Thank you for helping to support Peace Devotions through your prayers, likes, and shares.
If you’d like to support our ministry financially, you can donate here.
What is Hope?
How certain is your hope? We hope for a lot of things in life and many of those things are uncertain. Today Pastor Tim Hartwig tells us about something of which we can be certain: hope through Jesus
1 Peter 1:3-4
I hope I get a raise.
I hope I get married.
I hope the Vikings win the Super Bowl.
I hope I go to heaven.
When we use that word ‘hope’ there is often a lot of uncertainty attached to it. Hope for us in that uses like a wish or a dream, sometimes even an impossibility. I hope. When the Bible uses the word hope it uses it in a very different way than that. Hope in the Bible is sure and certain. It’s sure and certain because it’s based on an event that is already happened.
In 1 Peter chapter 1 verse 3 we read this
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he gave us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, into an inheritance that is undying, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you. (1 Peter 1:3-4)
Hope in this sense is not uncertain because Christ is risen. Because of Jesus life, death, and resurrection we now have a sure and certain hope in him. So what does Jesus resurrection make us certain of? Peter points to our life in heaven. Life in heaven is not to be a wish for us it can be a certainty. Not because of how we have lived or anything that we have done, but because God sent Jesus to live, die, and rise again for our salvation. Christ is risen, heaven is yours. Amen.
