Easter 8 Resurrection Makes Faith and Hope Central

[HKHaugan]

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” (Heb.11:1 KJV)

“I hope I can be a better person… I hope I can find a decent place to work and live…I hope for my children’s future…I hope I can get through this awful experience I’m facing…”

“I hope we can grow…I hope we can meet people who want to be a part of us…I hope we can get the message across…I hope I can witness when I get in the midst of non-believers…”

Hope is one thing. What we hope for is another. Having faith is one thing. What we have faith in is another. Both are shapeless ideals until they are centered in something or someone or both to give them substance and content. Until then hope is simply wishful thinking and faith is nothing more than determined self-discipline to reach a secular goal.

Born in the image and likeness of God our human nature is vested with hope and faith; hope in the Resurrection and eternal life; faith in Jesus Christ, the One who gets us there. But sin separates us from the source that gives them life. It is not until we are restored to God through Jesus that the gift of the Holy Spirit can give substance, content and power to accomplish what hope and faith were given for---eternal life, eternal relationship and an eternal family.

This is why the Resurrection is so important. What Jesus hoped for, He obtained through faith. And not only for Himself but also for everyone who puts their trust in Him. He made hope and faith a collaborative spiritual reality assuring every one that what He had accomplished on the Cross was available to everyone. What Jesus obtained was not only for Him but also for us, for everyone who hopes and has faith in Him. From death He obtained a new body. He obtained a restored mind. He obtained a fulfilled heart. He obtained the Holy Spirit, which He gave up in death. Those things that He sacrificed in death were perfected in His Resurrection. His perfect mind, heart and new body are set before us in hope for us. They were achieved by the faith Jesus had in His Father and His Word.

The Resurrection draws us to the person of Jesus, how He lived, thought, what He hoped for and the faith it took to achieve His hopes. It is the resurrected Jesus who defines hope and faith and their goals. Ideas of success and achievement are transformed to become what is pleasing to God and spiritually productive. When we hope to please God and have faith in His presence in our hearts it is God who reconciles the content of the world to Himself through our hope and faith in Him.

Think of the unbeliever we know who we hope finds Jesus. When is the right time to share Him with that person? Do we trust Jesus when we have the opportunity to witness to him? We hope we will be able to do it. But will exercise the faith to do it? Jesus is the one who brings hope and faith together in our hearts with His Spirit and empowers the risk we take in faith. We believe, we hope and we trust.

Faith is the substance and the evidence. It is both the reality and the experience. If something is the object of what is hoped for and the experience is getting what was hoped for then faith is proven by its results. If something is hoped for and it happens it was faith that made it happen. Faith is built in to each of us at birth and so is hope. Everyone will eventually believe something is worth going after, trust a way to accomplish that goal and then put the mind, emotion and spirit into action to get it. Faith is the substance within the choice and its achievement is its proof.

What I'm simply saying here is that faith itself cannot be denied. Everyone has it and lives with it in its most unseen reality every single moment of one's life. To deny it takes belief that it should be denied. The question though has to be asked. What is faith centered in? Atheists are not faithless. They have faith in not believing in God and believe in doing whatever is necessary to attack others who have faith in something or someone to not influence the culture openly. That active lifestyle is a faith lifestyle. The substance of their hope is the ultimate engagement of everyone's mind in God-denial.

The problem in conversing with an atheist is not their intellect but their heart, not how they think but what they think and finally in what shaped them to find atheism as the crutch for their faith in that atmosphere. What lies in the gut, in the underbelly, the deep recess of their being that brought them into that absorbing existence? It is the unseen, the invisible personal mechanisms that sin complicated. “This only have I found: God created mankind upright, but they have gone in search of many schemes (Ecc.7:29)." Another way to say it is this, “God made man simple but man complicated it.”

Underneath it all we will find the inevitable reality that the personal way we react and make conclusions is the issue. It's not necessarily 'good' or 'bad' parenting or how others treated us, or even environmental social and cultural influences but the personal internal processes that we use to rationalize and justify why we think and act the way we do. For instance, dissatisfaction with our appearance, height, weight and why we react about them and feel about them the way we do. We look to blame someone or something for them. In other words, blame is what we have faith in to shift the heat from me to another source. Blame is traceed right back to Genesis 3 where Adam places the blame on Eve and God for his alienation and Eve in turn blames the serpent. People have employed blame as a device ever since.

Another misuse of faith is being defensive. The root of defensiveness is pride and pride is rooted in fear. There are any number of surface reasons we can use to defend what we, now get this, what we believe is going to expose and injure us. Defensiveness is a daily experience unless we find a reason not to be defensive. When Jesus is the center of our pride then pride has found a proper home and He has already been our defense. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry (James 1:19).”
So we have to develop an inner system of belief, trust and faith in something to handle the inner insomnia of our emotionality (our emotions never rest unless there is an inner peace). The peace only Jesus brings is the balance for the three for He is our peace (Eph.2:14).