CHARTING OUR COURSE: Being A Community Defined by Our Hope

Who are we as a church? What does it matter that we exist? The church in North America has often answered the question by declaring what we are against. Churches are known for being against abortion, the homosexual lifestyle, atheism, against a certain view of women in leadership in the church, and the list goes on. But this only tells us who we are not. It results in a church that is inward focused, myopic, and not used to treating others with the lavish generosity we have experienced from God. This is not a good foundation on which to build our life together as God’s people! What is much more important and life-giving, and what we read much more of in the New Testament, is who we are. This article and the following two in the Insight are intended to lay the foundation for a healthy awareness of who we are as the church.

So who are we?! Why does it matter that we exist? There are many ways that we could begin answering those questions. Let’s start with this simple observation: Hope permeates the pages of Scripture. It was a radical hope that the early church was founded on, nourished by, and driven to action by.

Read through the New Testament. It is as if while these men were writing, they were sometimes given tantalizing glimpses of the Future coming to us; vivid, brief, and partial, but bright enough to light them on fire, and we burn too. They glimpsed what the prophets called “the Day of the LORD,” when Christ the King will return visibly in power and glory, and all people past and present will confess that He indeed is King (Acts 2:20, Phil 2:10, 1 Thess 5:10). Out of the corner of their eyes they saw the heavens and earth we know being made into a new heavens and a new earth in which God himself will dwell with us, and in which there will no longer be any mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away (2 Pet 3:10-13, Rev 21:1). Death himself will die, a foe defeated by Christ (1 Cor 15:26). In that day we will be raised from the dead and given new bodies, full of glory, fitted for our new existence in the new heavens and the new earth. Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, glimpsed it and burned like a torch: “Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed!”[1] Even creation itself waits in eager expectation for that day (Rom 8:19)!

This future is not just a faint hope, a “pie in the sky” kind of dream wish. It remains sure regardless of the difficulties we experience in this life; we may experience trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword, but none of these can separate us from the love of God (Rom 8:35-39). Neither is it merely future. The redemptive blessings of Christ’s death for us and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives are foretastes of the Age to Come. We experience today the presence of the Future!

This hope was what defined the early church. It was the reason for their existence, their defining characteristic, the momentum behind their mission and their radical following of Christ. As with them, so may it be with us!

But is it? Let’s think about this… How does this make a difference? If an untouchable radical hope is at the center of our reason for existence, how does that impact your relationship with your wife? Your friend? Your co-worker? Your employees? What implications does our hope have for the place of mission in our church? In sum, how can we live in such a way that the people around us look at the way we live and think to themselves “Those people must be full of hope; I can’t explain the way they live in any other way.”? I would love to hear your questions, ideas, or stories; please feel free to leave comments!
[1] The idea of being raised from the dead is just as strange to us as it was to most people in the first century. It is natural and good to have questions about the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection and the feasibility of our own. For those who would like to pursue these questions, N.T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God is an exhaustive exploration of the meaning of the resurrection and of what really happened on Easter morning.