Our Faith and Hope If you will just keep that in your minds and follow through this epistle, you will see how much light there is streaming from the cross upon the Christian life. First of all, light upon our faith and hope, “Who by Him do believe in God, that raised Him up from the dead, and gave Him glory; that your faith and hope might be in God” (1Pe_1:21). There is the object of our faith and hope, it is God. There are three steps, you will notice, to the throne; in 1Pe_1:18-19 (“Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot”), the redemption of Christ; in 1Pe_1:20 (“Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you”) the foreordination of God, and in the twentieth verse also the manifestation by Jesus Christ. Faith and hope reach God by the way of the sacrifice of the cross, that sacrifice that was thought out in the mind of God, and planned by God before ever the foundations of the earth were laid, and then personally exhibited in all its richness and fullness in the life of the Son of God. So Calvary shows us the eternal source of faith and hope and their immovable anchorage. The source of our faith is not in ourselves. The source of our hope can never be in our circumstances, but the source of our faith and hope is God Himself. That faith is tried, Peter tells you in the sixth verse, by manifold temptations, or testings. There never has been a time in the history of the Christian Church that believers have not been tested in regard to their faith. The testings of faith are necessary to prove the genuineness and the value of that faith. I was preaching one summer in the month of June, in one of the loveliest parts of Scotland, in the North, in the region where the gorse and the broom bloom. In the month of June they are at their loveliest, and you see the hillside covered with great patches of gold and green. Never have I seen the gorse and broom so luxuriant and so plentiful. I was speaking to a lady about it one day and she said, “Do you know the reason why the bushes are so large and magnificent this year? They were all severely burned last year.” So it was out of this furnace of fire that they came with their richness and their beauty. And it is just out of the furnace that our faith and our hope come to be of real value both to the object and to the owner. Faith has to be tested. You will notice also (thirdly) that the hope which is ours is a living hope. It springs into birth through the sufferings of Christ, and gains its immortal, quenchless power in the resurrection of Christ, and it has a practical influence, “Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1Pe_3:15). That living hope always leads to holiness, and the measure in which we sanctify the Lord in our hearts gives us the proof of the reality of that hope. Gordon Watt the meaning of the cross
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 02:52:29 +0000
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