Christ’s Resurrection: Our Ultimate Hope

Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed!

How can I persuade you to put your ultimate hope in Christ and his resurrection?

By “hope,” I mean the reason you have to think something better is in the future. Hope is whatever gets us up in the morning thinking today might be better than yesterday. Hope sends us to work thinking we’ll do some good in the world. Hope fills the hearts of students that they’ll learn something new. (OK, I’m idealizing a little here.) Hope brings us to the ballot box to vote, thinking that elected leaders will make a better future for our country. Hope helps push us through nausea in chemotherapy that we’ll be in remission.

Our hope is often based in things we have experienced. For many today, their hope is in their money: they work to earn money to buy things that will give them comfort and pleasure in the future. For some it is the work itself that gives them the feeling of making a difference. Or, their hope is in people: family and friends that will give joy and fun in days to come; or teachers who inspire them; or in political leaders who make promises to improve the country; or doctors, who will make decisions that lead to future healing. These each may be reasons to hope.

None of them, however, are ultimate. Money, things, and people will all ultimately fail. No amount of money is going to stop pain completely. No family or friends will be completely loyal. No politician can do as much as they promise. No doctor is going to save us from death.

This is why Christ and his resurrection is our only ultimate hope. If we have any hope for the future, it must rest on Christ and Christ alone. He is alive, and because he lives, as the song goes, we can face tomorrow! Because he lives, we be confident we have an eternal place with God, an eternal people to belong to, an eternal purpose to direct us even today.

Put your hope in Christ. This doesn’t mean we don’t temporarily put our hope into family, friends, politicians, doctors, and even money. We do and we will because in the short term all of them have an impact. But it means we are realistic about their limitations. When we are disappointed and sad that they fail us (which they will), we are light of heart and forgiving because our ultimate hope was never in them anyway. It is Jesus, who is alive, who is our ultimate reason for hope! And in the end, He will never fail!

Trusting in Christ and his resurrection,

Pastor Peter