoners of God — is a mystery into which the prophets themselves made careful inquiry.

1. What the prophets discovered, Peter says, is that the grace was to be made ours, rather than their own, and that these are “things into which angels long to look.” (1:12).

2. What a glorious living hope we have in Christ Jesus!

3. What an imperishable, undefiled, and unfailing inheritance awaits us!

Reflections and Conclusions

1. So here is our living hope:

1. It is founded in the resurrection and life of Christ himself.

2. Because Christ was raised from the grave, so we have hope of resurrection to eternal life.

2. But more than that, our faith comes to us as a “³new birth into a living hope” and as “⁴an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading” (1:3,4)

3. Our living hope comes to us as the gift of faith, which brings us into relationship with others.

4. But our living hope also manifests itself by bringing glory to God in the way we live our lives before God and before other people.

5. Let us therefore rejoice in the living hope of our salvation in Christ!