The Reason for Our Hope

I identify with Michael Spencer’s The Best Wreck I Ever Had: Spiritual Rebirth at the Wall and Beyond.

Michael says:

The fact is that despite what any of us may believe, there are points in our life where we’ve come to believe, often subconsciously, that God will act in particular ways. For example, a pastor might say that as long as he faithfully preaches the Gospel, God will provide his financial needs. Or a wife may believe that as long as she is a devoted Christian wife and mother, God would never let her husband stray into adultery. Or Christian parents may believe that if they raise their children in a nurturing Christian home, those children will marry Christians and remain in the faith.

I feel that our good Father is in the process of smashing my petty Christian ideals and replacing them with something altogether different than what I expected. I expected to come to the point of Christian maturity and holiness where I saw and understood circumstances in their eternal context and was able to make sense of them in light of Christian maturity.

Perhaps I’m maturing, perhaps not. But its more likely that Father revealed a robust love to me. The kind of Love that isn’t measuring life in terms of victory and defeat or success and failure but by the degree to which I trust His love.

It appears to me that the Christian community has constructed a significant number of religious tests by which we measure the validity of each other’s faith. And while I feel it is important to watch our doctrine and practice closely I think we’ve overestimated our ability to police ourselves.

Let us remember, and pardon me for riding my favorite hobby horse, that it is the finished work of Jesus Christ alone that satisfies the Father. Every good behavior or “fruit” flows out of the already finished work of Christ.

What Jesus did for us is significant as a once for always reality in human history but it also provides us with strength to move foreword. Jesus didn’t stay dead. He rose. And the power that animated the resurrected Christ animates us still.

So the litmus test of God’s love is not seeing good things happen to us because we’ve been good. Grades have been posted on the real test and Jesus got an A. And we hold on by faith to the once, for all, finished work of Jesus. When he ascended to the Father he sent the gift of his Holy Spirit as a seal. The Spirit was a promise of what is to come. We may now enjoy the real presence of God daily through the Spirit. His presence, as we see in Hebrews 11 or Genesis 22, doesn’t rely on circumstances but on his Sovereign choice.

I am reminded of J.B. Phillips book Your God is Too Small. He said this in the introduction:

If they [Christian people] are not strenuously defending an outgrown conception of God, then they are cherishing a hothouse God who could only exist between the pages of the Bible or inside the four walls of a Church.

I’m coming to believe that this faith thing really works. It’s not a means by which pastor’s control congregations neither is faith a way that fearful Christians insulate themselves from pain. Faith connects us with the reality of heaven and the love of our Father.

Jesus sat down at the right hand of the throne of heaven because he had purchased our freedom. Now the Spirit dwells. Now we can know the tenderness of Fatherly affection. We can look foreword to that day of judgement with confidence in Jesus’ work, in the power of the Spirit to get us there, and with certainty of Father’s love. Fear is gone.

Our brother Tolkein got it right:

PIPPIN: I didn’t think it would end this way.

GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

PIPPIN: Well, that isn’t so bad.

GANDALF: No. No, it isn’t.