Word of Salvation – Vol. 35 No. 48 – December 1990

 

Living In Hope

(A New Year's Eve Sermon)

 

Sermon by Rev. M. VanderRee on 2Peter 3:13

Reading: Psalm 90:1-12; Romans 5:1-5; 2Peter 3:1-13

Singing:  H.4; 174; 475; H.402; H.901

 

Brothers and Sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ,

After tonight the diaries which we had for 1990 will be redundant.  Tomorrow we will open new diaries and find most of the pages empty.  Within our new diaries we will find a small (or large) square for each day of our lives in the new year.  Each square will represent a new episode of our life.  In it we will record what we've done, whom we have met, how busy we have been.  We will only be able to live one square at a time!  And then at the end of each day, we will find that each square has an invisible door to the next square.  And we will all find, that one day the next square will be the last square.

So this evening, New Year's Eve, 1990, we want to look back at the year that we have had.  We want to consider how we have moved through the last 365 squares in our diaries, and then consider how we will move through the next year!  We want to ask ourselves two questions:-
   1.  What did we live through the last year?
   2.  What was our driving force?

There are some people who live knowing that one day a square will be their last, but they think that that is the end.  It is as though their final breath is simply that, everything stops there; then there will be nothingness.

There are others who live as though they are on a journey to a destination and when they walk into the last square, they know that for them the four walls that bound them everyday will be removed, for this is a new beginning!

One person lives as it comes, without hope, and without purpose.

Another lives life because it is part of a journey, with hope and with purpose.

Today, this 31st December, 1990 we want to consider the challenge which the Gospel gives us.  Namely, that God promises a new heaven and earth, and our hope in Christ is to be our driving force.  This evening we want to consider some elements in the Bible's teaching of the second coming, particularly that of our living hope and to see that it has implications for how we have lived the past year and how we will enter 1991!  We are part of a journey full of hope and purpose.

Our text is 2Peter 3:13:
“But in keeping with his promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and new earth, the home of righteousness”... in the light of Romans 5:5:
“...and hope does not disappoint us.”

1.  The Promise of God: The New Heaven and the New Earth

The Christian Gospel comes down to a promise that the last square in our life is the beginning of a whole new world.  It is the introduction to a world of perfect peace and total justice.  It is our introduction to the world of which Peter reminded his readers, the promise of the new heaven and the new earth.

There will be an intermission between my death and the arrival into that new place, for we must wait until the Lord comes again to usher in this new world.

The Christian Gospel reminds us that we will be part of that new world.  And that new world will be new, in the sense that an old, ramshackle, broken-down house is new after it has been worked over from top to bottom, by an architect and builder who have an eye for renewing poor structures where the foundations are still sound.  Everything is new, compared to the old place which was broken down, but it is still the old house.  Totally new, fundamentally the same.

The new earth of which Peter speaks is this old world.  God is not about to annihilate His creation.  God will not turn it into a fire ball which will destroy itself.  God is going to renew this creation which is broken and affected by sin.  (Romans 8, Rev.21:1)  God will restore paradise on earth.  It will be the same creation which the Creator made and loved, the garden He planned for his children, the kingdom He refused to surrender to the enemy.

In this new earth and new heavens, people will live together without sin.  Peter says it will be the home of righteousness.  It appears that he is saying something about the relationships with other people.  The effects of the fall will be removed from our relationships with God, each other and ourselves.  People will be fair to each other.  People will be guided by the desire to love and to care the way that it was intended to be.  There will be peace.  According to John in Revelation 21:4 God 'will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain anymore'.  On this new heaven and earth we will be marked by the shalom of God, peace and wholeness!  That is the promise of God!

But the students of history however tell us a different story!  They say that there is no golden age in the past to prove that the 'new heaven and earth' is a feasible alternative.  There is a dark age, there are the blotches of Auschwitz and war but there is no City of God.

The Promise of the Gospel is that there ‘will be a new heaven and earth'.  Hope, says Paul, will not disappoint us!  This is a promise that began to be voiced through the Prophets, Is.65:17: For behold I create new heavens and a new earth.' Later the promise was said again through a person whose whole existence was in fact saying 'There is a better world coming'.  The pregnant Jewish girl Mary, said, 'the hungry will be filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.'  The baby grew, and signalled the power of rightness in all that he did.  He proclaimed the coming of the Kingdom.  He gave people their sight.  The lame could walk, the guilty were set free.  The Christ became a threat to the established powers and so they hung him on a tree.  He died, but God raised him from the dead, and made the promise of the new heaven and new earth real!

The gift of hope is not like some people who are naturally optimistic.  As someone said, 'not like the people who are born sunny side up'.  The gift of hope in this promise of God is to be a realist, to see the world in which we live, and yet to look to Christ and what he has accomplished and say: We look forward to the full effect of his work being realized!

As we look back over the last year, 1990, ask yourself how you lived?  Were you and I, were we living out of this sure hope?

Did we experience the outworking of the promise of God?  By virtue of the fact that we are still existing as a local body of believers;
   that the Word is preached,
   that we can enjoy the communion, fellowship of one another,
   that we have the opportunity to be encouraged and equipped to serve our Lord.

We all participate in a ministry.  Whether it be the Care Group, or in the Christian school, whether it be the home, or the office, we minister not because it is an end in itself but to say: The day is near, we want people to respond to the claims of Christ!  We have seen the power of Gospel at work!

Has this Christian Hope of what is to come been the driving force of your activities in 1990?

I will leave that for you to ponder!

As we consider this year just past, we ought also to consider the new year, 1991.

2.  Our Participation in that Promise: Hope Does Not Disappoint.

Our Christian hope can have a great effect on the way in which we will live and serve in 1991.  We are called to participate in the promise of God... knowing full well that it is only those things that will be done for Christ that will last.  How we work and serve our Lord and King has eternal significance!

Christian hope is like a pair of crutches to a man with broken legs.  It is a way in which God enables us to be encouraged and strengthened.  God has given us this hope through Jesus Christ, planted by the Holy Spirit.  Because of that we can have confidence.  We have been given the ability to go on and live because of that hope.

As you consider 1990 and as we anticipate a new year of unknown circumstances; as we plan for what we would like to see happen; as we hope that our dreams will come one step closer to reality, consider that Christian hope enables us to live and work with confidence and not despair.  As citizens of the Kingdom of God, we are not allowed to write off the present earth as a total loss, or rejoice in its deterioration.  We are a part of a people of God, working for a better earth now.  Our efforts to bring the Kingdom of God into fuller manifestation are of eternal significance.  Our mission work in word and deed; our attempt to develop a distinctively Christian culture, through schools, politics, senior citizens homes, social work, trade unions etc., have great value, as the Kingship of Christ is declared!

As the world looks in on us, during the next 365 days and as we move through the next year of ministry and service, what will those on the outside see?  Will it be the human hope of a group of men and women born sunny side up?  Happy, content until...?  Will it be human hope which is limited in its horizon, that is dependent upon ourselves?  The hope: cheer up ... things will get better!  Will it be the treasure of Christian hope, with a horizon which is as unlimited as eternity, and is thoroughly dependent upon our faithful God?  Christian hope says, 'I don't know what will happen but God will keep me.’

There are many people who live without Christian hope.  Some drink and drug themselves to forget the tedious repetition of life.  Others fill the squares of their lives with shopping and consuming.  Still others work their lives and become rich and neurotic.  Others fret and fume about life.

An anthropologist, Ernest Becker, has this to say: 'The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer'.

Talk about human hope turned into sour doubt!

The only answer to soured human hope is Christian hope!  The knowledge that because of Jesus Christ, the earth has become His Kingdom, and that all that we do here that is for the building up of that kingdom, will be transformed on the New heaven and the New Earth.  At the beginning of history God created the heavens and the earth, but on the last day, it will be far better than we have seen it.

At the centre of that history is the Lamb that was slain, the first born from the dead, and the ruler of the Kings of the earth.

God encourages us this evening to look back, but even more to look forward in Christian hope to the year and the years that lie ahead!

GOD'S WORD IS CLEAR.  BE ENCOURAGED THROUGH THE HOPE GIVEN YOU BY THE SPIRIT OF GOD, TO THE GLORY OF OUR GREAT REDEEMER FOR THE PRIVILEGE TO BE A PART OF HIS PEOPLE, ON THE THRESHOLD OF A NEW YEAR.

AMEN