Living Hope - Part 2

Today on Fellowship in the Word, Pastor Bill Gebhardt challenges you to become a fully functioning follower of Jesus Christ. A priest represents themselves before God. A priest gains access to God. A priest brings offerings and sacrifice to God.

And you do that. That's why the writer of Hebrews said you come boldly into the Holy of Holies. You're not just any priest. You have the same access that the high priest does. But the high priest could only go in once a year. You can go in once a minute, once a second.

You have access. Go boldly into the Holy of Holies. You are a priest. And you offer up praise and thanksgiving and offerings to God. Thank you for joining us today on this edition of Fellowship in the Word with Pastor Bill Gebhardt. Fellowship in the Word is the radio ministry of Fellowship Bible Church located in Metairie, Louisiana.

Let's join Pastor Bill Gebhardt now as once again he shows us how God's Word meets our world. One of the first things that Jesus did that night is he went and he washed the feet of the disciples. That's the position of the lowest slave in the house.

He did it. Their feet were filthy. They came in for dinner and he got down and he washed their feet. And then in verse 12, he begins to tell them why. He says in chapter 13, verse 12, Now when he had washed their feet and had taken his garments and reclined at the table, he said to them, Do you know what I've done to you? Really interesting question.

I mean, it's not as obvious as it seems. They probably thought, Yeah, he washed our feet. Boy, he did a lot more. He says this. You call me teacher or rabbi. You call me rabbi and Lord, choreos. He said, You're right, for so I am. If I then the Lord and the teacher washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet.

Imagine by now their brows are perferral. You know what? He says, For I gave you an example that you should do as I did to you. You mean we're supposed to wash each other's feet whenever we get a chance? It's a picture. It's a metaphor. Drop down to verse 34.

Same night, same context. Jesus says in verse 34, A new commandment I give to you that you love one another, even as I have loved you, you also love one another. There's the commandment to them and to us. We need to love each other. How? Like Christ loves us.

Wow. Unconditionally, forgiving, patient, all those kinds of things. He said, Yeah, you need to love one another.

Now he's going to tell them reason. He says, Verse 35, By this, all men will know that you're my disciples if you love one another. Jesus understands what people are like. Look, you love some people. You could care less about most people. And there are a few people you don't like at all.

You see, that's just life. Jesus says, No, no, that's not the way it's going to be with you. And by the way, let's go back to Peter.

That's a problem for Peter's audience. You see, what was the church like? Well, in Peter's church, there were there were Jews who were what we call Missianic Jews.

They had come to Christ and believed in him as their savior. Now, Jews didn't like any Gentiles. They viewed the Gentiles as unclean. Well, they had a lot of Gentiles in the church, but they just didn't have Gentiles. They had Greeks in the church. Now, the Greeks saw themselves as intellectually superior to everybody else. In fact, from the Greeks' point of view, everybody but a Greek was a barbarian. That's the word the Greeks said. You know what everybody else talks like but us?

Bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. They're all barbarians. They're ignorant. Then there are the Romans. The Romans said we conquered the world. It belongs to us. So you have Greeks, Romans, Jews.

Oh, by the way, you have slaves. They're all in the church. You know what the church was full of? Prejudice. You see, it was prejudice. They didn't like that. On a whole, the haves don't like the have-nots. The have-nots don't trust the haves. You see, that's the way it is.

By the way, has anything changed? I don't think so. Sadly, but I can remember years ago hearing Tony Evans from Dallas say that the most segregated hour in America is Sunday morning.

Is that sad or what? That's the church. That's the church.

There's no place for that. Notice what Jesus said. By this, all men will know you're my disciples. They'll know something's going on. Just imagine if the, so to speak, quote, unquote, 50, 55 million of us in America, who are believers in Jesus Christ, born-again Christians, just think if we loved each other that way.

Just imagine what the other people would think. Have you ever seen them? Have you ever seen the way they are with each other? We're not even close to that.

That's not our testimony at all. In fact, if you think about the way the church operates, we have trouble loving each other in the room here. We really do. But the American church, we view people at the other churches as competition. There are competitors.

You're going to have to beat your competitors. Really? That's the case? You see, it's strategically important that we love one another. We should love one another.

Notice back what Peter says. Peter says the reason we should love one another is think about what it means to be a Christian. He says, for you have been born again, not of a seed which is perishable, but imperishable.

That is through the living and enduring word of God. First reminder, we all came into the family the same way. Everybody who knows Christ is adopted, every one of us. And we all came in exactly the same way. We believe the word of God.

We believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. No one came into the family any other way. God doesn't have any grandchildren.

He only has children. Each one comes in on their own. He said we have that in common. We all came in in the same way. He also says we all take our instruction from the same source. He says for all flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of the grass.

The grass withers and the flower falls off. But the word of the Lord endures forever. And he says, and this is the word which was preached or proclaimed to you.

We all take instructions exactly the same way. The only authority that we recognize is the authority of the word of God. There is no other authority. That's what, by the way, sparked the Reformation.

It was a priest named Martin Luther that said, I can't take this anymore. There's only two things that are important. Sola Fida. Faith alone saves. Nothing else saves. Faith alone saves. Sola Scriptura. Only the scriptures have authority.

No institution has authority over the word of God. We all came into the same way. We all take our instructions from the same source.

We all have the same struggles. Notice verse one of Chapter two. Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. I hope you don't miss that. Every one of those are what sins we directed other people.

Every one of them deal with other people. He's talking about among us. He said, you've got to stop that. You've got to love. You can't can't have feelings of malice. You can't deceive each other. You've got to stop being hypocrites.

You can't envy. And by the way, you can't slander. That's why God thinks it's so offensive to gossip. A believer gossiping, slandering. You see, another believer they're supposed to love. He said, look, we all have those weaknesses.

In fact, if they didn't have those weaknesses, he wouldn't have said it. We all have the same struggles with this. We came into the family the same way.

We receive our instruction from the same source. We all have the same struggles and we all grow the same way. Notice like newborn babes long for the pure milk of the word so that you, he says, by it may grow in respect to your salvation if you have tasted the kindness or the gospel of the Lord. We all grow the same way. We grow in the grace and knowledge of Christ. He said, that's what you have in common.

That's the way it works. We have so much in common. I can hope to have a better life because I believe in a living hope. I can hope to have a capacity to love my brothers and sisters in Christ. The next thing he says is I can hope that certain eager expectation to share my faith with others. This is where he was going all along with this.

These people are struggling. They came up with a strategy. If the culture hates you, here's a strategy Christians often want to use. I'll just blend into the culture. If I blend in the culture, they won't persecute me. You see, it makes sense to them. And we do that all the time.

You may do it without knowing it. Hey, I know what the people in the office are like. I want to blend in. I just want to blend in. I want to go where they go after work. I want to laugh at their jokes.

I want to be part of that. I don't want them to think anything different of me. I just want to be like they are. Then they won't dislike me. Then they won't make fun of me. Peter says, boy, that's wrong.

That's not going to help at all. He said, you have this living hope, this great salvation. You better utilize it. Now he's going to tell us as to why. He says, in coming to him, he said, as to a living stone, which has been rejected by men, but is choice and precious in the sight of God, you also, he said, as living stones are being built up as a spiritual house. Wow. He's telling us that we're really kind of special. That's the part that makes all this work. Do you have any idea how special you are?

Really? You see, I don't think we really do. In our country, we call this self-esteem. You see, self-esteem. What Peter is telling these suffering people and telling us is, you know what, if they were going to measure your self-esteem, it should be off their chart.

Guys should be able to come in and say, I saw the results of this and I don't have any room in the paper. I have never seen people who have healthier self-esteem than you. But that's not really the reality, is it? I don't know if we realize how spectacular or how special we really are from God's point of view.

And that's not a naive view. Hold your place here and go with me, first of all, back to Psalm 103. God knows who we are. This is a great psalm, by the way. I'm going to look at nine verses. I challenge you this week just to read these nine verses once a day for yourself.

You'll get God's perspective of you and what he's done for you. In verse one of Psalm 103, a psalm of David, he says, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Bless his holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget none of his benefits. Who pardons all your iniquities and heals all your diseases. Who redeems you your life from the pit. Who crowns you with loving kindness, hesed, and compassion.

Who satisfies your years with good things so that your youth is renewed like an eagle. Then verse 11, For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his loving kindness toward those who fear him. He said, As far as the east is from the west, so far he has removed your transgressions from us.

Just as the father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him. He says, You realize what he's done for you? He's forgiven you forever, infinitely. He'll never bring it up again.

All those things. And then this last verse, verse 14, For he himself knows our frame. He is mindful that we are but dust. God's not naive when it comes to you. He knows exactly what you are. You see, but look what he's done for you anyway. Now you know the passage, but remember I've used it so many times, Jeremiah 29, For I know the plans that I have for you, declare to the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for calamity, to give you a future and a hope. You see that?

You see how special this is? The next time you go look in the mirror, maybe you should start every day this way. But you actually should look in the mirror and say, God is for me.

Because he is. God is for me. You see, that's you. That's me. God is for me.

The Apostle Paul said, If God is for us, then who can be against us? How is it we have such low self-esteem? How is it that we can feel so hopeless?

You see, what's going on with us? He said, You have a living hope. Not for someday, for today, for every day. You have a living hope. That living hope can change you and should. That living hope gives you the capacity to love and like your brothers and sisters in Christ.

That living hope, he says, should give you the confidence, he says, to share your faith with others. Now back to Peter. Look at these word pictures that he gives if that's not enough. In verse 5, he says that you are a living stone being built up in a spiritual house.

Isn't that interesting? He says, here's the imagery. Jesus is the cornerstone. That's what you build everything around. And think about it as the temple of God. Then every believer who is alive since Christ is part of the house. Can you imagine what floor we're on? Maybe that's why the New Heaven, New Earth, or the New Jerusalem, I mean, is 1500 by 1500 miles.

Like, we're way up there. There's my stone. In the imagery. He goes, Jesus is the chief cornerstone, but every one of you are a living stone.

But he doesn't stop there. He says, not only are you a living stone, he says, for a holy priesthood. You talk about something that was stolen from the people of God, and I'm so glad for men like Martin Luther who recaptured it for us. You're a priest.

Every one of us. Every single one of us is a priest. A priest represents themselves before God. A priest gains access to God. A priest brings offerings and sacrifice to God, and you do that.

That's why the writer of Hebrews said, you come boldly into the holy of holies. You're not just any priest. You have the same access that the high priest does. But the high priest could only go in once a year. You can go in once a minute, once a second.

You have access. Go boldly into the holy of holies. You are a priest. And you offer up praise and thanksgiving and offerings to God.

What a vantage that is, but he's still not finished. Verse 9, he says, but you are a chosen race. We're not just any race. We're a chosen race. There are a lot of races, but this one's chosen. By the way, it doesn't matter what race you're from. You're in the chosen race. You see, that's us. Chosen by who? Chosen by God, he says. You are a royal priesthood.

Don't miss that. I'll put it this way. I'm no Levitical priest. I'm Melchizedekian.

He's the king priest of Salem. That's who you are. You're not just any priest. You're Melchizedekian. You're a royal priesthood. That's who you are. Now, the only two members in the scripture of that group that I know of is Christ and Melchizedek, who might be the same.

That's astounding, he says. That's who you are because you're in Christ. You have a royal priesthood. You are a holy nation or a holy set-apart people of God. You are a people for God's own possession. Verse 10. You once were not a people, but now you are the people of God. You had not received mercy, but now you receive mercy.

Six images. Living stones in a spiritual house. We are priests in the same temple. We are a chosen race, a holy nation.

We are a people of God's own possession, and we're a people who have received mercy from God. If that doesn't pump up your self-esteem, what's going to? Do you have any idea how valuable you are?

Let me try it this way. Napoleon Bonaparte's toothbrush sold for $21,000. It's 200 years old.

What's your toothbrush look after two years? It is 200 years old. It's sold for 21,000. Jackie Onassis Kennedy's fake pearls sold at auction for $211,500. Fake pearls.

And JFK's wooden golf set sold for $772,000. Why are they valuable? Because of who they belong to. Who do you belong to?

Someone a lot greater than Napoleon Bonaparte or the Kennedys. You belong to God, creator of all things. You belong to Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior. That's who you are. You see, that's who you are. He says, do you get that?

Do you have any understanding of how spectacular you are? And there's a reason for it here. You see, there's a reason for it. Back to verse 9. You are a chosen race, a royal priest of the holy nation, a people for God's own possession. Here it is.

So that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of the darkness and into his marvelous light. You see what their problem was? They saw the culture as a threat. But they didn't see the culture as a mission field. We're starting to do the same thing here. We see the culture as a threat to us.

But the culture's not a threat. It's our mission field. Our job is to go out and to proclaim the excellencies of him. You see, that's what we're... And by the way, you know what that takes? That takes you to actually tell people about Jesus. That's right. You have to speak it.

Now, you might be thinking, well, I don't really know if I can do that or I'm really qualified. By the way, that was their problem. I think when it came to evangelism, all they said, well, you know who led all these people to Christ? The apostle Paul. Well, I heard the apostle John was leading a lot of people in the area. And here's Peter writing to them. You know, that's John and Paul and Peter. And they had other guys like Barnabas and Silas and Apollos and Timothy.

I mean, these are like giants. Who am I? He says, you're a child of God. That's who you are. You're a holy nation, a chosen people.

You're a royal priest. Now get out there and proclaim it. Tell people. Later in this book, he says, let anyone who asks you that you can give a hope, you can give an account for the hope that's in you.

You just tell people. That's our responsibility. That's why we're here. I've said it over all the years. Every single thing that we can do as a believer, we'll do infinitely better in heaven.

Everything. Except win the lost. This is our one shot. This is why we're here.

Notice then, he's not finished yet. He then says in verses 11 and 12, Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers, who are not of this world, to abstain from fleshy laws which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles or unbelievers. Now watch.

So that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may, because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation. There's your life. There's your works. He says, one, proclaim. There's your words. The next, there's your life. There's your works. Our life is a living testimony.

It's how we live and it's what we say. He said, that's what you should be able to do. He said, that's what I want you to be able to do. He said, I want you to share your faith with others, by your words and by your works. Proclaim. Being saved is a great, great thing.

The prophets were intrigued by it. Angels long to understand it. They're for granted. And when you're saved, you not only have the hope of heaven. Yes, you have that.

That's for sure. But you have that certain eager expectation of the life to come tomorrow and the next day. Peter said, it's a living hope. That living hope means that I can live a better life and I can be better than I was in the past.

That I don't have to live the way I used to live or live the way they live outside of here. I can also love my brothers and sisters in Christ. That's amazing. It's astounding. Isn't it easy to love the Lord because of who he is and what he's done?

But he won't let it stop there. He said, you also have to love each other. I have that capacity because of Jesus Christ. And I can share my faith with others by words and by works. Of all the people on earth, hope should spring eternal in us.

We're the children of God. We have reason to be hopeful. We don't have to worry about wishful thinking. We have that certain eager expectation of the life to come. And the hope that we have will never disappoint us. Let's pray. Father, it must seem to you that a hopeless Christian is an oxymoron.

How can one of your children with all of the benefits that you have provided all of the blessings, all of the sureties, all of the certainties in their life feel hopeless? Father, I pray that these words of Peter encourage us. First of all, I pray that it reinforces our self-esteem. We understand who we are and how special we are in your eyes. And we are special, Father, not because there's anything intrinsically wonderful about us.

We are special because you have chosen to send your son to die for our sins, and we have accepted that gift. Father, I pray that as we look at these days ahead and we have this living hope within us, we come away with the assurance that we can change. We need to change, not only for our good and your glory, but for our witness in this world, that we can love one another in such a way that the world takes notice.

Again, it would be for our good and your glory that would help win the lost. Father, give us the courage when the opportunity comes to proclaim our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, to give an account for the hope that's in us, and to remember that every day of our lives, the way we live, the way we conduct business, the way we are in our neighborhood or the places that we play, all reflect our Father who's in heaven because we are his children. Father, I thank you for hope. Human beings live with hope, and you have provided the answer. Thank you, because hope changed us. Hope is found in our Savior.

In his name we pray, amen. You've been listening to Pastor Bill Gebhardt on the Radio Ministry of Fellowship in the Word. If you ever miss one of our broadcasts or maybe you would just like to listen to the message one more time, remember that you can go to a great website called oneplace.com. That's oneplace.com, and you can listen to Fellowship in the Word online.

At that website, you will find not only today's broadcast, but also many of our previous audio programs as well. At Fellowship in the Word, we are thankful for those who financially support our ministry and make this broadcast possible. We ask all of our listeners to prayerfully consider how you might help this radio ministry continue its broadcast on this radio station by supporting us monthly or with just a one-time gift. Support for our ministry can be sent to Fellowship in the Word, 4600 Clearview Parkway, Metairie, Louisiana, 7006. If you would be interested in hearing today's message in its original format, that is as a sermon that Pastor Bill delivered during a Sunday morning service at Fellowship Bible Church, then you should visit our website, fbcnola.org.

That's fbcnola.org. At our website, you will find hundreds of Pastor Bill's sermons. You can browse through our sermon archives to find the sermon series you are looking for, or you can search by title. Once you find the message you are looking for, you can listen online. Or if you prefer, you can download the sermon and listen at your own convenience. And remember, you can do all of this absolutely free of charge. Once again, our website is fbcnola.org. For Pastor Bill Gebhardt, I'm Jason Gebhardt, thanking you for listening to Fellowship in the Word. .