Study of Peter: hope rested in God
While Judas missed the hope of Jesus entirely, Peter grasped onto it. The hope he held onto allowed him to see the beauty in the midst of pain and immense persecution. This same hope Peter cherished is freely given to those who love God.
This week in our Lukewarm Church series, we’re investigating the hope that Peter held onto.
Peter knew very well his own natural tendency to hope in other things. While with Jesus in His ministry, He hoped in the fighter, warrior and deliverer version of Jesus in his heart. He hoped for things that seemed to align with God’s mission and promises.
But thank God we didn’t get what Peter hoped for, the judgment of God that would have left us no way of salvation. God knew much better. And Peter had learned to put His trust in who Jesus said He was, loving, servant-hearted and yet all powerful and wholly good.
Like Peter, we tend to make Jesus out to be the version we feel most comfortable with. And we hope in that made up version of Jesus. So when life contradicts that version, we’re gutted.
Suddenly, we don’t know if we can fully trust in who God is, because He’s failed to be who we believed Him to be. It’s not until we see what He says about Himself, regardless if it fits in our worldview that we are relinquishing our hold and control over who He is.
Although Peter was bewildered many times at what Jesus might be doing, he knew God was faithful every time. And slowly, he began to trust Jesus' words above his own understanding. When he didn’t know what God was doing, Peter clung to Him as his refuge.
As a Christian, God promises to be our refuge (Psalm 46:1).
God as our refuge
We all have a refuge of sorts. Somewhere where we run to as a baseline. A refuge is the place we feel the most unequivocally ourselves, we are our most comfortable and genuine self. When God is our refuge, we are actively putting our trust and hope in Him. But in order for Him to be our refuge we must first be comfortable with Him.
To get to the point of comfortability and vulnerability which enables us to experience God as a refuge, it takes time to build a natural pattern of running to Him and allowing Him to prove that He is who He says He is. But if we never run to Him and give Him the space to be our comfort and refuge, we’ll never experience this hope.
Ephesians 1:18 says, “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints”.
When we are able to trust that God is good and who He says He is, we get a beautiful taste of His ultimate glory and He becomes a foundational truth upon which we see the lens of the world. But if we don’t grasp onto this hope, it’s merely a concept for us. Like Judas, we’ll see it but hold tightly to what we hope in more than God and miss the promised hope found in God.
Expecting goodness from God
But what is this promised hope? He promises eternal hope meant for our present as well as future. Almost everything on this side of Heaven is slowly decaying and fading away, making it difficult to grasp the concept of an inheritance that never, ever tarnishes.
He promises to be good, always.
This statement may immediately bring up doubts in your heart like, “What is so good about God allowing this pain in my life?” The truth we don’t want to hear is that sometimes, we never know why God is doing something. We may never get to see the reason for pain or the justice dealt. But His goodness isn’t dependent on our understanding of it but on who He is.
In Acts 2, Peter is reminding the following around him that though Jesus died He was now more alive than ever. And that in His death, He was fulfilling His promise of salvation to us. He describes the hope we have access to now in verse 4, “wait for what the Father had promised.”
The word “promised” in Greek is Epangelia, which translates to “a promised good”. That same Hebrew word for hope is used again in Romans 5:4-5:
“and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
Hope isn’t something one simply has but rather something one gets to.
Hope directs our path
What we hope for is what we move towards. It informs everything else you do. As a compass, it directs your focus and direction on your life path. The hand can’t be facing nowhere, it’s focused in one direction one way or another. If we don’t put our trust in God, we’re putting our trust in something or someone else. And not in the non-trivial ways, but in the life-foundational way.
We all hope that certain things are true. A core, fundamental truth. We may fundamentally hope in ourselves and in our own goodness. Or we hope that humanity is overall generally good.
But if we hope that God is good and making His goodness our fundamental truth, it cannot help but change us. We hope that God is true and who He says He is and that hope will never disappoint us (Romans 5:5).
And like the compass analogy, we can’t be facing north and south. We can’t put our ultimate hope in God, plus money, status or morality. It can be one or the other.
God assures that we can completely depend on Him. So will you reach out and grasp onto this hope that is available to you right now?
