Tomorrow is Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and I want to talk to you about hope, the future, and transformation. Hope is an essential part of our everyday lives. We cannot live without it, and knowing Christian hope is vital to living a Christian life. Whatever our future hope is will significantly impact how we live today. Seeing our great hope in Christ will transform our lives right now.
In Philippians 3:12-21, Paul consumes himself with the future hope in Christ. This Christian hope should overwhelm your heart just like the sun overwhelms your eyes when you look at it. The English word hope isn’t all that helpful for communicating what the Bible talks about when it uses the Greek word. They both have a future-oriented aspect, but the English word is shallow by comparison. Biblical hope entails confidence, as Hebrews 11:1 tells us: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”
Hope entirely changes how we live our day-to-day lives. We are hope-based creatures. We desperately need hope to survive in this life. Why? Because without hope, our lives have no meaning, and we can’t bear that possibility.
So what is the Christian hope that Paul is “straining toward”? Two things that it’s not and one thing that it is. First, it is not earthly prosperity. Many people think if they live right, God will bless them, and they will live happily ever after. This can’t be what Paul means because Paul is writing this in prison. Further, Paul writes in verse 10, “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.”
Second, Many Christians mistakenly believe that hope means they will one day be rescued from this world to ascend into heaven and leave everything behind. Paul wrote in verse 20, “We are citizens of heaven,” but this statement has been misunderstood. Paul is writing to a church in the city of Philippi, a Roman Empire colony. When we read verse 20, we think Paul means, “We are citizens of heaven, and so we are waiting until the day we can go and live in heaven where we belong.” But that’s not it. If someone in Philippi said, “We are citizens of Rome,” they didn’t mean, “So we are looking forward to going to live there.” The task was exactly the other way around. The mission of a Roman citizen in a place like Philippi was to bring Roman culture to the city they were in. But suppose Philippi got taken over by a foreign power. How would the Roman citizens in Philippi handle themselves? They would put their hope in the fact that the Roman emperor (who was called the savior) would come from Rome to Philippi to overthrow the evil powers and establish his rule in that city. This is what Paul has in mind. The church is a colony of heaven, and our task is to bring heaven’s culture to earth.
The Christian hope is that one day, Jesus will return to earth and make all things new. We hope that one day, we will make everything that is broken whole and make everything that is wrong right. This hope completely changes how we live our day-to-day lives. We know that we, as heaven’s citizens, must bring heaven’s culture to earth.
Today, on Holy Saturday, we wait with hope and anticipation for tomorrow, Easter Sunday, when we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. I encourage you to join us at Mill City Christian Church tomorrow at 10 am as we celebrate this momentous occasion. As we gather in community, we will sing songs of joy, hear a message of hope, and partake in communion to remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for us.
