A Living Hope for All of Life

Easter Sunday

Allen Snapp

Grace Community Church

April 5, 2026

 

A Living Hope for All of Life

Let’s turn together to an amazing passage found in 1 Peter 1. Let’s read vv. 3-5.

³ Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, ⁴ to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, ⁵ who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 1 Peter 1:3-5 (ESV)

Let’s pray.

By the Father’s great mercy…aren’t you grateful for our heavenly Father’s great mercy? … He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We didn’t cause ourselves to be born the first time and we don’t cause ourselves to be born again. It is God the Father who has caused us to be born again to a living hope. I love that phrase living hope. It speaks of a hope that permeates every aspect of our lives. It infuses hope into our best days and our worst days and everything in between.

That living hope comes through Jesus’ resurrection. Because he lives, hope lives! Peter tells us that the hope Jesus gives us is a hope that reaches every dimension of our lives: past, present, and future.

1. We have a living hope that redeems our past

We might think that our past is beyond the reach of hope. We can change our present and our future, but we can’t change our past. What’s past is past. And yet our past never totally past, is it? We are who we are today in large part because of our past (both good and bad).

We all have things in our past that we are grateful for. Things we wouldn’t change for a million bucks. But I’m also sure we all have things in our past that we wish had been different. Our past can have a powerful effect on our present and our future.

Regret is one hope-killer. If I had to define regret, I’d say it’s the strong desire to change the past coupled with the realization that there’s no way we can. Failures another hope-killer. Past failures can paralyze us from stepping out and taking risks. Anger over wrongs others have done and guilt over wrongs we’ve done can consume us.

So because our past plays a large role in forming our present and our future, a living hope needs to be able to transform our past. But how is that possible? Our past can’t be changed. It can’t be rewritten. But by God’s grace, our past can be redeemed. We see that powerfully in Peter’s life. Look at verse 3.

According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…vs 3

Those three words are vital: from the dead. They speak in the past tense of the historical event of Jesus’ crucifixion and they aren’t just a historical fact to Peter: he was there. He saw Jesus get arrested. He heard the words come out of his mouth: I don’t know the man! He remembers weeping bitterly over his betrayal of Jesus. When he saw them lay Jesus in the tomb and roll that stone over the mouth of the cave, Peter knew what it was to watch hope die.

When the women came from the tomb saying Jesus had risen from the grave, John and Peter ran as fast as they could to see for themselves. But John ran a little freer because he didn’t have failure and guilt weighing him down. If Jesus had risen from the grave it would be the most amazing thing possible, but Peter couldn’t help remember that after bragging that he would die for Jesus, he had denied Jesus three times.

Those were words he would forever regret. Words he knew would forever change his relationship with Jesus. He and Jesus could never be the same as they were. Those words could never be unsaid. But they could be redeemed! Jesus turned Peter’s three denials of him into three affirmations of love (“Peter, do you love me more than these?”). Jesus redeemed Peter’s regret by turning it into resolve to faithfully shepherd the flock Jesus died for.

The resurrection could only happen because the cross happened. On the cross Jesus died for our sins, our brokenness, our failures and our regrets. Jesus died for our past so that he could radically transform our present and our future! When we bring our sin and regrets to the foot of the cross, God doesn’t undo them, but He does forgive them. God removes them from us as far as the east is from the west. And he redeems them. We learn through our weakness to rely on God’s strength. We trust that God can heal our brokenness. Our story – past, present, and future – when we put it in God’s hands, is redeemed.

Through the resurrection of Christ we can live with the hope our past has been redeemed.

2. We have a living hope that keeps our future

According to His great mercy, He has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you…vv. 3-4

God’s keeping an imperishable inheritance in heaven for you and me! And the only way an imperishable inheritance can have any value to us is if we shed these perishable bodies and put on imperishable bodies. That’s our greatest living hope – that like Jesus, these tired old bodies will be resurrected from the grave immortal and imperishable.

⁵¹ Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, ⁵² in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. ⁵³ For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. ⁵⁴ When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.” 1 Cor. 15:51-54

We have the living hope that one day death will be swallowed up by the victory of resurrection over death! We have the living hope that death and the grave won’t be the end of our story. We have a future. Hope affects our past and our present but it’s mostly about the future. God says in Jeremiah that He gives us a hope and a future. Hope needs a future and a future needs hope.

The future hope that we will be raised from the dead fills today with hope! Present life is better when it’s lived with the future hope Christ’s resurrection gives us! Knowing that this life isn’t the end of our story makes the blessings we enjoy in this life so much better! And it gives us strength to endure the hardships of life to know there is much better waiting for us when our time on this earth is done.

Death is a hard thing. Saying goodbye to everything we’ve ever known all our life – to our loved ones, to the things we take for granted like sunshine and green grass and birds singing and trees swaying. To realize we’ll never again experience a summer day and hear a thunderstorm walk through the leaves in fall or swim in ocean waves. It’s hard to say goodbye to our body, the earthly residence we’ve lived in all day every day all our life. I often wonder how people who don’t believe in Jesus face death.

Death is our enemy but for the believer God has also in a strange way made it our friend because death is the gateway to eternal life. The Bible says precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints. When we breathe our last and leave this tent, our heavenly Father is right there with us, and He will lead us home.

That’s what our inheritance is. Home. Inheritance speaks of family. Children receive an inheritance from their parents. Through faith in Christ we have been born again as children of God, and everything that belongs to Christ belongs to us. That’s not talking about things primarily. Sometimes families get split apart over inheritances. They want the stuff. The inheritance God has waiting for us is better than property and houses and bank accounts. Our inheritance won’t be a house. It will be a home. Jesus said he was going to prepare a home for us.

Deep in our hearts we long for a home. After I resigned as pastor of a church on Long Island our family went through several years of transition. God was in it, but we moved six times in three years. It was a time where we felt the disorientation of being uprooted again and again, not having a place to call home.

I remember taking walks with Janice during all this transition and we’d walk by homes and we’d dream of being settled and having our own home. It wasn’t a house we wanted, it was a sense of home. When we were moving up here Janice wanted to get a bumper sticker that said, “last move”.

Our inheritance will be Jesus welcoming us into our eternal dwellings. Our eternal home. And we will finally be home. The home our heart has longed for all our lives here. The feeling of home we sometimes catch a brief glimpse of in the best of moments, and then it’s gone. Jesus says in John 14 he goes to prepare a place in his Father’s house for us. A home. In Jesus’ kingdom we won’t be strangers, we won’t be guests, we will be home. Our living hope is an inheritance that is waiting for us. No better than waiting, it’s being kept for you. Peter wants us to feel this personally. God has your inheritance secured for you and no one and nothing can take it away.

3. We have a living hope that guards us in the present

…who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. Vs 5

Our inheritance is being kept by God and we are being guarded by God. Do you get the feeling God wants to make sure nothing keeps us from receiving our eternal inheritance?

The readers of Peter’s letter were suffering greatly. I’m sure they struggled with discouragement and doubt – is there really an inheritance? Am I really gonna make it? Peter assures them and us, yes, God has it and God has you.

John Piper in his book God is the Gospel shares the story of a Nazi concentration camp where the prisoners were horribly mistreated. One day, somehow, one of the prisoners is able to smuggle a short wave radio into the camp.

Weeks later, the Nazi guards see an unexpected sight. Nothing’s changed, but somehow everything’s changed. The prisoners are smiling, laughing, some even whoop and throw their tin plates in the air. Their situation is the same, but they have news. Allied forces have broken the line and just a few miles away. That news, without changing anything, changes everything! Hope can do that!

Life gets messy. The journey isn’t an easy one. We fail, fall, and sin. Husbands and wives argue. Moms feel frazzled by demanding kids. We lose jobs, get sick, feel discouraged, lose loved ones. In all of this our hope can get pretty dented and banged up.

But in these verses Peter smuggles a shortwave radio into this fallen world, and it lights up our lives with hope. We have been born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ! And part of that hope is that God is with us, keeping us, guarding us as we travel from here to there.

Living hope that redeems our past, assures our eternal future, and guards us in the here and now. All through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. What a day! What a hope! What a Savior! He is risen!

If you don’t know Jesus as your Savior, today is an outstanding day to ask him into your life to be your God and your Savior. The moment you do, you will be born again to a living hope.

Let’s go to God in prayer.