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By Pastor Glenn Pease
Billy Graham in his book Hope For The Troubled Heart tells the story of the lone survivor of a shipwreck who was marooned on an uninhabited island.
He managed to build a hut in which he put everything he had saved from the wreck.
He prayed to God for rescue as he daily scanned the horizon for a passing ship.
One day he returned to his hut and to his horror he found it in flames.
All he possessed was going up in smoke.
It was the ultimate tragedy, and he sat in despair.
Shortly after that a ship arrived.
The captain said, "We saw your smoke signal and hurried here."
The ship wrecked man fell to his knees and thanked God for the fire he had just been cursing as a tragedy.
The point of Graham in telling this story is that he recognizes the great need for people to have hope.
When bad things happen it is important that we have hope that God can work in all things for good.
The world is full of bad things, and today we do not have to wait for weeks and months to hear about them.
We get the bad news the very moment terrible events are happening.
This much bad news is affecting people around the world and producing a lot of the sense of hopelessness.
Graham writes, "Perhaps the greatest psychological, spiritual, and medical need that all people have is the need for hope.
Dr. McNair Wilson, the famous cardiologist, remarked in his autobiography, Doctor's Progress, 'Hope is the medicine I use more than any other-hope can cure nearly anything.'
I remember years ago that Dr. Harold Wolff, professor of medicine at Cornell University Medical College and associate professor of psychiatry, said, 'Hope, like faith and a purpose in life is medicinal.
This is not exactly a statement of belief, but a conclusion proved by meticulously controlled scientific experiment.'"
This is confirmed over and over again by Dr. Robert Veninga, professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.
He has written a book called A Gift of Hope.
In it he gives dozens of illustrations of how hope is the key ingredient for facing the trials and tragedies of a fallen world.
I can share only a few examples.
He says that when children are diagnosed as diabetic they are overwhelmed.
Disease is supposed to be for old people and not kids.
They get depressed at the cruel injustice of it all.
The treatment is not just diet and insulin, but hope.
They teach the children that they can back pack, play football, and be fully involved in social activities.
They learn that prominent personalities like Mary Tyler Moore, and former New York Yankee star Jim (Catfish) Hunter are diabetics, and they live full and exciting lives.
When hope crowds out their fears these children adjust rapidly and begin to enjoy life again.
He goes through a whole series of family problems and tragic situations, and he shows that families that survive any crisis do so because they give each other the gift of hope.
Jerry Lebenow was locked up for three and a half years for a crime he did not commit.
A woman was brutally killed and he was charged and found guilty, he was sent to Stillwater prison.
Three years later the Supreme Court reviewed his case and found that he had not received a fair trial, and that the evidence did not support his guilt.
He was released to return to his family.
How could he suffer such an injustice and not be bitter and hateful?
He had family and friends who kept encouraging him and giving him hope.
Survivors in concentration camps did so because they never lost hope.
Those who did lose hope died.
Hope is a vital ingredient to life.
Dr. Veninga says there is nothing in the world of medicine or psychology that can help people survive and be healed that can match the power of religious hope.
And this brings us to our text, for long before all of the scientific and psychological research the Apostle Paul told the people of God that hope is the foundation of even faith and the knowledge of the truth.
These are the two vital goals the church is to achieve in the lives of the believers.
It is to build up their faith and their knowledge of the truth, and he says these both rest on the hope of eternal life.
Hope is used about 180 times in the Bible, and so it is a major topic of the Word of God, but I never saw it before that Paul is telling us here that hope is foundational, and that even faith rests on hope.
That means when he said these three remain, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love, that the second greatest is hope, and so he has these three basic virtues in reverse order of their importance.
Faith rests on hope.
Let's focus on this.
I. THE FOUNDATION OF HOPE.
Paul is famous for saying that we are saved by faith, but in Rom.
8:24 he says, "For we are saved by hope."
Faith and hope are like two strands wound together to make a rope.
We are saved by both together, for they both link us to Christ who alone can save.
They just look in two different directions.
Faith looks back to the past, and at what Jesus did for us on the cross in dying for our sins, and also at the resurrection where He conquered death and all the consequences of sin.
Hope, on the other hand, looks ahead to what Jesus has promised to do for us because of the cross and the resurrection.
He has promised to come again and to raise us up, or to change us in a twinkling of an eye, and take us to the place He has prepared where we will enjoy eternal life in His presence.
Paul is saying that this hope we have of eternal life is the foundation even of our faith.
The point being, if we do not have the hope of eternal life, what good is it that Jesus died and rose again?
Paul says in I Cor.
15:19, "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to pitied more than all men."
The hope of eternal life is so foundational that without it there is no meaning to our faith and knowledge, for it is all worthless without this hope.
God recognized the necessity of this hope and so Paul says that He promised eternal life before the beginning of time.
Here we see the ultimate goal of God before He started the creation of the universe, and the whole creation of reality and time as we know it.
Here we see the purpose of God which gives meaning to all of life.
God promised eternal life before He even made a living soul who could enjoy it.
Before time God said that this hope will be the key to meaning through all of time.
It will be the hope of eternal life beyond time.
Who in the world did God promise this too if it was before time, and the creation of Adam and Eve?
It was a promise for us, but the one who got the promise first had to be Jesus who would become a man and make it possible for the rest of mankind to enter into this foundational promise of hope.
The hope of eternal life was the motive that brought Jesus to earth to die for lost mankind.
Do you think Jesus would have come to die if the end result was that man would just be restored to live 200 or 500, or even a 1000 years?
It is not very likely.
It was the hope of eternal life that made His sacrifice worthwhile.
Eternal life is a value beyond our grasp.
We cannot conceive of its worth.
But it is the best God can give to a creature made in His image, and He promised this would be the gift He would give to those who receive His Son.
Paul wrote, "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
The end result of sin is death, and the end result of salvation is eternal life.
The focus of God from before time began was this hope of eternal life.
It was the focus of Jesus coming to earth.
Paul now says it is the foundation for our faith as Christians.
The one thing God wants for His people to have all through history is the hope of eternal life.
What does it mean to be saved?
It means that one has the hope of eternal life.
What is the practical effect of Christ's coming into history?
How does His coming, His death, and His resurrection effect us in our everyday lives?
The answer is right here in the hope of eternal life.
That is the bottom line that God was aiming for before time began, and it is the goal of His whole plan that His people would have the hope of eternal life.
To be without God and without hope in this world is to have life with no meaning.
To have God as your heavenly Father, and to have Jesus as your Savior, and to have this hope of eternal life is to have the meaning you need to cope with and to conquer, and to be victorious in a fallen world.
The second coming and the rapture of the church is called the blessed hope, for by these events Jesus will usher us into that fulfillment of this fundamental hope of eternal life.
It is the foundation of our faith.
Let's look next at-
II.
THE FUNCTION OF HOPE.
Since God made the hope of eternal life a promise before the beginning of time, He expects this hope to be a foundation on which His people build their faith.
So the function of hope is to reach out into the future and lay hold on it as a means of changing the present.
The function of hope is to participate in the future now.
It is to taste of the things to come and let the future have an impact on the present.
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