Christ our Hope Anglican Church Valparaiso

We're commanded to ask for the Holy Spirit and to desire more of the gifts of the Spirit. Part of what is means to be a child of God is to continually long for more of the Holy Spirit in us, for Him to transform us further, for Him to speak to us clearer, and for Him to shape us to be more like Jesus.

Our salvation is accomplished by and fulfilled in the revelation of Jesus Christ, and as Jesus left us an example to follow, we find he reveals himself to us and to others through our obedient pursuit of him and his ways.

The old words in our mouths tore down others, but the God’s word grows us up into maturity in newness of life. And all the while, God himself is building us into a temple for himself.

Peter claims that the story that God is telling in all of history—from Moses through the prophets and most astonishingly in Jesus Christ himself—is the story of his powerful love that comes to us, for our sake, in order to rescue us from our sin, our alienation, and from every sad and broken part of our stories. The story of the world, he claims, is about Jesus, but it's for us.

The hope of the gospel is not that we'd take our fresh start and do it better this time: now I've got a chance to pay more attention, be more kind, somehow dredge up in my heart a deeper devotion to God. Instead, our hope is living because it's secured in and by and through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. He is himself the hope, and the direction towards which this new life is pointed.

The church is called out of the world, called out of the ongoing cycle of weeks and months and years, to dwell in and upon the eternal truth: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. And we do it in hope and expectation that that truth will not just be something that we say and "remember" in our minds, but that the truth of it would come to life inside us, that it would fill us and make our lives into something new.

There is no moment of human grief, no loneliness, no sorrow, no isolation that God himself has not tasted; there is no suffering in which we suffer alone, for God through Christ has come near. And because he is near, there is no longer any person that can rightly call themselves forsaken by God, because he has come for us, to rescue and to heal us

Jesus wept for Lazarus, and then he raised him from the dead. The Lord is near to us, and he wants us to know that Jesus who descended into the grave did not remain there, and when he rose, he led many captives free.

We must acknowledge we are blind and that we only see so far as God shows us. God invites us to reject living in the dark and instead live in the Light. We are commanded to try, and keep trying, to discern what is pleasing to the Lord, and fully depend on God's light for each step.