HOPE
Dear Friends,
Easter turned everything on its head.
It reset all the compass points by which this life on earth is lived. Death isn’t final. Evil doesn’t triumph. The present isn’t everything. And Caesar isn’t Lord.
Hope came into its own.
It wasn’t that hope hadn’t been there before, for the Lord had carefully nurtured that hope in His people from earliest days. But that nurture of hope had been much like the life of the famous Chinese bamboo tree in its first four years or so.
The seed is planted, watered, tended, and ever so patiently fertilized. After a year there’s nothing much to show for the care that’s been constantly shown. After two years, there’s still not a lot to show for the work which the farmer has daily put in. After three years – the same: any growth is at best very minimal. After four years, there’s still not a lot to be seen: it’s tempting to pack the thing in.
In the fifth year, however, something really quite astonishing takes place. Within a week this would-be tree grows up to 90 feet in height! Explosive growth!
That’s what I mean when I say that hope came into its own. It had always been there, from the time of the sin of Adam and Eve when the creation itself was subjected to frustration, but subject by God in hope, as Paul underlines in that famous Romans 8 passage.
Hope that was more than merely empty wishful thinking: hope that was more than merely any optimistic singing in the rain. Hope, instead, that had taken its root when the seed of God’s promise had been planted back there in the garden of a fallen world. Watered down the centuries by the promise being repeated, and watered, too, by the Lord’s own raising up of individuals who in some regards were ‘types’ of what was promised. But by and large throughout the whole Old Testament, that hope was much like Chinese bamboo trees for those who had invested in its truth. Waiting. And waiting. Year after year. Waiting, yes: and starting perhaps to wonder as well, to wonder if anything ever would come of the fragile seed of hope which the Lord Himself had planted so very long ago.
Easter was the Chinese bamboo tree, year 5! Not even a week, but three short days in which that seed of hope exploded into the thing it was planted and meant to be by God. A huge, surging, soaring hope, erupting within the hearts of Jesus’ followers, re-setting, as I say, the compass points by which we’re called to navigate this earthly life: re-orienting our living to make us, and emphatically so, a people who live towards the future. The promise of God now matched by the power of God, and changing forever our perspective on life and on living.
Those ‘compass points’, now wholly reconfigured by the drama of that weekend we call Easter – these ‘compass points’ are always so important. The fact of our mortality: the prevalence of evil: the attraction of the instant: and the role of the State. Our whole way of living is largely defined by the way in which we view and understand these four realities: and the death and resurrection of our Lord transformed the way we look at them – and therefore, too, transformed the way we live.
Death isn’t final. Evil doesn’t triumph. The present isn’t everything. And Caesar isn’t Lord. Those four great truths translate now into hope: a solid, substantial, ‘three-dimensional’ hope, different entirely from any mere crossing-your-fingers and shutting-your-eyes and blindly assuming it’ll all come right in the end. And it’s that substantial, 3-dimensional hope we have in Christ which we’re exhorted to expound to those who ask about the transformed way we live.
How do we live, then, and why do we live as we do?
A careful concentration on our final destination
The first and most obvious dimension of the hope to which the Scriptures always point is our careful concentration on the place to which we’re headed and the resurrection destiny we have. We adopt a deliberately forward-looking focus. The writer to the Hebrews puts it well: we’re to fix our eyes on Jesus – who for the joy set before Him endured the cross. He was forward-looking, sustained and always energized, by that future full of searing, soaring joy: we’re to be the same.
It’s what Paul describes as ‘the blessed hope’ (Titus 2.13f): the coming again of our Lord Jesus Christ and the life to which then we’ll be (as those who’ve trusted in Him) raised. It’s the conviction drilled powerfully into our hearts that the best is still to be. A life that’s perfected in every regard, a realm that is righteous with no trace of sin. No sin, no death. No pain, no tears. No sorrow, no suffering. All at last made right. Bodies made whole, hearts made pure. Joy beyond measure in the presence of God, eternal pleasures at His right hand. The freedom and fulness for which we have longed, the frolicking dance of a child-like delight in the boundless beauty of God.
It’s that which fills our horizons and stirs our hearts. And it makes us always essentially a ‘pilgrim’ people; a people on the move; a people who are driven by a single, great intent; a people now intent on heading home.
We live towards that future. The pleasures of the present have now lost their taste, because the fragrance of the future, carried on the Spirit’s breath, has now captivated every single fibre of our being and become our sole obsession.
A settled confidence in the face of all adversity
But the hope which now marks the believer is more than merely a simple looking-forward to a future day – huge and important as that is. We have become as a people a truly hopeful people. Full of hope in every situation. Full of a confident trust in the Lord, that whatever we may have to face, He’s not only able to cope with it all, He’ll ensure that it all works for good.
There’ll be light at the end of the tunnel.
No longer now merely resolved to survive, but eager and bold, aspiring to thrive, in a confidence born of the knowledge of God and His grace. However great the challenges – our God is greater still. However fierce the foes may be – our God is mightier still. However testing the trials may be – our God is the God who saves. There’s nothing He cannot handle. No problem too complex or thorny for Him to address and resolve. No power on earth (or anywhere else) that prompts any fear or foreboding in the heart of the great Almighty – their power so puny compared to the might that is His that the Lord on His throne simply laughs! As the song so gladly celebrates – ‘who can stand against us if our God is for us?’
That’s part of the whole new perspective which Easter instils in the minds and hearts of believers. The victory wrought by Jesus back then is given to His disciples. Which is why we may always stand firm and abound in the work of the Lord: because we know, as Paul insists, that our labour in the Lord is never in vain. Never.
We know that now: faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen (Heb.11.1). We may well face problems, challenges, trials: we may well be buffeted, bruised, bereaved. Jesus didn’t ‘photoshop’ the picture which He painted of discipleship. Nor, for that matter, did Paul. So, though we may be hard pressed – we’re not crushed: although we may well be reduced to a scratching and a shaking of our heads, we don’t succumb to despair. We may be knocked back, knocked down, and generally knocked about (with the bruises and scars to prove it), but we’re not knocked out. Easter reset all the ‘compass points’. Friday gets followed by Sunday, the cross by the empty tomb. And therefore when those painful Fridays come, we cope with them now in the knowledge that there’s a glorious Sunday coming.
We’re an essentially hopeful people.
Like Daniel’s friends. Faced by the fire of the furnace, the fire of their faith blazed stronger still, and their line was emphatic and clear. Death isn’t final. Evil doesn’t triumph. The present isn’t everything. And Caesar isn’t lord. Our God is mighty to save: they knew that. The assurance of things hoped for. He can save. He will save. And even if He doesn’t in this instance, we trust Him to know what He’s doing – and whatever it is that He does, it’ll be altogether good.
An eager commitment to the next generation
Mention of Daniel and Daniel’s three friends leads me on to the third of the dimensions of that hope to which the Scriptures always point: a ‘next-generation’ perspective: a commitment, that is, to nurture, equip and mobilise the rising generation of the family of faith – and thereby shape the future in the cause of gospel growth.
How on earth, after all, did these four young teenage boys, removed so unceremoniously from their homes in Judah, and thrown into the maelstrom of a God-defying culture – how on earth did they muster the faith to withstand the onslaught? And where on earth did they find that surging, strident hopefulness by which, beyond each fearful Friday they could see a Son-filled Sunday soon to dawn?
Was it not through the hope-fuelled labours of their forebears in the faith? Was it not through the likes of Jeremiah, who lived towards the future and discerned how very different would the context be in which a rising generation would be living out their faith? And who therefore took pains to ensure that that next generation were taught and trained for war and for the battles which they’d surely have to fight?
Jeremiah was Josiah’s peer. And, yes, there was a measure of revival in those days. He was doubtless glad, and grateful to the Lord for it. But the present isn’t everything – even when the present sees the ‘good times’ roll. The man was ever looking down the line: fifteen, twenty, thirty years ahead, a generation on. Equipping them to pick up in their own, and still far-future, day the baton of the battles of the Lord, and know how on the battlefields of Babylon to honour God and spread abroad the glories of His name.
“Praise be to the Lord, my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle” (Ps.144.1). Well, yes, He does. But how? How did He do it for Daniel and his gang? Not with some deft magic click of His heavenly fingers. But rather through the forward-living, hope-fuelled, next-generation thinking of the likes of Jeremiah. Jeremiah clearly saw what was coming when not many others could (or would – for most of them closed their eyes to the fact of that coming exile): he saw what the rising generation would, accordingly, need: and he trained their hands for war, trained the fingers, as it were of their faith, for the battlefields of Babylon. That’s what this hope does for you and in you: it translates into action, this sort of action, an investment in the next generation.
We’re wholly committed to just that sort of investment in the future. Training the next generation. It’s there in our acronymic DNA, the ‘T’ of our A-C-T-S. Training for ministry. It’s an integral part of all that we’re about. We created a Training Fund, and resolved to push £15,000 each year towards that fund, intent on ensuring the investment was real and our commitment to training would be backed by the necessary cash. We developed a policy document, to go with the fund itself. We’ve helped to create, and get off the ground, the Ministry Training Academy here in Aberdeen.
None of that by itself, though, is surely adequate. We don’t mean to be a ‘training’ church in name alone: we mean to be a church which actively offers, and substantially provides, the sort of basic training which aspiring preachers and pastors and leaders will need. So we’ve sought to develop, as well, a 2-year ‘Training Programme’, whereby in partnership with the MTA we’ll help to train the rising generation and prepare them all for ministry in the likely ‘exile’ context of the coming days. And we’ll flag that up in the hope that there’ll be those now eager to avail themselves of such an opportunity.
We live in hope. Easter altered everything. Hope is not just that eager longing for the promised better day: nor just that bold and persistent confidence in the face of present trials: it’s that forward-looking, next-generation commitment, which sees us always living towards the future and investing our all not primarily in the present day, but intentionally and always expectantly in the years ahead.
Happy Easter!
Yours in Christ Jesus our Lord
Jeremy Middleton