1 Peter 1:3-9 Easter Message

You are listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. Well, good morning,

Recast. Thanks for joining us online on this Easter Sunday where we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We're disappointed that we can't be celebrating this monumental part of Christianity with you in person, but we have been praying for you, and we're excited to be able to share together with you online through technology, such a neat capacity that we have nowadays.

For this morning, we are going to be digging into the book of 1 Peter. So if you have a

Bible, why don't you go ahead and start turning there. Because this is a book that we haven't been in recently,

I wanted to just open up by giving you a little bit of background to kind of set the stage for what's going on.

Peter writes this letter from Rome around AD 64, mid 60s, something like that.

And if you know anything about that time period, you know that the Roman emperor Nero was having

Christians throughout the empire tortured and killed for their faith.

And so Peter wrote this letter to a small, persecuted minority of Jewish Christians who had been driven out of Jerusalem during this time of persecution, and they're now scattered throughout modern day

Turkey. And because of their belief in Jesus, they have suddenly been forced out of their homes.

They've been forced to leave their families and their communities behind so that they could seek safety in areas far from Jerusalem.

If you think about that, they were probably forced to travel at least 800 miles in order to avoid this persecution.

That's pretty extreme, and there's nothing that they could do about it. It was either stay and die or flee and live.

And so their entire lives were turned upside down by a disruptive event that was totally 100 % out of their control.

And so they had to have been feeling pretty helpless and pretty hopeless as they're now exiles living in a foreign land.

So Peter writes to this group that he calls elect exiles with the purpose of strengthening them so that they can persevere through this persecution that they're facing with the right attitude.

And so with that in mind, why don't you grab your Bible, turn with me to 1 Peter chapter one.

We're gonna be looking at verses three to nine this morning. Here's the word of the

Lord. 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 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold, that perishes though it is tested by fire may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Though you have not seen him, you love him. And though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

Let's pray together. Lord, we are so thankful for your work on the cross on that Good Friday.

We are so grateful that you paid the penalty of sin, that you took the penalty that was ours upon yourself, that you made the ultimate sacrifice so that we don't have to and so that we might have eternal life.

For that we are eternally grateful. And Lord, we have hope in your resurrection and we're thankful that you have conquered death, enabling us to live forevermore.

And on this Easter Sunday, though we are far apart, I pray you will knit our hearts together in this common hope that we have, the hope of the resurrection.

We, Lord, are coming to you this morning with thanksgiving and with joy because we know that you live.

May you bless our time this morning. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Hello again, Recast. Thanks for joining us. Once again, my name is Pastor Spencer.

If you've never seen me, this is my first time preaching here at Recast and I'm just so excited to be coming to you this morning.

You know, when I was in seminary, some of my favorite classes were classes in biblical

Hebrew. I have a picture here that's supposed to pop up on your screen that's gonna show a picture of me and my

Hebrew professor. This is Dr. McGinnis. He was a great encourager, a fantastic teacher, but most of all, he was a wonderful example of what it looked like to follow

Christ in a time of hardship. During those years I was taking classes, he was diagnosed with a nerve disorder that disrupted his very normal life and drastically changed it and turned his world upside down.

And to start this morning, I want to read for you an excerpt from his testimony.

He writes this, even through the haze of anesthesia, I knew my brain surgery had failed.

In October of 2010, I was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve disorder characterized by episodes of searing pain that affects either side of my face.

In my case, TN affects the left side. Besides cluster headaches, TN is the most painful condition known to the medical profession.

I'm told that even childbirth and kidney stones cause less agony. TN is so excruciating that it has been called the suicide disease.

Only a handful of procedures manage the condition, albeit temporarily, and only one offers a cure.

My wife, Joy, and I chose the cure, a microvascular decompression, an MVD. It is a type of invasive brain surgery.

It is the only procedure that offers the chance of a permanent fix with a 95 % success rate.

My MVD was scheduled for April. A world renowned neurosurgeon led my operating team and I was treated at a premier hospital.

A company of people from coast to coast praised fervently for success. I had the best possible prognosis.

All the odds favored success. But afterward, as I lay in ICU among the numerous

IVs and beeps of various monitors, I realized I was in the 5%.

My surgeon suggested a glycerol rhizotomy as an alternative to deal with my TN. A rhizotomy is less invasive, but it provides only temporary relief.

The best it could afford, if successful, was a one to seven year respite from pain. Though not a permanent fix, it could be repeated as necessary.

Statistically, this medical procedure offered a 90 % success rate.

Two months later, I underwent a second surgical procedure. And in the recovery room, my neurosurgeon meant joy in me.

He explained that everything had gone as planned. He was very pleased and from his perspective, the chance of success was high.

But from my perspective, the left side of my face resembled the cheeks of an overstuffed chipmunk.

I felt as if a dentist had over -administered Novocaine. And even through the facial numbness of the rhizotomy, the pain came roaring back.

And with tears, we realized that we were in the 10%.

Another medical failure, hopes crushed a certain future with tremendous pain.

How do you respond to something like that? How do you respond to an event that is totally outside of your control, that disrupts your entire life?

I think for most of us, there is a tendency to feel hopeless and helpless when we experience these disruptive events that are beyond our control.

And right now, more than at any other time in recent history, every one of us is experiencing disruptive events beyond our control.

This COVID -19 pandemic has made us realize that we are not in control. Many of you have felt the impact of this disruptive stay -at -home policy.

You may be laid off from work right now and wondering how you're gonna pay the bills. You might be wondering if there's gonna be a job to go back to when this is all over.

Small business owners all over the country are worried about going bankrupt. Many people who are working from home are trying to figure out how to work and then take care of kids who are now gonna be at home for five months.

Maybe you're in an at -risk group and you find yourself living in a constant state of anxiety, wondering when

COVID is gonna show up at your house. It's easy when disruptive events come into our lives to find ourselves feeling helpless and hopeless, not knowing how to respond or what attitude we should have during this season.

But there is hope. This reality is really nothing new for God's people.

Here in the first chapter of 1 Peter, we see Peter addressing a group of God's chosen people who are experiencing despair because they have been displaced from everything that they know as normal.

And he writes to them telling them that we can respond to disruption with praise to God and rejoicing because we have been born again.

We can respond to disruption with praise and rejoicing because we have been born again.

Disruptive events will try to leave you feeling helpless and hopeless, but I think you'll see in this text that because of Christ, we can praise

God and be joyful no matter what life throws at us. So turn with me, grab your

Bible. We're gonna look at 1 Peter chapter one, and we're gonna spend the time, like I mentioned, in verses three to nine.

If you have a Bible, I want you to grab it and follow along with me. I'm gonna read verses three to five, and we're gonna constantly be looking back at these verses just to keep them at the forefront of our minds.

And so here's 1 Peter chapter one verses three to five again. 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 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in this last time.

As I mentioned in the introduction, the main purpose of this entire letter was to strengthen and encourage the readers so that they would persevere through their persecution with the right attitude.

But notice, Peter doesn't open up with an immediate explanation of their problem or really even a solution for them.

Rather, he opens up with praise to God. Blessed be the

God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now that word blessed is really an indication that Peter is praising or worshiping

God. He's praising God, and then he gives a bunch of reasons why God should be praised.

And the praise really helps to kinda set the tone for how they should respond to this disruptive event that they have just been through.

And as we think about how we respond to disruption, I would suggest to you that the first thing you should do is praise

God, because it does exactly that. It sets the tone. It helps correct our thinking about our circumstances.

It takes the focus off of ourselves and places it on God. And there's really just so much that we could praise

God for, but Peter here gives three distinct reasons why

God should be praised. And I wanna lay those out for you first, and then we're gonna come back and put some meat on each bone.

So the first reason he says that God should be praised is because he has caused us to be born again to a living hope.

Second, he should be praised because he has caused us to be born again to an inheritance.

And third, he should be praised because he protects us with his power.

So let's go back and unpack that first idea. God should be praised because we have been born again to a living hope.

Notice that the cause or the reason for this new birth is God and his great mercy.

God is the initiator in the producing of the new life. The source of your life in Christ lies completely outside of yourself and wholly with God.

Think of a baby. I think this will help you to understand it. A baby plays absolutely no role in the process of being created and being born, right?

And so just like a baby being born, we cannot take any credit for being born again.

It is something that happens to us, not because of us. And more than that, we don't deserve to be born again.

We don't deserve to have new life. We don't deserve to have eternal life. We are sinners and what we deserve is judgment and wrath.

But because God is full of mercy, he chooses to cause us to be born again.

There is really nothing that we have done to merit this choosing. There's no decision that we made to merit this choosing.

It is solely an act of God. And that, Peter says, is why we should praise

God. And so that's the main idea in this section, that God is worthy of praise because he has caused us to be born again.

Everything else in this text flows from that idea. But notice, we haven't just been born again.

We haven't just been given this new spiritual life. We have been born again to a couple of things.

And these are the first few points of the outline. First, we can respond to disruption with praise because we have been born again to a living hope.

So having a living hope is one of the results of being born again.

Experientially, when you are born again, you are given hope. The new birth is a birth of hope.

And this is not an empty or a vain hope like you would have if you were to hope in man or hope in money or hope in your career or hope in your relationships or hope in possessions.

It's a living hope. And it's living in the sense that it's genuine and it's vital and it's not based on futile things like that.

It obviously, he's obviously here playing off the idea of being born again, right? This new life, this new spiritual life has resulted in a new hope that is alive.

We were once dead, but now we're alive. And so too, our hope is alive.

It's real. And this hope is a Christian hope in the sense that it is the conviction that something will happen in the future.

It's not a wish like we often think of hope as being. For example, I might say,

I hope the Lions win the Super Bowl this year. Meaning that it's about as likely as a flying pig and really is nothing but a pipe dream.

But if they did, it would be really, really cool, right? When we use hope in that sense, hope expresses uncertainty.

But biblical hope expresses conviction and certainty. It's a confident expectation that something good will happen in the future.

But for that confidence and conviction to be legitimate, there has to be some sort of basis, right?

Otherwise, the hope is just as empty as the hope of unbelievers. And so here,

Peter gives us the basis of our hope. And it is the fact that God resurrected

Jesus Christ from the dead. In other words, our hope is the hope of the resurrection and Jesus's triumph over death.

It's the promise that if God raised Jesus from the dead, that he will also raise those of us who trust in Jesus.

And this too, this is really neat. This too is another reason why hope is described as living.

It's living because Jesus Christ, the ground of that hope is living.

He is alive. This is really the whole reason why we celebrate the resurrection and why we celebrate

Easter. It's through his resurrection that Jesus has forever conquered death and provided us with real hope.

But not only in the resurrection did he defeat death, but he also secured life.

Because of the resurrection, we have been born again. We have been given new life. We have a hope that is alive.

And one day we will be fully alive and live forevermore. That's what

Easter is all about. We have a hope that is beyond this world.

It's beyond our circumstances. It's beyond our troubles. And I think

Peter starts with this truth because he knows that his audience was feeling hopeless.

They hadn't been expelled from Rome due to the persecution from the Roman emperor. They'd left behind their homes and their land and their wealth and their inheritance because their inheritance, because it was the first century, was likely vested in family land.

By leaving, they were essentially abandoning their inheritance and their family rights.

And so you can imagine that that had to have left them feeling uncertain about their future and probably helpless and hopeless.

And it was all due to a dramatic, disruptive event beyond their control.

And as a community, many of us are finding ourselves in a situation not unlike that of Peter's audience, right?

People have lost jobs. They've watched their retirement savings plummet. They're unsure how they're gonna make their mortgage payments.

It's overwhelming. It leaves us feeling anxious and uncertain. The coronavirus has been a disruptive event beyond our control.

We are helpless in the sense that there is nothing that we can do about it. And in a sense, we are just along for the ride.

But we are not hopeless. We have a living hope, a hope that was secured through the resurrection of Christ.

And we have a relationship with Christ who is alive and who has secured eternal life with all the resources that we will ever need for us.

And so the first thing we ought to do when we find ourselves dealing with life -altering disruption is really remembering the purpose of Easter, remembering the resurrection and praising

God because we have been born again to a living hope.

But more than that, we have been born again to an inheritance according to verse four.

This is the second reason why we should praise God when we face disruption. We have been born again to an inheritance.

And Peter mentions this idea of an inheritance because he knows it was a concern for these people. But like I said, they've left behind their families and their land for the sake of Christ.

And thus they have no earthly inheritance. But Peter writes to them to assure them that though they may not have an earthly inheritance, they have a heavenly inheritance that is worth far more than anything that this world could ever offer.

And it's an inheritance that cannot be touched by changing circumstances.

This inheritance is described using three terms. And all of these point to the eternal character of this inheritance.

It is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. Imperishable means that it's untouched by death.

This inheritance is yours whether you are alive or dead, unlike an earthly inheritance where when you die, it disappears and it's no longer yours.

And he also says that it's undefiled. That means that it's unstained by evil. It is pure.

It will never become tarnished or dirty. And then finally, it is unfading.

Unfading means that it's unaffected by time. It does not become worth more or less on the basis of circumstances or what's going on or what situation we find ourselves in.

It is always there for us. But why? How is that possible?

How can it not be affected by anything? How can that be? He goes on and he tells us, he says, because it is kept in heaven for you.

God himself keeps this inheritance for believers. In the strongest terms possible,

Peter is emphasizing the security and the certainty of the reward that is awaiting believers.

It does not matter if you've been removed from your home. It does not matter if you have lost your retirement. It does not matter if you lose your family.

No matter what happens, your heavenly inheritance is being kept for you far beyond the reaches of this world.

And the next part here in verse five is really, really neat. Not only is that inheritance being kept by God guaranteed for you, but we who are also being kept by God's power.

I want you to read this. Look at verse five there. Right before verse five, we're gonna start. It says, kept in heaven for you who by God's power are being guarded.

That's the idea of being kept through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

This is the last of Peter's reasons why we can respond to disruption with praise.

It's because God protects us with his power.

God protects us with his power. But how exactly does he do that? Well, the text answers that question.

It says who by God's power are being guarded through faith.

Through faith. This is such a glorious promise. God's power protects us because his power is the means by which our faith is sustained.

And so the encouragement here is that God will preserve your faith through sufferings, through trials and through the many challenging circumstances of life.

This verse is not saying though that God's power protects you physically through sufferings and trials.

But it is saying that his power protects you in those times from falling away from the faith.

And notice, this protection will continue until we are ushered into a salvation that will be revealed in the last time.

The idea here is that God is protecting and preserving us so that we will receive that final inheritance.

That one day we will indeed be ushered into the kingdom of Christ and rule with him as co -heirs fully experiencing the joy of eschatological salvation.

And for that, God is worthy of praise. And so as you think about how to respond this

Easter to the disruption that we're experiencing, respond first by praising

God. Praise him for the resurrection that accomplished so much for us.

Praise him because he has caused you to be born again to a living hope. Praise him because he has caused you to be born again to an inheritance that is not affected by the events of this world.

And praise him because he protects you through events like this and protects your faith, ensuring that you will continue in the faith until the day we are finally freed from the presence of sin and glorified in the likeness of Christ to rule and reign with him as co -heirs forever.

What glorious promises and what fantastic reasons to praise the Lord this

Easter morning. There's another key element involved, I think, in how we should respond to disruption.

And we see this beginning in verses six and continuing on through verse nine.

I want you to grab your Bible. We're gonna read this and refresh our memories of this section as well.

Peter says, in this you rejoice. Though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes, though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Though you have not seen him, you love him. And though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

The second big thing that I want you to know this morning about responding to disruption is that as a believer, you can respond to disruption with joy.

And he gives the reason why right here at the beginning of this verse. When he starts off with the phrase in this, he's really looking back to everything that he's just said in verses three to five.

And so essentially he's saying in this hope of salvation that was accomplished through the resurrection, rejoice.

And so we can rejoice no matter our circumstances because of the salvation that has been promised to us.

You see the hope of salvation provides the perspective through which we are to view our present sufferings.

Peter goes on to elaborate on the nature of the suffering. He first defines the suffering as being grieved by various trials.

He doesn't have just one type of trial in view here. This is diverse. And that's because he wants you to know that trials are necessary in this world.

As a Christian, you have to face trials. You have to suffer. The New Testament pictures suffering as the road that believers must travel in order to enter into the kingdom.

But even in the bleakness of that understanding, he gives hope and he gives a reason for joy.

He says that our suffering is for a little while.

It's a little while, not in the sense that the suffering will be brief, but rather that it is brief compared to the future glory that will be revealed to us.

This is such an important perspective to keep in mind when we're suffering because when a person is in pain, every single moment feels like an eternity, right?

And time seems to slow down. You never think that you're going to get out of the pain.

I've never had to deal with a whole lot of physical pain, but a little over four years ago, my dad died after a six -year battle with cancer.

And that kicked off for me what was the most difficult period of my life.

My dad and I were very close. He was like a best friend. We would talk for hours a week on the phone.

He was my greatest encourager. And when he died, it felt like a part of me was gone.

You know, I'm not a crier, but every day for months and months, I would find myself just randomly weeping and breaking down in tears.

And I wondered if this was ever going to pass. If I was ever going to be myself again, it was hard to imagine that that pain would ever go away.

And what I learned through that season, and what I hope you will learn, if that's you right now, is that even if that pain continues on for the rest of your life, it is still nothing but a blip on the radar when compared to the future glory that awaits us.

And that is a reason to rejoice. And so once Peter defines the nature of suffering here as something that is necessary and brief, he moves on in verse seven, and he puts forth the first,

I think, of three major reasons why we can respond to disruption with joy.

He says that we can respond to disruption with joy because we know that trials are good, in that they test the genuineness of our faith.

Peter is very explicit here with the reason we must go through suffering. It's to test the authenticity or to test the genuineness of our faith.

He doesn't want the audience to assume here that they're suffering because of a failure of their faith or that they're suffering because they have inadequate faith.

So he tells them, no, you are suffering because this tests the authenticity of your faith.

And that makes sense in the context, right? He just told us in verse five that for the genuine believer, the power of God through faith protects them or keeps them from falling away until the day that final salvation is revealed.

And so if you come out of adversity clinging to the hope of the gospel and trusting in Christ, it is an indicator that you have been protected by God's power and the genuineness of your faith has been proven.

And he illustrates this testing by using the example of gold. At the time

Peter wrote this, gold was the most valuable element known to man. But sometimes the gold would get mixed with impurities, which would lower its value and its beauty.

And so the metalsmith would refine the gold. And he did this by heating the gold up in a crucible, which would then cause all of those impurities to rise to the surface and then they would be skimmed off, leaving a pure gold behind.

And the idea here is that through trials, faith is refined like gold.

Trials have a way of really purging the human and the sinful elements involved in faith and leaving behind a holier, more

Christ -like version. Think about it this way. Trials in and of themselves don't cause you to sin, but they will reveal what is inside.

Let me just give you a very simple example. I learned this firsthand while doing home improvement projects.

When we bought our first house, there were some electrical lines that ran above ground across our driveway.

And we thought, well, that looks kind of tacky. Why don't we see if we can get those buried underground? And so I struck a deal with the electrician and he agreed to run the wires underground for the same price if I would dig the hole.

And at the time I thought, well, this is a no brainer. Yeah, duh, I'll do that. It turns out the electrician was a little smarter than I was.

So there I am, I find myself outside and I'm trying to dig this 50 foot trench that's 18 inches deep across our driveway.

And let me just say this, 18 inches through compacted gravel. Let me just summarize by saying this.

The project turned into my nightmare. You know, I'm out there,

I'm jumping on the shovel. It's not budging. Every time I do get a little shovel out, it's the size of a spoon.

I probably could have done better by just digging away with my kitchen spoon. And then on top of all that, it's raining.

I mean, the thing, it was just absolutely miserable. And so knowing that this project was gonna take longer than I anticipated,

I wanted to inform Megan that I was going to be tied up working on this for a while.

So I marched myself up to the front door and instead of calmly telling my loving wife that this project's gonna take longer than I anticipated,

I yelled at her for not doing anything and told her that she was gonna have to do all the cleanup on her own.

Not exactly walking like Jesus, eh? So later that night, I continued to shovel in the rain and I found myself reflecting on my attitude.

And I realized that I was unkind, I was impatient, and I was angry when

I shouldn't have been. Now, that difficult project didn't cause me to sin, right?

But it did reveal to me my unkindness. It revealed to me a quick temper and it revealed to me a lack of patience.

You see, trials do that, they reveal weaknesses, they reveal our inner sin.

But there's value in that because once I see my sin, I can allow God and the Holy Spirit to work inside of me.

And that's the process of refining through trials. Through that incident, my sin was brought to the surface and God was able to skim some of it away.

And these times in our lives, they're really valuable because they prove to us the genuineness of our faith and they refine us more into the image of Christ, which ultimately results in him receiving more praise and more glory and more honor at his revelation.

And this concept is just so important for us to grasp because it allows us to view trials not as purposeless, but rather as an opportunity to be joyful because they assure us that we are genuine believers.

But why else? That's one reason. Why else can we respond to disruption with joy? Look with me at verse eight.

It says, though you have not seen him, you love him. And though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that it's inexpressible and filled with glory.

Peter here makes two statements that seem to be out of the blue and he's really making a connection between his audience and Jesus.

And the first thing that he makes clear is that they have not seen Jesus. Well, why does he say that?

It may be in contrast to Peter himself who spent a significant amount of time with Jesus, right?

And so his faith was grounded in the realities that he had seen with his own eyes and that he had touched with his own hands.

But for these people, for these exiles, they are truly walking by faith and not by sight because they have never seen

Jesus and yet they believe in him. The second thing to notice here is that their belief and their love of Jesus results in them rejoicing with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.

I don't think he could have said this any stronger, rejoicing with joy. Their lives and the lives of all believers really, no matter the circumstances, ought to be filled with joy because we love

Jesus and we believe in him. John himself, Jesus himself rather, in John 20, verse 29, confirms this reality.

And he says, blessed are those who do not see me and believe. And I don't have a whole lot of time to go into this, but if you were to do a word study on blessed in the

New Testament, what you would find is that there is not a single incident, not a single incident where blessing is connected to material prosperity or convenient circumstances.

Rather, it's typically connected to poverty and trials.

And that word blessed really means to be a person who is happy because they are receiving

God's favor. They're happy because they're receiving God's favor. If we bring that theological concept here then to 1

Peter, what we see is a group of people who are happy, who are rejoicing with joy because they believe in Jesus, even though they have not seen him.

And as a result, they are receiving God's divine favor, which results in joy.

And that is why Christians can be joyful and can be happy even in the most difficult of circumstances.

And that's our second reason why we can respond to disruption with joy. We can respond to disruption with joy because we love, have a relationship with, and believe in Jesus.

And finally here, the last reason why we can respond to disruption with joy is found in verse nine, which says, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.

We can respond to disruption with joy because the outcome of our faith is our salvation.

This really is providing us another reason why as Christians we love and rejoice.

It's because by believing in Jesus, by exercising faith, we are saved and given eternal life.

Notice here, he's describing a present reality. You are obtaining, it could be translated, you are presently receiving for yourselves salvation.

This means that you have been delivered from the penalty of sin, from the condemnation that sin brings, from the wrath of God, from the guilt of sin, and from its hopelessness.

And not only have you been delivered from hopelessness, you have been delivered to hope.

And so we can rejoice this Easter and praise God because through Christ's resurrection and his defeat of death, we have been born again to a living hope.

We have been born again to an inheritance that this world cannot take away and cannot tarnish.

And we are being kept by God's power until the day that we are saved from the very presence of sin.

There is nothing that happens in this world, no trial, no amount of suffering or pain, and no disruptive event like this

COVID -19 crisis that we cannot respond to with praise and joy because nothing can diminish the hope that we have in the resurrection of Christ.

And on this Easter Sunday, as you watch this, may you be reminded of the resurrection of Christ.

May you think on and be joyful because of the resurrection of Christ, which has accomplished for you the hope of salvation.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus Christ, we are so thankful, so, so, so thankful that you stepped down from heaven and that you came and lived a perfect life, that you went willingly to the cross to suffer and to die for our sins.

And Lord, we are so thankful that you rose again, paying the penalty and taking our sins upon yourself so that we, if we believe and if we follow you as Lord, may have life forevermore.

What a joyous reality, Lord, it is to know that you are alive. And because you are alive, we too will one day be alive.

So Lord, we praise you this morning for your work in our lives. We are thankful that you chose us.

We are thankful that you have caused us to be born again. We are thankful for the living hope that we have, and we are thankful that one day we look forward to ruling and reigning with you as co -heirs in your kingdom.

And in that, Lord, our hope rests. We are so thankful for you, and we're thankful for this spirit that indwells us and helps us to think on and keep these realities at the forefront of our mind.

May he be at work in our lives this week. We pray all of these things in Jesus' precious and holy name, amen.