I Choose Hope - Experiencing Hope, Part 1

Are you in need of hope today? Has life beat you down? Does God feel far away and you feel very, very alone? Well, stay with me.

Help's on the way. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. The mission of these daily programs is to intentionally disciple Christians through the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram. We're in the middle of our series, I Choose Hope, facing the future with confidence. We hope you've been encouraged by this series so far. And to help others find that same encouragement, would you take a minute after this message and share it with them?

Now you can do that through the Chip Ingram app or by sending them the free MP3s that you'll find at livingontheedge.org. Thanks for spreading the word about how this teaching is impacting you. Okay, here's Chip for his message, Experiencing Hope from Philippians chapter three. I was thinking about a story that I heard that is a true story. It's kind of one of those you kind of read in the paper and it goes on the AP wire because it was so odd and then ends up in Reader's Digest. True story of a woman in Florida lived in a trailer park and hers was sort of a really beat up, you know, not so good trailer.

And just everything about her life and practice just barely making it. And a very, very, very elderly woman. And eventually she died and they found her in her trailer and, you know, they went through all the right processes and found there was a distant relative or something. And they came in from out of town and found out at least, oh, she had a deposit box. And so they went to the deposit box at the bank, opened the deposit box.

It had hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. And yet it was like, you know, she's barely making it, you know, walking to the little store. And I thought about that. In other words, I'm sure in her mind, something a little bit warped was, you know, I'm saving this for a rainy day, like I might live to be 150.

You know, I mean, you know, you got to ask, so when do you think that rainy day? So she had everything she already needed. She had hope for today. She had plenty of money for as long as anyone has ever lived. And yet it's one thing to possess something.

It's something else to appropriate it and use it. And I got thinking about my own life and yours and thinking, you know, I possess all the hope that I need. I know that I have been sealed by God's Spirit, by His grace. I have the absolute certainty that Christ is coming back. I have the absolute certainty He's prepared a place for me and for all genuine followers of Christ.

I know that every promise is true. He said He's going to provide for me. He's going to protect me in the midst of a fallen world. Anything I need, anyone I need to get through anything, I have that hope.

But I don't always appropriate it. I live at times, and I see lots of Christian live at times as though they're hopeless. That this relationship went south or the job situation or a health situation or one of your kids or, you know, how long am I going to be single or how long do I have to stay married and, you know, all those kind of issues. And so I want to talk to you about not just the fact of finding hope, but how do you experience it? Hope is the mental and emotional attitude that life is good, that the future is promising, and that progress is absolutely certain even in the midst of challenging circumstances and difficult people.

In other words, you wake up in the morning and most parts of the day as you're relating to people, as you think about work and your responsibilities, there's this buoying up inside that, you know, life is hard, but it's good. The future is uncertain, but it's promising because God's in control. I just sang, I don't, I'm not going to trust in any sweetest frame, no other person. God is going to come through.

I just don't know how and progress is absolutely certain. He made this promise. He who began a good work in me is going to complete it until the day he comes back, regardless of the difficulty and the challenges that everybody has difficulties. Everybody has challenges, but I have a hope. I have an anchor to my life. That's what we're talking about in hope.

Three things. One, wherever we put our hope will determine what we worship. I mean, wherever, wherever my hope is, if I think it's work that's going to come through, if I think it's this person is going to come through, if I think fame is going to come through, wherever I put my hope, I worship. Second is false hope always ends in pride or despair. When I put my hope in something or someone that doesn't have the ability to come through, either I get a bit arrogant when I make some success or it's despair because life isn't working. We found that false hope is almost always focused on external things. True hope is always about internal things. False hope is what I can accomplish. True hope is about what's already been accomplished by Christ for me. And third, we learned that true hope is rooted in relationship and it results in joy and endurance. I think joy is way underrated.

C.S. Lewis said, joy is a serious business of heaven. Jesus on the very last night after they had gone through everything and he's in this vineyard and he's talking about a deep connection with him by abiding in him and the kind of rich relationship regardless.

He's already told him it's going to be tough. And he says, these things I've written to you that my joy might be in you. The joy of Christ and that your joy might be full or literally overflowing.

See, real hope produces a joy when the external circumstances are going, no way. So here's what I want to ask you. Okay.

I mean, a lot of what I'm going to say for many of you that have been around for a while, it's like, you know, these things. Okay. The issue isn't do you know them?

The issue is, are you experiencing them? And so I'm going to ask you to do a little something. This is very private.

Don't write anything down. But I want to ask you what relationship or what circumstance just right now, just where you're seated today doesn't have to even be a huge, big thing, but it feels hopeless. I mean, just in your life, it just feels hopeless.

It might be just an area of your marriage. It feels hopeless. It might be something at work and a supervisor or a frustration or a project, but might be one of your kids that you've tried, tried, tried, tried. I don't know what it is, but what I want you to get your arms around. We're going to talk about how the spirit of God wants to take the truth of God's word and help you not know about hope, but experience it. One of the best ways is to start with, where do I feel a little hopeless?

Have you got it? You didn't think I was going to go on, did you? Okay. You need to get that in your mind.

And I'm not saying it's true, but it's how you feel and your feelings influence how you respond. The big question I want to ask and answer with you today is this. How do we experience true hope in everyday life?

Monday morning, Saturday night, Tuesday in the midst of a meeting, Thursday when a project's not going well, Friday when your kid's sick, how do you experience hope in everyday life? The answer is Philippians chapter three, verses 10 and 11. And there's an important context. If I would read what I'm going to read to you, and if I knew historically like Paul, this hater of the church, this persecutor, this murderer, this super religious guy, totally out of touch with God, just came to Christ, and he'd been a Christian like six months and was all fired up, I would read this one way. But what I'm going to read to you is the apostle Paul, former Saul, 30 years after his conversion. This is what he says after he's been beat up more than a few times, where he's been left in the ocean. He's been left once for dead already. I mean, his life, this is the guy that was the rising star of Judaism.

So he's a Roman citizen, city of Tarsus. He has wealth, reputation, education from the Stanford, MIT, Yale of his schools. He has got it all, and this is how he's viewing life.

Have you got it now? Thirty years later, here's the passion that's pumping through this guy's spiritual veins. He says, what's more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing value of what? Knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord. We underline that.

This is his hope. The prestige, the power, the wealth, the influence, all of that, I consider a loss now in comparison to a deep, personal, intimate relationship with Christ. For whose sake I've lost all things. And there's our, here's our accounting term.

I consider them garbage or literally dung. That I might gain Christ and be found in him. Not having a righteousness of my own that comes to the law, but that which is through faith in Christ circle, faith in Christ.

Memo to people who like to skip ahead. Faith is going to be the key to moving from hope that I actually possess to hope that I experience. It's the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith.

Now here's verses 9 and 10 where he now just kind of zooms in about his consuming passion and the source of his hope. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his suffering becoming like him in his death and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead. I want you to understand exactly what he means and then I'll talk about what it really means to us. What he's saying is I don't want the intellectual knowledge about God. I don't want facts.

I don't want data. I want a deep, personal, intimate relationship with God the Father through the person of Christ. In fact the Hebrew word when it's translated in this passage if the Hebrew was translating this he would use the word Yada. And the word Yada was when God is speaking about Adam and Eve and it says Adam Yada Eve and she gave birth to a son. He takes the most intimate moment in the relationship between a man and a woman, the culmination of communication of spirit, mind and body and he says I want to have the kind of intimacy with the living God that a man and a woman who are unashamed and come together physically. He says that's the depth, that's the level. And then grammatically basically it would be I want to know Christ namely.

Now I'm going to give you three phrases that identify how you experience this kind of intimacy. First namely the power of his resurrection. He's not talking about some day some way after he's resurrected with Christ.

He's talking about the operational power, the supernatural power in daily life, life changing power over guilt, life changing power over addictions, life changing power over the way he used to think, life changing power to forgive the people and to receive God's forgiveness and to experience the very living Christ inside of him. He says that's how I want to know him. I want to know him so that every day is different than any other day because the living Christ lives in me. The same power that rose him from the dead dwells in me. I want to experience that.

Second I also want to know him intimately through something that most of us don't want and we would never welcome but it's a reality. The fellowship of his suffering. The word quinonia.

We have a quinonia class. It means to participate in, to associate with, to share oneness communion. It has this idea of a connection with someone that as you're going through something they're with you.

They're with you all the way and the ups and the downs and the struggles and what you know the people that you're closest to in all the world are the people that you have been through some huge difficult painful thing and you supported each other on the journey. And he's saying in my life if the suffering comes from without, if it comes from persecution, if it even comes from within, I want to experience the very presence and the comfort and the enabling of Christ in the midst of that. And third he uses this word becoming like him in his death. Morphe. You know what the word morphing means? It means to change intrinsically from the inside out. What he's saying is I want an intimate deep relationship.

I don't want to know about God. I want to experience him and I want to experience him with a level of power and energy and impact that transforms me and I see things happen that have no human explanation and I want to experience him in the lowest and the hardest and most painful things of life so that I am actually morphed or transformed from the inside out. How? Into the likeness of his death. And he said, well, what do you mean by that?

Well, what was the likeness of his death? Jesus came to the point, Father, I do nothing unless you say. He comes to the very end of his life and he prays, Lord, if there's a different way rather than going to the cross, let's go with that plan.

Yes. Not my will, but yours. Paul's praying, I want to be so transformed in an intimate relationship with Jesus that when my Gethsemanes come and I have to make a crossroads decision about I so want to do it this way or I still want to cheat just a little or I so want to, I will say not my will, but yours be done, because he would come to the point where he'd be so changed that he would actually believe that a good, kind, loving, all powerful, sovereign God that would be for his best regardless of the front end cost. And so somehow here, the somehow is not he's not doubting whether he's going to be resurrected. So somehow to attain to the resurrection from put a circle around from and write the little word out of it's a little Greek preposition. He's saying, I know that all people of all time are going to be resurrected. The good or the righteous and the unrighteous will be resurrected. He said, out of that general resurrection, he says, I want I want to be reminded that whether you come back or whether I die, because remember, he thinks he's going to get executed or might be out of that resurrection to the final end, that my faith in knowing you would turn to sight and it would be forever. That's what he's teaching.

I want to kind of flush out. How do we experience this intimate relationship with Jesus in everyday life for you and me? And I'm going to suggest that Paul has said, this is what I want, namely that there's three things that we must know and progressively underline progressively. This isn't overnight.

This is like this morning early. I was in my study, kind of reviewing everything, and I was reading a psalm that talks about your descendants and them walking in righteousness. And three of my grandkids really, really just they just came to my mind. And I just it was like, I'm going to go out of town tomorrow.

I just have to see him. So I got up and donuts and grandfathering is a big plus. So I went to the little donut shop and and, you know, I drove over to my daughter's house and knocked on the door and came in and I had a little bag for them, a little bag for them and coffee for my daughter and her husband. And just, you know, just 15, 20 minutes.

But it was this. I just I just want to be with them. I just want to experience life with them. And I long for them to experience what God has for them. And so it's but but when I was there, my little one grandson, he just learned to walk about two and a half weeks ago.

I mean, we went from, you know, like, is he going to make it? And I mean, it was like, you know, he gave me this. You know, he knows donut already. And all you health food people I eat very healthy. Normally, when you're a grandparent, you get to do this stuff.

My daughter can feed him healthy stuff all the time. I'm bribing them. Sort of. Here's what I want you to get as you listen. I ask you to plant in the back of your mind.

Where do you feel hopeless? I want you to begin now to take that thought as I walk through. How can you progressively experience the power of his resurrection? How can you progressively in the midst of this experience him in your suffering? And how can in the process you can come to even before we walk out of this room, a sense of morphing and changing that even if you can't see it, by the way, hope you can never see. It's a certainty of things unseen that you would say, Lord, not my will, but your will, because I'm going to trust in what I can't see you, your power, your love for me. And so with that, he says, what's the power of his resurrection?

How exactly do you experience that? What the apostle Paul did in verses 10 and 11 is he gave you the over arching kind of big issues of how to have an intimate personal relationship with God through Jesus. But his teaching through all the epistles is just filled with explaining these phrases. So what I thought I would do is each time I'm going to give you his theology of resurrection power and then I'll give you his experience. Then I'll give you his theology of suffering and then his experience, because as you see both those things, guess what you're going to do?

You're going to go, aha, I got it. It's his power in our weakness. The way the apostle Paul is going to teach us that we experience the resurrected power is out of our weakness. Romans eight verse 11 says, but if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who dwells in you. In other words, the same power that raised Christ from the dead.

When you turn from your sin, ask Christ to forgive you, come into your life. The same power, the same spirit lives inside of you. So you should expect supernatural things to happen. And then what he's going to say is, but the way the supernatural things happen is a recognition that what you need is his strength or you need his power in the midst of your weakness. Most of us just are our mental human fleshly bent is that I'm going to make it by what I do and this is what I can accomplish. He's going to say the flip with God is it's when you come in humility and admit you can't. The 12 steppers have a lot to teach us on that one.

Bill Wilson, by the way, was a believer. Anybody know what the first step is? I'm absolutely powerless. I can't do this. I can't overcome this addiction.

Well, guess what? You can't overcome forgiving someone either. You can't overcome your fear of failure. You can't overcome your family of origin. You can't overcome your fear about the economy. You can't overcome what's going to happen to your kids.

Right? Can you really? So what the apostle Paul is, he has this difficult situation. Three times he prays. God says, no, no, no.

And then in second Corinthians chapter 12 notice what he says. God, you have said no to me when I've asked you to remove this difficulty, this tribulation, some physical issue. Therefore I'm well content with weakness, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties.

Did you notice they're all plural for Christ's sake? Why? For when I am weak, then I am strong. You've been listening to part one of Chip's message, Experiencing Hope, which is from our series, I Choose Hope.

Chip will be back with us in studio shortly to share some helpful application for us to think about. In uncertain times, what do you put your hope in and how confident are you that that person or thing will actually deliver the peace and stability you're desperate for? As Chip teaches through Philippians chapter three, he'll share what God has to say about our fears about the future and how it's possible to be confident in these anxious times. Stay with us as we learn to face tomorrow and each day that follows with complete certainty in a never failing hope. To get more plugged in with this series, I Choose Hope or any of our helpful resources, visit livingontheedge.org.

That's livingontheedge.org. Well Chip's joined me here in studio and Chip, I understand you have a really meaningful story you'd like to share that ties into this idea of hope. You know Dave, I had an experience that really blew my mind. It was just a few years ago and I met a guy that was a, he would call himself a kind of cultural nominal Christian.

He's an older guy and he lives in a part of Florida, sort of the retired community and I mean everybody, I don't mean this in a bad way, but everybody's senior, senior, senior citizens right? And he came to know the Lord and he had this tremendous salvation experience and really got in the Bible. And he met a mutual friend of ours and my friend gave him the book, The Real Heaven. And he read it and I mean he wrote me this long, long email and said, Chip, you don't understand.

No one knows about this. I'm living in a world where most of these people have very little time left. So he reads the book and he started teaching all these small groups. Then he started teaching it in community centers and it was just absolutely amazing what happened because you know, we've all lost loved ones or we know someone who's lost really close loved ones. And even as believers, if you don't have hope or if you just, if heaven is some vague idea, it is not what God has promised. The early church lived and endured because it had this hope of heaven, a real place with Jesus, with him that's concrete, that I mean makes a difference, that's an eternity that you look forward to. And Dave, I've just seen that people don't know much about heaven. My confession, I say in the book, I didn't know much about heaven even as a pastor. And so if there's ever a time to learn about heaven, it's now. And I really hope people will either get the book or you know, jump in and do the small group with us.

So Dave, why don't you give them the details so they know how to get it? Be glad to Chip. Well, if you've been searching for some solid biblical answers about heaven, let me encourage you to get plugged into our resources for The Real Heaven. Whether it's Chip's popular book or the small group study, you're going to walk away with a more accurate and exciting view of the place God's preparing for us. For complete ordering details, go to LivingOnTheEdge.org or call us at 888-333-6003. That's 888-333-6003 or visit LivingOnTheEdge.org.

App listeners, tap special offers. Well, here again is Chip to share some final application for us to think about. As we close today's program, lean back, will you? What relationship? What circumstance?

What's going on in your life that's nagging at you or literally makes you feel hopeless? I mean, we're studying Philippians chapter 3, and I'm going to be honest with you. The apostle Paul's perspective is pretty revolutionary. He counts all this success, all this education, all this career that he's achieved as lost compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus as Lord. And I'm going to just tell you right off the bat, that doesn't come naturally to me, and I'm guessing it doesn't come naturally to you.

But this is what he says. He says, Hope is rooted in the person of Christ. And it's interesting to me that the first step to get there is to recognize there's power in our weakness. You know, for some of us, we've tried really, really hard to be good Christians, right? You know, read the Bible, pray, go to church, give, go on a missions trip. For others, you know, we've been taught that there's some miraculous emotional experience and we can have that and everything's going to be perfect. But the reality is we live with this world of tension and struggle and it's a journey. And the apostle Paul says that what he learned is that in his weakness, when he got to the point where it's not just hard, not just difficult, but when he got to where it was impossible, that's in his desperate dependency.

He said, God, I can't do it. Are you ready for this? That's when God meets you.

That's when you'll experience his power. Do I understand it? Of course not.

Is it true? Absolutely. So what I want you to know is that stop fighting the difficulty and the challenges. What if you just said, okay, God, I'm putting up the white flag. I surrender. I recognize I can't make this marriage work. I can't make my relationship with you work.

I can't be this perfect person. But I will be your son. I will be your daughter. And now I'm asking you today, fill me afresh with your spirit. Help me to depend on you and to walk in step with your spirit. As you open his word, he'll speak to you. As you talk honestly from your heart, he'll whisper to your soul. As you get connected with other believers, he'll encourage you through them, and you will encourage them as well.

Great word, Chip. Well, before we close, I want to thank each of you who's making this program possible through your generous giving. One hundred percent of your gifts go directly to the ministry to help Christians live like Christians. Now, if you found this teaching helpful, but you're not yet on the team, would you consider doing that today? To send a gift, go to livingontheedge.org or text donate to seven forty one forty one.

It's that easy. Text the word donate to seven forty one forty one or visit livingontheedge.org. App listeners tap donate and let me thank you in advance for whatever the Lord leads you to do. Well, for everyone here, this is Dave Drewy saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.