1 Peter 1:3,4 “Praise be to God! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade – kept in heaven for you.”
Today’s verse talks clearly about how Christian hope is both for this life and for the next. But many of us aren’t living today in light of eternity. J. I. Packer puts it well: “For today, by and large, Christians no longer live for heaven, and therefore no longer understand, let alone practice, detachment from the world… Does the world around us seek profit, pleasure and privilege? So do we. We have no readiness or strength to renounce these objectives, for we have recast Christianity into a mold that stresses happiness above holiness, blessings here above blessing hereafter, health and wealth as God’s best gifts, and death, especially early death, not as thankworthy deliverance from the miseries of a sinful world, but as the supreme disaster… Is our Christianity out of shape? Yes it is, and the basic reason is that we have lost the New Testament’s two-world perspective that views the next life as more important than this one and understands life here as essentially preparation and training for life hereafter.”
It’s important to note in the above that Packer is redressing an imbalance which he observes in many of us nowadays. But we mustn’t create a false dichotomy and swing too far the other way either, ending up ‘so heavenly-minded that we’re no earthly good’. As the Christian Aid motto states: “We believe in life before death.” Jesus provides not only hope for the after-life, but hope through our day-to-day trials, challenges, disappointments, and hurts. Let’s grasp hold of both dimensions of this ‘living hope’ and share it with people around us today.
Thank you Lord for the gift of hope – for now and into eternity. I choose to embody that hope today. Amen!
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