Welcome to the Potter's House Salmon Arm podcast. We are a Bible-Believing Church located in
beautiful British Columbia, Canada. We are proudly part of the Christian Fellowship Ministries
with 3,000 churches around the world. We are a church focused on world evangelism, discipleship
and church planting. Here we will share recent sermons from P.H.S.A. Church and other sermons
from throughout our fellowship. I am Pastor David Bickford and I will be your host for this
podcast. I thank you for listening today and we hope these messages are a blessing to you and
bring you closer to God. Welcome back to the Salmon Arm Potter's House podcast. My name again
is David Bickford. I am the pastor of the Potter's House here in Salmon Arm. Today I have a message
entitled, What Hope Do We Have? Our Hope is in and Through Christ. The text we will be using today
is going to be 1 Peter 1, verses 3-9. That will be our jumping off point. If you have your Bibles
or you are following along, you can turn there. Before we jump into that, though, I wanted to
go through an illustration I found from a guy named Halford E. Lecoq. It is titled, Unfinished
Business. One night at dinner, a man who had spent many summers in Maine fascinated his
companions by telling them of an experience in a little town named Flagstaff. The town was to be
flooded as part of a large lake for which a dam was being built. In the months before, it was to
be flooded. All the improvements and repairs in the whole town stopped. What was the use of painting
a house if it was going to be covered in water in the next six months? Why repair anything? The
whole village was going to be wiped out anyway. So week by week, the whole town became more and more
bedraggled, more gone to seed, more wobble gone. Then he added by way of explanation, where there
is no faith in the future, there is no power in the present. So let's just quickly pray. Dear Lord
God, I pray that you'd use this message to reach the lost, Lord God, to work into people's hearts,
Lord God, to bring them closer to Christ. And we give all the glory and praise and honor to you in
Jesus' name. Amen. So George Bernard Shaw is perhaps one of the most renowned freethinkers,
liberal philosophers, and atheists. And this is another excerpt from one of his plays.
In the play, it says, the science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. It counsels,
which should have established the millennium, led instead directly to the suicide of Europe.
I believed them once in their name. I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers
in temples and 1,000 creeds. And now they look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist
who has lost his faith. I find it interesting that he would write this, even in a play,
considering that he was an avid atheist. Some have even used this to presume his turning away from
atheistic beliefs. And we can only hope that he found Christ in his last days. But I don't believe
that's what this actual piece of his play is saying. But when we start to think about this,
we have to understand that there's some truth in the core of this heartbreak that's in this play.
The fact that life is built upon the very essence of hope.
Life depends on hope. It doesn't matter where you are from or how you were raised
or what you believe. Everyone needs hope in order to survive. If you wake up without any hope,
then you will likely wither away in despair. This is true for both the believer and the unbeliever.
A man or a woman that has nothing to hope for will also have nothing to live for.
And we can see this clearly in our own society. There are many instances that we could see today
that give people an out when they have lost hope. The debate for assisted suicide is just another
example of society losing hope. In times past, it was the growing drug epidemic. These attempts to
escape from a life without hope hastens our society's decline. And I believe that the further
we remove ourselves from the living God, the more hopeless our society is becoming. We are not meant
to rely on our own understanding of hope. We are not meant to be filled with hope from distractions
of this world. That is why all of the entertainment world does not satiate our soul's desire for hope.
So let's look at our text this morning. And again, 1 Peter 1 verses 3 through 9.
The subheading of this text is praise to God for living hope. Praise be to God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. In his great mercy, he has given us new birth into a living hope through the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into the inheritance that can never perish,
spoiler faith. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you who through faith are shielded by God's
power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time.
In all this, you greatly rejoice. And though now for a little while, you may have had to suffer
grief and all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of our of your faith
of greater worth than gold, which perishes even through the though refined by fire
may result in praise, glory, honor. When Jesus Christ is revealed, though you have not seen him,
you love him. And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled
with an inexpressible and glorious joy for you receiving the end result of your faith,
the salvation of your souls. Amen. So then let's let's look at, you know, firstly,
at what is hope. Right. We'll look into that. And then we're going to look at sustaining hope as
the second point in our third. My third point this morning will be our hope being in Christ.
But let's look first at defining hope. You know, what is hope? What does that mean to us? Well,
to define it, the definition, the dictionary definition is that it's a noun, the feeling
that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. When used as a verb,
it can be it can be defined as to look forward to with the desire and reasonable confidence
to believe, desire, trust, or to feel something desired may happen. We hope for an early spring
to place trust, rely. Some other words that are similar to hope are anticipation, belief,
confidence, expectation, faith, goal, optimism, promise. What is the opposite of hope? Hope,
the opposite of the word hope is abandon or disbelief, distrust, doubt, forsake, despair,
or fear. So I have another story here that I'd like to talk about. So there was a, I read this
article and it's a very moving story about a Nigerian cook who survived a shipwreck, but it
wasn't any just regular shipwreck. This was a very interesting story. So Kenny, I believe that's how
I pronounce his name, was the only survivor in a crew of 12 when the boat capsized in May. It's
still haunting. In addition with being saddled with survivors' guilt, some Nigerians believe he
saved himself through black magic. The Jaskon 4 was resting on the seabed upside down at a depth
of a hundred feet or 30 meters. The chubby cook survived on only one bottle of Coke. Two flashlights
that he had found gave up after less than one day. In the dark, he had almost given up hope after
three days when he suddenly heard the sound of a boat, a hammering on the side of the vessel. And
then after a while saw lights rising around the waters near him and then bubbling. He said he knew
it had to be a diver, but he was on the wrong end of the cabin. He came in, but he was so fast, I
saw the light, but before I could get to him, he was already out. I tried to follow him in the pitch
darkness, but I couldn't trace him, so I went back. His rescuers from the Dutch company DCN Diving
were looking only for bodies and had already recovered four corpses when they came upon Okeni.
When the diver returned Okeni had to swim again to reach him and still he did not see him.
So Okeni tapped him on the back of his neck and of course the diver was afraid. When the diver saw
his hand he said, corpse, corpse, corpse, into the microphone reporting up to the rescue vessel.
When he brought his hand close to me, I pulled on his hand, Okeni said. He's alive, he's alive,
he's alive. Okeni remembers hearing. Okeni described a surreal scene after the diver emerged
into the air pocket. I knew when he gave me water he was observing me to see if I'm really human
because he was afraid, he told the AP last Thursday. Okeni said he made a pact with God when he was at
the bottom of the ocean. When I was under the water I told God if he rescued me I will never go back
to the sea again. He had hope. Okeni was so happy. He was so happy. He was so happy.
So Okeni in his darkness was looking for something to cling onto. He turned to God in the darkness,
his belly of the whale kind of situation at the bottom of this ocean floor and just a small pocket
of air clinging to hope, clinging to hope that God would bring him through this ordeal. And eventually
thankfully his faith was rewarded and he was saved out of that darkness.
But he had to work at sustaining his hope. He had to work at building, at not allowing himself to
fall into despair so that when the divers did come he was able to act quickly, promptly and help
expedite his own rescue in that situation. For he could have withered away in those three days
and then when the divers come he could have missed his opportunity.
But no, he was able to maintain his hope in the darkness and ready to act at a moment's
notice when he saw the light. So that brings me to my next point which is sustaining hope.
How do we sustain hope in our life? The unbeliever will fill his days with entertainment,
pleasure, friends, family or maybe career goals. These are all things, career goals are things that
we battle with. I've battled with that in my life wanting to get to the next level of an organization
or the next level of corporate life. And for those of you who might not know I've done
I've worked for some pretty big companies. I've worked for large oil companies. I've worked for
large distributorships and industrial distributorships. I've worked for a lot of
pretty neat organizations. I've worked for the United States Navy in a very critical capacity
for being a sub-safe hydraulics mechanic, aircraft mechanic. And those career goals,
they grab you because they give you the immediate hope of money, power, authority.
But these things are not wrong in themselves. In fact, these examples can help us to better
understand the foundations of hope. In Hebrews 11 verse 1 it says,
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
So here are the foundations for hope. You have to have belief, faith, confidence, expectation.
The beginnings of hope are rooted in your belief that today will pass and that tomorrow will bring
new opportunities. The sun might be setting today but it will rise in the morning. When you look at
Genesis the first day starts at night then the sun rise and when it sets that is the beginning of
the second day. That is why the Jewish Sabbath starts on a Friday evening and lasts until a
Saturday evening. The day of rest is the Sabbath. I find it intriguing that the beginning is the
darkness with the belief that the day will grow in the light. In our culture we typically start our
day in the light and end it in darkness but really it's the other way around. The day starts in
darkness and ends in light. The new day doesn't dawn but rather it sets. In Genesis 1 1 through 5
it says, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, now the earth was formless and
empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep. The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters and
God said, Let there be light. And there was light. God saw the light was good and separated the light
from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness night. And there was evening and there
was morning on the first day. That means every day has to start with the belief that the sun will
rise. Belief is the very beginning of hope. If we use simple examples in our lives most of us wake
up and believe that we will get dressed and have something to eat for breakfast. That belief is
solid because we have faith that the food in the fridge is not spoiled and the cereal in the pantry
is not too stale. So now in that simple example our belief has moved over to faith. We have faith
that nothing has changed from the time we went to bed until now when we are up and hungry for the
new day. The root of belief and faith is often our experiences. Every day the sun rises, every day
we have breakfast. These experiences give us confidence in our belief. Then faith is supported
by our experiences and builds a foundation of confidence. Once we have gotten to the stage we
begin to have expectations of certain outcomes. We expect that the sun will rise and set. We expect
that the cereal we are looking to eat will be there and there will be enough milk for our breakfast.
So the foundations of hope are belief, faith, confidence, expectation. What happens when the
cereal is not there? What happens when the expectations are not met? Your confidence is
shaken, your faith is tested. Do you lose faith and throw out your beliefs? Our beliefs are
challenged all the time. Our experiences can change our level of faith, can shake our confidence and
dash our expectations. There's another seafaring story. There was a passenger who fell from a cruise
ship who was treading water for 20 hours to survive. So the passenger from a cruise ship in the Gulf of
Mexico late last month says he has no recollection of how he ended up in the water. We'll touch on
that in a minute too. James Michael Grimes, 28, said he spent a harrowing 15 to 20 hours treading
water before he was rescued the day before American Thanksgiving. Grimes spoke with several news
outlets last week sharing the details of his ordeal and told ABC News that he and 18 other
family members were on a cruise to Cozumel, Mexico aboard the Carnival ship Valor. They were having
some drinks on the evening of November 23 celebrating his win of an onboard air guitar contest
when he told his sister he was going to the washroom. So right now, you know, I don't know how it
fell off. Well, maybe it had to do a little bit too much of the spirits other than the Holy Spirit.
But I digress. Grimes credited his survival to his faith telling CNN he feels blessed to be here.
The Lord gave me the will to live. It's a miracle, he told the outlet. I wasn't going to give up at
any point in time just saying this is it. This is the end. It never came to that. I was determined
to swim until my arms and legs could not hold my body up anymore. It was like a 20-hour baptism.
This is a pretty crazy story. And for anybody who's spent any time at sea, I haven't spent a
ton of time at sea even though I was in the Marine Corps. I think the longest period of time I spent
out on the water was about two weeks for a training op. And I can tell you, it's not my favorite
place to be. Especially on a helicopter carrier, everything's smelling like diesel fuel and the
flight pattern that we had to fly when we were out there. And I think that's the most important
thing to remember is what they call starboard D. So you're just flying in circles and circles
and circles endlessly all day long. It wasn't something I considered to be a fun adventure
time. But the thought of being in what we call, we used to joke, it's like being in the drink.
You drop off into the drink, the ocean. We do a lot of training in the military for just that
kind of idea like in helicopters. Because if a helicopter goes, you got to be able to get out,
from the helicopter and be able to tread water just like this guy did. Luckily, we would have,
if you survived the actual impact, we would have like flotation to help us. But the thought,
that terrifying thought of being in the dark in the ocean is incomprehensible at times, even
for me. So the imagination runs wild with this. Here's a guy who maybe was a little bit tipsy,
a little bit, you know, you know, lit from drinking after his celebration, he falls into the ocean.
And somehow he was able to immediately start treading water. You know, thank God, because
he's in this position now where his life depends on his action. But one of the other key things in
situations like this is not falling into despair. You have to be able to, like he said, just keep
treading water. You don't look at, well, I'm tired, I'm exhausted. You have to keep treading water.
But eventually, you know, what we see from his story is he turns to God to just cry out. And,
and, you know, in hope that he will be saved. And he says it in his own words, it was like a 20 hour
baptism, because I guarantee you, treading water, not in the ocean, you're going in and out of the
water, your head is coming in and out of the water all the time as you're trying to tread water,
because the ocean moves. So he was constantly, yeah, like a 20 hour baptism going down to death
and back to life, down to death and back to life. But what did he find his hope in? He didn't find
his hope in his strength. He didn't find his hope in the liquor that he was drinking. He didn't find
his hope in the friends that were left on the boat. He didn't find his hope in anything other than
his God. And that brings me to my final point, which is our hope is in Christ. Our hope is in
Christ. The world today is constantly trying to steal our joy and our hope. And an era of constant
entertainment, we are bombarded with the most horrible of sins on a nearly constant basis.
There are wars and rumors of wars. In fact, everything is a war, a battle, a struggle for
justice, whether it is someone's opinions or beliefs. If it goes against the truth that you
hold, then it is an attack. Gone are the days, bygones be bygones, live and let live. Now it is
all destruction, doxing, cancel culture, you name it. On the world page, it is Russia's evil,
Ukraine is evil, no America's evil, no China's evil, or is it the UK monarchy is evil, or the
WEF is evil, world economic forum. Everything that is considered good by one group is automatically
considered evil by another group. Even if a fast food chain decides to remain closed on a Sunday
for Christian religious reasons of the ownership, well then that is evil and bigoted to people who
think they should remain open so they can get their fast food fix. In this era of constant
battle, it's understandable that we would be tired. Fatigue is a real thing when you are
constantly at war. So how do we keep going? What hope do we have? Where can we seek refuge? Where
can we find joy, peace, and rest? The world would have you believe that there is no hope. No joy,
no peace, no rest. The very idea of evolution, atheism, and many of the other world religions
is that there is no hope. That life, that this is all that life is. And that there is nothing to
look forward to beyond this very temporary existence. That once you're gone, you're gone.
A lot of people will use this freedom of nothingness to allow them to act however they want in life.
As if there's no justice for the wrongs committed in life. So again, I ask, what hope do we have?
As Christians and believers in Jesus Christ, our hope is in and through Christ Jesus.
First Peter 1 verses 3 through 9 again, praise be to God, the father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
in his great mercies. He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of
Jesus Christ from the dead and into the inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.
This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until
the coming of salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all of this,
you are greatly rejoiced, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds
of trials. These have come so that proven genuineness of your faith or the great,
of a greater worth than gold, which perishes even through refined by fire, may result in praise,
glory, honor, when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you've not seen him, you loved him.
And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible,
glorious joy. For you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your soul.
2 Corinthians 3, 4-6, and verse 12. Such confidence we have through Christ before God,
not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our confidence comes
from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the
Spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life. Therefore, since we have such confidence,
therefore, since we have such hope, we are very bold. Our hope is in Christ. Our belief is in
salvation through Christ. Our faith is in the power of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Our confidence comes from our own salvation and the miracles that we have experienced.
Our expectation is the fulfillment of the future promises spoken in the Bible. We have a glorious
future Christ. If I could have every head bowed, every eye closed real quick, unless you're driving,
of course. Jesus Christ saved us and set us free from the bondage. The bondage is he continues to
work in our hearts every day through the Holy Spirit. God the Father sacrificed his Son so that
we can have hope of life eternal. And it comes through the belief in Christ, the faith in his
promises, the confidence is to proclaim his gospel, and the expectation of the kingdom to come. If
this message resonates with you, but you don't know where you stand with Jesus Christ, that can
change in an instant. All you have to do is repent of your sin and accept him as your Lord and Savior,
and then through grace you will have salvation. And you can do that simply by repeating after me,
Dear Lord God, I know that I'm a sinner, but I know that you sent your Son Jesus Christ to die for me.
I accept him as my Lord and my Savior. I thank you for the gift of salvation through grace,
in Jesus name, amen. Thank you for joining with me this morning for this message. I hope that
that it's resonated with you, that it's helped you. If it has, let me know. I'd love to hear about it.
And I will talk to you all again next time. Thank you.
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