Knowing Your Hope and Knowing Your Value to God

Steve Scoggins / Ephesians 1:18 / Feb 19, 2012

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Introduction:

The prayers of the New Testament give us an idea of what God wants to happen in our lives.

I.          God wants Christians to know their future will be better: “The hope to which he has called you.…”

I read an anonymous quote 40 years ago that I have never forgotten. It shows the importance of having hope:

“Man can live about forty days without food,

about three days without water,

about eight minutes without air,

but only for one second without hope.”

William Styron, author of Sophie’s Choice and other books, struggled with depression most of his life. He tied his depression to feelings of hopelessness: “In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come — not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”

On the other hand, if people believe their future can be better, their lives will be changed.

Parade Magazine told the story of self-made millionaire Eugene Land, who had been asked to speak to a class of 59 sixth-graders in East Harlem. What could he say to inspire these students, most of whom would drop out of school? He wondered how he could get these predominantly black and Puerto Rican children even to look at him. Scrapping his notes, he decided to speak to them from his heart. “Stay in school,” he admonished, “and I’ll help pay the college tuition for every one of you.” At that moment the lives of these students changed. For the first time they had hope. Said one student, “I had something to look forward to, something waiting for me. It was a golden feeling.” Nearly 90 percent of that class went on to graduate from high school.

We Christians are always able to look into our futures and know they will be better. That is the Biblical meaning of “hope.” We are called to have hope!

What Bible truths help us understand that our future will be better?

1.         John 3:16 lets me know that death is not the end of my life.

Every lost person will eventually give up hope if he or she lives long enough. Our bodies inevitably break down and we eventually die. If life is viewed only as time on earth, it must one day dawn on a person that life will only get worse. But Christians have a totally different perspective. We believe what Paul said, “To live is Christ and to die is gain!” To depart and be with Christ is far better!

I remember visiting with one of my church members in North Carolina right after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. A smile on her face, she shared with me that she knew she would soon be in Heaven. The next day I visited her, she said, “Pastor, do you know what they are doing for me today? They are sending a psychiatrist to see me. They think I am too happy for someone who has heard my diagnosis and fear I am in denial. They just don’t understand us Christians, do they?”

2.         2 Cor. 4:16-18 tells us that, in Heaven, God will more than make up for our sorrows.

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day.  For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.  So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

The Bible tells us that God has put into every heart a sense of justice, of right and wrong. Because of this, I believe we all know there has to be something beyond these few years we are on earth. Too many good people suffer too much and too many bad people get off too easy.

The Bible also tells us that God is not on a 70-year deadline to right the wrongs in our lives. He will more than make up for those wrongs in Heaven. Light affliction here will bring a weight of glory there. If you were to go up to anyone now in Heaven who had a hard time on earth and were to ask, “Was what you went through on earth worth it?”, that person would point to the glory he or she is experiencing and say, “Worth it? Why, it can’t compare to what God has done for me now!”

3.         Phil. 1:6 tells us that God is not going to stop until He has finished what He started in our lives. I am going to get better!

“…Being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.

I often get frustrated more with my own failures than with the trials of this world. I know I still haven’t become what God saved me to be! But we all need to know that God is not finished with us yet. He will keep working on us from the inside out until He makes us like Jesus on the day Jesus returns.

I use this promise as a basis when I pray for my children. I can see evidence in all of them that God has begun a good work. Thus, I know He will finish it.

Matthew Henry was probably the greatest commentary writer of all time. His parents violated the customs of England in the 1600’s. His father Phillip was from a lower class than his mother. Her father objected to her marrying Phillip. He said, “This Phillip Henry, where does he come from?” She replied to her father, “I do not know where he comes from but I know where he is going.”

4.         Romans 8:28 tells us that God is going to make good come to me out of all my circumstances.

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.”

This passage does not say God causes all things. The Greek word sunergo means that God works with all things. (Sunergo is the source of our English word “synergy.”) God is not the author of evil. But God can even make good things come from evil. Joseph was able to look his brothers in the eyes years after they sold him into slavery in Egypt and say, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”

I have seen God bring good out of my most difficult experiences.

My roughest time in the ministry was the five years I spent in a church in Georgia. Though I constantly had to deal with difficult people in leadership positions, I also made mistakes of my own because I was serving a large church as pastor for the first time. But I can point to those five years as the time God did the most to shape me as a pastor and equip me to lead others in the future. I never prayed more than when I was in the fire those five years!

One of the effects of serving that church is that I came to see the great danger of legalism in a church or in a Christian’s life. That church was full of legalistic Christians! These are sincere Christians who focus on rules and regulations more than a relationship with Christ. Legalistic Christians keep a growing list of things beyond those commands found in the Bible. Legalism puts God’s people into prisons God never intended for them to occupy. I love bringing people like Steve Brown to preach to us and remind us of the freedom of living in grace.

I was almost a year into serving my church in North Carolina before I relaxed in grace. It dawned on me one day that I was no longer in a legalistic church, and that I did not have to constantly “walk on eggshells” so as not to transgress some Christian’s extra rules. In that feeling of relief, I wrote this song:

Too many years have been spent in serving tradition.

Too many songs have been sung without meaning the words

Pleasing the Lord has become our only ambition.

We stand in grace with a smile on our face, we’re free in the Lord!

You know there’s a hunger out there for real revival

But if the church stays the same as before we won’t get the job done.

Awakening to grace is the key to the soul’s survival

So throw away your chains and rejoice, you’re free in the Son!

(chorus)

We’re coming alive in the Spirit. We found the freedom of the Lord.

Knowing we stand in grace has been our best reward.

We can’t wait to sing His praises, our hearts hunger for His holy word.

We know in our hearts just where to start, we’re free in the Lord.

II.        God wants Christians to know how much He values them.

“…the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people.”

Did you get that? We are God’s glorious inheritance. We are God’s treasure.

I struggle with how to present this truth. I believe that in many ways we have gone too far in our culture to instill “self-esteem” in others. Mike King recently read an interesting article in his Christian counseling periodical entitled “Self Esteem Gone Awry.” It made the point that when no one keeps score in children’s games so that no feelings will be hurt and every child gets a trophy, we are not really preparing our kids for life.

I have reacted in the past against some who have changed the words of hymns out of concern about protecting our self-esteem. In my view, these changes neglect the strong Bible teaching about our sinfulness before God. One of the former editors of our Baptist hymnal shared with our class in seminary that Isaac Watts’ wording had been changed to protect self-esteem. Watts originally wrote, “Alas and did my savior bleed and did my Sovereign die? Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?”  This phrase was changed to “sinners such as I,” the editor said, in order to prevent “wormology”!

I don’t believe any words exist that are dire enough to describe our sinful condition. You cannot be saved until you are broken before God about your sinful condition! Some people’s self-esteem is too high to permit them to be saved.

Yet many people have been destroyed by abusive parents or the taunting of their peers at school. Satan has used these destructive words to convince people they are of no value to God. That is not true! Christian, you are a treasure to God. God’s inheritance is His people.

Let me see if I can expose you to the feelings of God’s heart toward you:

“The LORD your God is with you,
the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you with singing” (Zeph. 3:17).

Can you picture God delighting in singing over you? I used to hold my children and sing them to sleep when they were babies.

“Then those who feared the LORD talked with each other, and the LORD listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in his presence concerning those who feared the LORD and honored his name.   ‘On the day when I act,’ says the LORD Almighty, ‘they will be my treasured possession’” (Malachi 3:16-17).

We feel the heart of God strongly in the three stories Jesus told in Luke 15. He likened God to a shepherd who lost a sheep. The shepherd went looking for that sheep, found it, put it on his shoulders, and brought it back home. Then he cried out to his neighbors, “Rejoice with me, I have found my lost sheep!”

Jesus said God is like the poor woman who lost one of ten gold coins that were her financial security. She swept her house and found it, then cried out to her neighbors, “Rejoice with me!” Finding the lost coin brought her joy.

The father of the wandering boy ran to greet his son coming home from the far country. He told his workers to go and kill the fatted calf. It was time for a party because his lost son had come home.

I believe you and I were the “joy set before Him” when Jesus went to the cross.

In Isaiah 53, that great chapter about the cross of Christ, Isaiah uses a wonderful analogy:

“He shall see the labor of His soul, and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant shall justify many, For He shall bear their iniquities” (Is. 53:11 NKJV, emphasis added).

The word translated “labor” here and “travail” in the KJV is the word for the labor of a woman delivering her child. I had the privilege of being there when my wife delivered our children. Because Karen delivered four of our children naturally, without any pain killer, labor was really “labor” for her! Yet I watched her countenance completely change minutes after delivery when her new baby was placed in her arms. At that moment, her labor was worth it. The joy of her child was the only treasure she could think of.

Thousands upon thousands of people have been blessed by the practical Bible teaching of Charles Stanley. Most people would never guess that Dr. Stanley had to overcome a deep sense of inferiority ingrained in him in childhood.

When Stanley was nine, his mother married an abusive man. This step-father had an explosive temper and was often physically violent toward them. Stanley said he once caught the man choking his mother and said if he could have gotten hold of a knife, he would have killed him. During his teenage years, Stanley slept in a room with a locked door and a loaded 22 rifle by his bed in fear of his step-father. This father constantly berated him and told him he would never amount to anything.

Other factors reinforced this inferiority complex. Stanley started school a year earlier than everyone else, so he was always smaller and skinnier than his classmates. He was picked on a lot. His mother made him wear shorts to school every day until he was in junior high; then she dressed him in knickers with high socks. He often had the worst grades in class and his teacher made a point of making him an example before the class.

Let me share the words of Stanley based on this background:

“The sense of failure and embarrassment at not being good enough was devastating to me.

The misery of inferiority is never what God intends for His children.

Feelings of inferiority are a hindrance to becoming the people God designed us to be and fulfilling His purpose for our lives. When it comes to our value, we either accept the truth of His appraisal or decide not to believe Him and instead rely on our own feelings. What will your choice be?”

Conclusion:

God wants you to really grasp two truths today.

1)    Because God is in control and because of His great promises, your future is strong and good.

2)    Because God sent His Son for you and made you one of His own, you are more loved and treasured by God than you can ever imagine.