Christian Hope

This transcript has been automatically generated

I would be grateful if you’d turn to the book of Colossians and while you find that perhaps I can apologise for what seems a very strange subject in a city church for the Tuesdays in June. I can imagine some unbelievers, some who are not particularly kind towards the Christian truth, saying that the taking of such a subject on a Tuesday in our lunch hour services is characteristic of the emotional retreat which there is in Christianity. They say, well now, there are all these city businessmen, they don’t like the rat race, they find life pretty intolerable today, and so this man Lucas turns on for them a sort of orgy of emotion, and they come through those old-fashioned doors of St. Helen’s and for 20 minutes think about pie in the sky. Now I dare say there are many people who could put it in a more deadly way than that. And as you know, laughter is a very deadly weapon, not only when we’re young.

And the result of that is, I believe, that the church today is painfully unfaithful in its proclamation of the last things, what is going to happen at the end. One turns on one’s television to find some church leader obviously embarrassed when asked about heaven or the life of the world to come. He apologises for the biblical picture of a 3-decker universe. He says, of course, the ascension isn’t scientific but he must put up with that and clearly wants to get off the subject as soon as possible. The impression is sometimes given, I’m afraid, by us in the Christian church, and I take my share of the blame, that we modern 20th century people don’t need to think about heaven and hell, about the last things, about God’s ultimate future.

To this I can only say that I believe with all my heart that we need to think about these things. There’s a grand verse in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy where God says through Moses, the secret things of the Lord, the secret things belong unto the Lord but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children that we may do all the works of the Lord. Now I find that division a very helpful one. There are the secret things, they belong to God, we can’t pry into them, he hasn’t revealed them. Uh, they no doubt are many fascinating questions we should like to know more about but he doesn’t give them to us because presumably they’re not practical.

But there’s another kind of truth, says Moses, which is the revealed things which have been given to us and to our children that we may do all the works of the Lord.

Amongst this second class of truth, in the second class of truth, are these truths concerning the last things. And if they are given to us in the Bible, it is because they are for us and for our children that we may do God’s will. The implication is quite clear that it is impossible to do God’s will, to live life as he wants it to be lived, if we don’t know about these things that he’s revealed. Notice these truths are for your children. I vividly remember that many years ago when I was a very young Christian, long before I was ordained, being asked to go to a school Christian meeting and I was told to choose my own subject and for some extraordinary reason I chose the subject of heaven.

I think I’d got rather excited with it in reading this Bible that had become a new book to me and so I turned up and these group of boys were there and I talked to them about heaven. And I always remember because afterwards I had a bread-and-butter letter from the leader of the group, which is somewhat unusual amongst people of that age, I think, saying, thank you very much for coming and thank you for the subject. It meant a very great deal to me. I’d never really heard or thought about it before. Some years later I was walking down a street in Oxford And I met this fellow, now an undergraduate, and he caught me up and said, do you remember coming to speak at such and such a school on the subject of heaven?

He said, it’s meant so much to me, I can quote to you the passage from the Bible which you took. And he proceeded to do so in English and slight one-upmanship in Greek because he was a classical scholar.

Now these things are important for us and for our children. Because they actually do help us and without them we are lost. One thinks of the tragic figure of Bishop Pike, some of you may remember his visiting this church quite a number of years ago. I suppose he stands for the modernist in the church of our 20th century, a man who had put aside all the miraculous and the supernatural and tried to give us what was a practical Christianity. And you’ll remember the very painful story of his son who committed suicide and the book that Bishop Pike wrote out of his despair, trying to get in touch with his son through the medium of séances and so on.

Yes, we need this, but not just because we’ve all got to die. I would say very emphatically, we need this truth because we’ve all got to live. And there are many people today who are finding this quite a problem. I suspect that quite a number of sensitive, thoughtful people today who are trying to take the door out of life, in suicide do so because they have no conception of the glory of truths like this. They need them in order to live, quite apart in order to prepare for death.

Indeed, I believe that we could say that the Bible and the New Testament message of Christianity would be a very poor philosophy of life if it did not deal with the ultimate things. Actually, any philosophy, whether Christian or not, has to tell us about the future because what I am aiming for and working for and waiting for in the future, and there isn’t one of us who isn’t thinking a great deal about that, governs and controls how I actually live and sort out my priorities in the present. So if the Bible is going to give us a philosophy of life, if it’s going to teach us how to live today, it’s got to tell us what really matters in the future. I’m sure if you are a parent at this moment, or if you know young people or those students, you will feel very sympathetic at this time of year because of course we’re right in the exam season. And 10 o’clock this morning for certain young people I know, and 3 o’clock this afternoon, are rather tense times.

And I’m sure your mind can go back to the days when you looked at a long examination paper and your mind went completely blank. And if, as in my day, I was reading history at the university, you searched desperately for one question that you could answer. You caught sight perhaps of something about the date of William the Conqueror and leapt at the question saying, well, at least I can answer that, found that the examiner, wretched man, had cheated by saying, relate this to the 3rd clause of the Magna Carta, and that completely stymied you. Now the wonderful thing about the New Testament is that it goes straight to the hardest questions and it cracks those first. Having done that, it’s able to answer the lesser questions, and the big questions obviously concern the future.

These are dealt with first, then we’re able to live. Now the word that has put me on the track of the subject that is going to be our concern, and I hope one of the richest subjects we’ve ever looked at together this month, is the little word hope. And I want to introduce this word to you by looking very briefly this morning into this short letter from Paul the Apostle to the Colossians, and I want you to look at chapter 1 and verse 27 first of all.

And there Paul shows us that hope is an essential part of the authentic Christian message.

Now in verse 26 he says that the word of God has not been fully known in days past. There’s been a mystery concerning God. And certain things concerning him have been hidden for ages and generations, but now, he says, but now in the Christian era, they’ve been many— made manifest to his saints, to Christian people, to the church. And then this tremendous statement, verse 27: To them, to the Christian church, God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles, that is all men, are the riches of the glory of this mystery, no longer a mystery, Which is— now before we look at this, I wonder how you would put a definition of Christianity in one sentence. What is the essential Christian message?

I need hardly say that this is not something that we have sought for, it is something that God has declared and revealed to us. I was sorry to see in the paper that a long programme on religion is going to be given to us on television in the next few years on the same basis as civilization. I’m not sorry about that, but I was sorry that the title was to be The Long Search. Nothing, I think, could epitomise more clearly the misunderstanding there is amongst people as to what religion, true religion, is really about. It’s not a long search of man painfully looking for meaning.

The story of Christianity, as opposed to religion, is a story not about human search but about divine revelation. It’s about a God who has opened the mysteries of heaven, come down into the darkness of the world and spoken clearly and articulately without stammering in the person of Jesus Christ and he has declared what? What’s the essential message that is proclaimed at Saint Helen’s and every Christian church in the world that keeps to the authentic Christian gospel? Well, here it is and I find it very moving. So simple and yet so magnificent, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Now notice that there are 2 phrases here. The first, Christ in you. Christ, God’s Son, the presence of God in your heart. Not noticed primarily in history, though Christ is in history, and no one can shake that evidence. Not primarily Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, though Christ is in the Sermon on the Mount and that standard is still the Christian standard.

Not primarily Christ in the church, though it is inevitable if you become a Christian that you will become a member of a Christian church and join the body of Christ. But not primarily historical or ethical or institutional, and very often these can be sidetracks and People miss the way, but primarily personal, Christ in you.

I can’t think of a more marvellous description of the treasures and the richness of the gospel. Here is the most wonderful figure the world has known and here is you, little you, of no importance particularly except to God and to your own immediate family. And Christ the Son of God is willing to come and live with and in you. That’s the gospel, that’s the good news. Christ down to earth.

So you see, before we talk about heaven in the future, let’s get it clear that God already desires to live with us on earth. Where, says the child to its mother, where does God live? And the real answer to that is not just in heaven but with his people here and now. Christ in your heart.

But that is not the whole gospel. Look at the second part: it is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

I have asked myself, what is the trend of our evangelistic preaching in this country since the war? And I’ve looked at my own evangelistic preaching and I’ve said to myself, yes, our preaching is all about this first clause. It’s a wonderful thing of course to talk about. The offer of Christ to stand at the door of the heart of any man or woman, boy or girl, and enter and make that person new, Christ in the heart. But much evangelism, I think, falls short by stopping there.

New Testament evangelism always contained the second great offer of the gospel here and now, which is the assurance not only of the presence of Christ in my heart today but the hope of glory hereafter. And what a wonderful thing that was to the ancient world which was without God, as Paul says in a luminous phrase, and without hope.

We all also live in a world which is without God and without hope. I want to go on to say something about that later this month, the despair that is entering our Western culture. Because we are without God and Christ and without any hope for the future. And therefore part of the original apostolic gospel was not only the proclamation that Christ could live amongst us and in us but that he could give to every man a living and a true hope, a hope of glory hereafter. And without that we’re only half enjoying our Christian faith.

So we find Paul, for example, in prison in his letter to the Philippians rejoicing in the presence of Christ even in that miserable dungeon and yet saying that he longed to go to be with Christ because he said it’s far better. The dungeon would be put away, the opposition to the gospel would be put away, that sinful flesh within him would be put away that constantly held him down. All these limitations of sin and sorrow, all these things would be put away when he was in the presence of Christ in glory. And yet already he had an anticipation of that joy in the presence of Christ by his Spirit in that prison in Philippi. That then was the essential authentic Christian message on the first day and hope was part of it.

Now secondly, and the other great thing I want to say this morning, was just as hope was part of the authentic, original Christian gospel, it was part of the authentic, original Christian experience. And you will find this in chapter 1 of Colossians, verse 4 and 5. Just looking back a few verses.

You see, Paul has not been to this church in Colossae but he rejoices at the news that he’s heard about them from Epaphras and he has heard certain things that give him the certain knowledge that Christ has begun to work in them because he said, I’m rejoicing at what I hear because, verse 4, we have heard of your faith in Christ, of the love which you have for all the brethren and because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You can’t fail to have noticed there the famous Christian triad, uh, the most precious bunch of charismata, one commentator calls it, in the New Testament, the real evidence that God is working in us, are faith, hope and love. Now let me just say very briefly but I think it’s important, these are not natural qualities. These are not things that I can bring up from within me, that I can generate a certain faith in God. I can’t do that.

From cold. I can’t learn to love my brethren. I can’t give myself a hope of life eternal. I can’t conjure it out of nothing. I can’t make myself religious and attempts to do that are futile.

We don’t come to Saint Helen’s on Tuesday morning to generate religiosity. We come to open ourselves to the working of the Spirit of God who alone can produce in the soil of your heart the The little shoots of faith in Christ, love to the brethren and a hope of life eternal. These are the gifts of God and in that magnificent passage that Derek Edwards read just now, we won’t bother to turn to it, Peter says that it’s by God’s great mercy that we Christians have been born anew, born again, regenerated to a living hope. Through the resurrection of Christ from the dead. The foundation, the resurrection, the means by which that foundation comes into my life, the new birth, and through this new birth I come into a living hope.

You know, I never met anybody at a funeral or who has to face death, I never met anybody who had a real living, solid, joyful assurance about what lied in those, beyond death unless that person had a real, living, solid experience of Christ here and now. A hope of glory hereafter is wrought in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. It’s part of the equipment that he gives us when we come to him. It is the assurance that so many Christians lack today.

If you have faith in Christ and this new love to the brethren, and this assured hope of life eternal, then it means God’s begun to work in your life. By the way, isn’t it a lovely emphasis, this, that the gospel we’re talking about is a gospel of grace? Because Christ does not come to us and say, I’m going to give you faith and love. How many sermons we have on that. He says, I’m going to give you faith and love in your hearts and an assurance that you’ll be with me after death.

He doesn’t just say, I’m going to give you faith and love and if you work those things out, why maybe one day you’ll be with me. How uncertain that would leave me.

He announces the beginning of the battle and tells me at the beginning of the battle that the victory is won. He tells me that I belong to him now and that nothing can stop me being with him hereafter. Therefore, if that is so, it can’t depend upon me, it depends upon grace.

Part of the authentic Christian message, part of the authentic Christian experience and therefore, and I wished I’d had more time for this, I shall have to leave this till next Tuesday, therefore verse 23: Continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel. I’m afraid that’s just what we do. We drift into presumption on the one hand and despair on the other, and that will be the beginning of our study next Tuesday. Let us pray.

God chose to make known the riches of his glory, Christ in you, the hope of glory. O God, we thank thee with humble hearts this morning. That to your church has been committed the proclamation of this great treasure to men. And we know that all around us in the city there are people who are poverty-stricken because they know nothing of Christ in them, the hope of glory.

And we ask that our own lives may show something of the richness of this treasure and that many during this month may be drawn through these doors to have their minds and hearts opened by thy grace and love to what thou hast to give them, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.