We probably have a lot of relationships that are shallow or even artificial. It is important for us to get to know people better. It is more important to get to know our spouse better. But even more important… is getting to know God better. That is the prayer today. That we might know God better. The more we learn about God and what He has done for us, the more we know the hope God gives us in Jesus. A hope that is based on his power to raise the dead to life! Grasp the awesome scale of God’s love. God brings from death to life by grace. God has done resurrection before. We know He can do it again. There is no greater hope. May we “know greater hope!”
We probably have a lot of relationships that are shallow or even artificial. It is important for us to get to know people better. It is more important to get to know our spouse better. But even more important… is getting to know God better. That is the prayer today. That we might know God better. The more we learn about God and what He has done for us, the more we know the hope God gives us in Jesus. A hope that is based on his power to raise the dead to life! Grasp the awesome scale of God’s love. God brings from death to life by grace. God has done resurrection before. We know He can do it again. There is no greater hope. May we “know greater hope!”
I have a major life question for the teens we have with us this morning: Are memes still in? At the risk of being uncool, I have a meme for us all today. Ready? (Show “knowledge is power”) The philosopher Francis Bacon seems to be the first to have written it and there’s a lot of truth in his thought. Can you think of a time in your life when you knew something that someone else didn’t? It gives you an advantage, right? The NFL draft just happened, and there’s a reason why teams spend millions of dollars for scouts to observe college players. They want to know something that other teams don’t. There’s a reason why you can never stop dating your spouse even after you’re married. The second you start to assume you know everything about your spouse, you’re entering a dangerous game! So what’s the common thread between being an NFL scout and being married? You can’t stop at the surface. You have to go deeper. The second you start to be content with the superficial, you really do lose all the power. The same is true when it comes to our knowledge of God. If I were to ask you, “How well do you know God” how would you answer? I’m not talking about Bible trivia, but a personal knowing of God. So, “How well do you know him?” If we begin to think that faith is nothing but knowing the right Bible facts, or that we’ve reached a point where we know enough about God, we miss out on experiencing the power we as people crave more than any: hope.
Especially in our world today, hope seems to be hiding. It’s a struggle that our teens know personally and in the lives of their friends. Recently, a study came out from the CDC that reported that almost 60% of American teenage girls reported “persistent sadness and hopelessness,” and about 30% of boys reported the same. There is an almost 50% chance that when you talk with your teenage child or grandchild they are wrestling with hopelessness. But as many of you know such feelings of hopelessness are there in every chapter of life. We need to know hope. We cannot live without hope. We try to find escapes when we feel hopeless. So how can we know a kind of hope that is greater than our struggle, more powerful than our weaknesses, more certain than the confusion all around us?
You know where we’re going to find this hope? We’re going to find it in a letter written from the place I would least expect to uncover hope: prison. That’s where the apostle Paul wrote Ephesians, chained to a Roman guard, no privacy, no escape, a situation most would call “hopeless.” We haven’t even gotten to the reason why he’s chained! He’s imprisoned because he was spreading the hope of Jesus! Paul was a hope expert, remember what he wrote? “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.” He calls this hope “riches” and “incomparably great power,” but I don’t about you but the skeptic in me called “the sinful nature” can’t help but argue: What kind of hope leads to prison? What kind of hope leads to chains?
If we look superficially at the hope of God, that’s all we can know. His hope doesn’t seem to give us the answers we think we need. There have been times in my life when doubt has so affected me that everything in life had a darker shade to it. In a way, it was my own prison. God in his grace surrounded me with Christian family and friends, many of whom would say things like, “Look at this passage. Read this chapter. Let Jesus speak to you in his Word.” Beautiful advice, but there was a part of me that wanted to stay in the dark until I had given myself hope. The temptation was there: Knowing God more isn’t going to give you hope. You know enough about him. The rest is up to you.
Does that temptation sound in any way familiar? The feeling that God and the Bible can only take you so far, but then it’s on you to feel hopeful, to make certainty happen in your life, to live. Satan wants you and me to keep things superficial with Jesus. He wants us to look at the future and not see hope, but disappointment, anxiety, and grief. In fact, Lutheran philosopher Soren Kierkegaard summed up how Satan wants us to see hope as an impossible illusion when he wrote, “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” The forces of evil want you to think that hope is a power you’ll never experience or personally know.
But Hope himself wants nothing more than for you to know by personal experience what hope is. Remember how Paul defined hope? He calls hope “riches of Jesus’ glorious inheritance in the saints” and “incomparably great power.” The big question is: “How can we experience this hope as we live and breathe each day?” Look at Paul’s prayer that comes right before he defines God, and he tells us exactly how we know this greater hope, “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you.” This knowledge Paul is talking about isn’t knowing fun facts about Jesus’ life. He is saying the more you know Jesus, the more time you spend with him, the more you personally know him, you will know what real hope is.
Now maybe you’re thinking right now, “Wait, Pastor Jonny, you said that I can’t create this hope on my own but now you’re telling me that I need to be the one to reach out to Jesus?” “Why doesn’t Jesus reach out to me?” The truth is…He has reached out to you and he will never stop calling out to you. In the darkness of depression, pain, regret, guilt, and shame, you have been found. Remember what we heard last week? You were chosen before the world was a thing. God chose you. He was thinking about you before he ever said “Let there be.” He reached out his hands through the waters of baptism and personally washed every last sin away and called you “my child,” giving you an inheritance, a future in your heavenly home that is certain, never to be taken away from you. He reaches out to you every time you eat and drink his very body, filling you with a connection to him that leads to a longing for the celebration in God’s banquet hall to come. If all that wasn’t enough, he gave you his own voice. These words for you that the Holy Spirit made sure would be written down so when your marriage feels hopeless, or getting into the college you want seems impossible, or your career is stressful or unsatisfying or doubt tries to take away every last bit of certainty from your life, that you could hear your Father’s voice and know more and more that he is greater, he will never let you down, and his love for you is the surest aspect of your life.
It’s because God chose to know you more deeply and chose to know you as his dear child that you and I can know him more and more, and the more we know him, the more the eyes of our hearts are opened, and the more the Holy Spirit shows us God flexing his muscles. And out of all the ways God has flexed his almighty power, the one that he considers to be the most powerful, you know what it is? “That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand…and God placed everything under his feet.” Your hope, what you base your certainty in life on, is based on Jesus who is in control of everything! How could we not want to know Jesus more?! How could we not want to spend time with him?!
And if all that wasn’t amazing enough, God has something else he wants you to hear today. Not only does Jesus stand over and above every adversity, struggle, pain, and temptation in this life, but someone else does too. Look at what Paul says, “And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” Do you see who else through Jesus stands above it all? You. Me. We are his body. He is the head. The more we know Jesus, the more the Holy Spirit shows us who we really are through faith. The more we know Jesus, the more we see that there is no pain so deep that God’s resurrecting power can’t overcome it.
The hope we have in Jesus is the most intense form of power on the planet. Do you know what this means for you? It means your struggle with hopelessness is not hopeless. In fact what I’m about to say is often used as a criticism of Christianity but’s really where its power is found. An atheist friend of mine once said to me, “All Christians talk about is heaven, but they have no answers for the here and now.” Such a thought says that thinking about heaven doesn’t help us in the present, but that couldn’t be more wrong. When Paul calls hope “an inheritance of riches” he wants you to hit pause and just think about how amazing heaven will be. Think about it. Every single one of us in this room has worried about the future. We have all had moments when the pressure builds up, when expectations fall flat, when the future is disappointing, all this worry about the future, when our future is the one absolute guarantee for us as Christians. Your future=You and Jesus. Period. The more we dig into the Bible and realize what that means, the more our present becomes clear, and our past doesn’t dictate who we are.
Here’s the challenge Paul is putting in front of us: Think about heaven more! Seriously, jump into a Connect Group this week, or just block out 30 minutes of personal time, read Ephesians 1:15-23 and just think about what heaven is going to be like. Think about the fact that you live in the resurrection power of Jesus. Think about that through faith in him, you stand above every spiritual enemy that wants to bring you down. Think about how deeply God knows you and how his love for you knows no end.
Spend time getting to know Jesus more, and you’ll find something will keep happening. You’ll start experiencing what a hope-filled life is all about. It’s more than emotion. It’s power. It’s greater than circumstance. The power that raised Jesus from the dead will open the eyes of your heart more. The Holy Spirit has promised the more you know God, the more hope you will know. Let’s take him up on that promise! After all, he’s never broken one of the 300-plus ones he’s made! In this hopeless world of ours with more knowledge than ever, let’s run to our Savior’s waiting arms. Wrestle with God in his Word, and the more you do, you’ll find his words to be true. The more you know Jesus, the more hope you will find. Amen.