Liberty: freedom to live through the peace and assurance that come through love expressed concretely in history.
We can live fully now, because of Christ: He has confirmed our salvation and our intrinsic value. This sets us free to simply, and humble, be who we are. Neither more: striving to achieve, nor less: laziness and apathy. It frees us from both despair and arrogance. It frees us to love because we are secure so we cannot loose anything by loving.
Therefore: believe and live. This involves growing in belief through continuous repentance and trust. As Francois Shaffer makes much of: moment-by-moment.
Faith, Hope and Love?
How do we live in light of Hope?
To recap our hope: the world is broken and we are hoping for a new one. The facets in which we are hoping are: an external king, coming of the kingdom, the removal of evil, the change of our hearts and perfect intimacy with God and each other.
The core of our hope is restored intimacy. The reason we are looking forward to the removal of evil is not merely to have it removed (though that will be great), but rather we want it removed because it impedes relationship.
The foundation of our hope is love, and the content of our hope is love.
So how do we live in light of this hope? We start by believing it, that is by having faith that what God has said He has done was done and was done by Him. It was not done by people projecting their understanding onto events to make sense of the world. And having faith that what He says will happen will indeed happen. So believing in the past and in the promised future, That is trusting Hod. Not just believing (assenting to truth) also trusting leading to rest.
So faith is trusting.
We also have hope, we do not merely believe that God will fulfil His promises, we look forward to it with anticipation. This is hope. Hope is calling what God says is good good and longing for it, which involves recognising that what we see and experience is not that full goodness (though traces of the goodness remain.)
Now crucial to both faith and hope is love, Without love neither faith nor hope can flourish and trying to maintain them will outside of the context of love will cause them to become deformed. However there is love, the love of God. He created to show His love, He continued to love even when all that He loved was corrupted and He has made a way to restore all that He loves without destroying it.
Within this love faith becomes rest. If I believe that God is who He is, and I know that He loves us and me, then I can trust Him and (in conjunction with knowing His power and Wisdom) I know with all certainty that He will “work all things for my good”1, even the unpleasant things. This means that I do not need to “worry about what I will eat or what I will wear.”2, but rather I can rest doing “the good things He has given me to do”3 today and letting Him worry about tomorrow.
And again, within this love hope becomes joy. In the context of intimacy with God then when I begin to taste what He calls good and I see that is love, my heart begins to celebrate it, and I dance with Him. Even lament becomes intimate for I am experiencing His heart and tasting His love. Thus my hope is transformed from selfish desire or cold moral judgement into a deep and warm desire and celebration of goodness.
Further hope and rest work together to strengthen each other. When the pressures and brokenness of this world challenge my rest hope steps in and draws my eyes up to that which is grand. When my I cannot see and get caught up in the smallness of the world, rest gives me space to remember goodness.
And so the first call of God in how to live in light of hope is to remember God’s unfailing love for us and to live in reliance on His unfailing love 4.
Many readers will at this point be asking, but what about repentance? Surely the first call is to repent. In deed one of the founders of the reformation starts his famous treaty on Christianity with:
When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Mt 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.
-Luther [1997]
So where does repentance fit in? Repentance is a part of our hope and is founded on the promises of God. Again our hope, God’s plan, is the restoration of all things including us. And as we see more and more how good God intended all things we will naturally lament the brokenness and evil around us. And in us. For the brokenness around us we lament with God and rejoice in God’s power and love. For our own brokenness we are invited to repent. To find ourselves broken or wrong, to affirm that it is not good by seeing the cost of it, and yet be drawn back to God by having it paid for (not ignored) by Jesus, and then to be invited turn away from it, and promised help in leaving it behind. This is wonderful! We are not merely shown our brokenness but are called out of it. And not because we aught but because there is something better, an not by our own strength but by the power of God Himself. Repentance is the first taste of the coming hope and the fulfilment of the promises.
So we are called to rest and rejoice, yet we are called to more than that too! We are called to take part in this unfolding hope, not merely to be spectators in God’s grand art, but to be participants with Him. This is profound and yet obvious: God loves us, He works for intimacy with us. Having achieved that would He then push us to the side and make us merely watch? No! In the intimacy He invites us to participate and gives us great honour while doing so5. Indeed He says this very strongly:
And God placed everything under Him [Jesus], and appointed Him to be hear over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.
-Ephesians 1:23 NIV [2011], emphasis mine.
So how do we participate? Well first we love Him back. What does that look like? We remember His unfailing love for us and rely on His faithfulness. Or in other words, we let our Great Father dote on us and celebrate. Then we love what He loves, especially each other. Even this call to love what He loves is an invite to intimacy with Him.
But here is the rub. Here is the really tough part of being a Christian, loving each other as God loves us. Jesus gave up all honour and even life so that He might again be in relationship with us, and this is the call to us. To put others before ourselves. This has many and varied applications. It means doing the boring work you aught to do at work for the sake of others (and because God has given you that to do), it means loving your spouse even when he is a pain, it means disciplining your children and looking after the animals in your care. It means doing the ordinary things of life considering the wellbeing of others, loving them even as our Great Lover loves us and them. For some people it may also involve grand acts of heroism or altruism, and for others it may mean some great dead once or for a short time in their life. But even in the midst of those acts there is the ordinary every day of loving those around us.
In this simple way of loving what God loves we are working with Him to foreshow and to build a beautiful loving community where each person is loved and loves as they are uniquely equipped to love, a community celebrating the uniqueness of each person and yet unified by being the beloved of God and displaying that love. In this community there will be healing and all that comes near it will be made more. So we are called to have this vision and strive for it in the ordinary ways of life, with the full knowledge that what we are doing goes against the brokenness of the work around us, and will be let down by the brokenness within us. But that is fine, because it is God who acts and the goal is intimacy with us. Though the resulting community is beautiful it is nothing without the path of intimacy leading up to it.
The path laid out for us is beautiful and the destination is beautiful and all the more beautiful for the journey in intimacy. But the path is not easy. Look at the path of Jesus: rejection on every side, collimating in execution. And yet look at the journey: He walked with people and loved them, and they leaned to love Him. Then look at the destination: He overcame death and evil He has made a bridge for us, His beloved, to be with Him forever. And so we walk the path of life stumbling over the brokenness of the world and the brokenness within us, yet we walk day by day in intimate step with God, each day drawing closer to the great end, our wedding feast in the new kingdom, with all that we love. So let us walk day by day, loving everything in our reach to love with the love of our lover.
To live within this hope the first and most important thing is to live in community. Consider finding a small group in a local church and join that (sometimes called cell groups or growth groups.) There is a lot of variety in how these are run, a good indicator is if they eat together. Joining a community gives a place to express and live out this hope in addition to supporting, encouraging and deepening it.
After this consider joining a local church. Perhaps the one that your small group is associated with, perhaps another. When considering look out for how they do community and spend some time with the pastor (if they have one) asking about what they believe (especially about hope) and how they do things.
At the same time consider beginning to read the Bible. While this is daunting and can be difficult to do “correctly”, it is worth doing nonetheless. You read the Bible not to gain knowledge but to deepen faith, hope and love.
But reading the Bible is a bit like prospecting for gold. You can do it by just walking along and picking up random stones you find and inspecting them. This is pleasurable and can lead to treasures, though seldom. Or you could go a bit deeper and start sifting in the river. This is also a pleasurable activity, though a bit more work, but it yield higher results. Or you can get the land surveyed and find all the equipment and start mining. This is the most work, but yields the highest gains.
Reading the Bible is similar, you can simply read it causally and randomly. This is good and pleasurable and yields some treasures, especially as God works though His word. You can read the Bible systematically, like sifting, this helps with context and reliability. This has higher yields, not only in knowledge, but also in drawing near to God. Additionally any long practice builds up with time and so becomes more and more valuable the longer it is held. Finally you can invest in the work and studies of others to help you dig deeply into the Bible. The classic example of this is studying theology, and this is not recommended for most. But finding resources and people to teach you tools reading literature generally and the Bible specifically can have wonderful gains.
When beginning reading the Bible choose a book to read and read it from start to finish. Initially read bigger chunks and try not to get stuck on the details which raise all kinds of questions. Once you have read the book in large chunks and want more out of it, then go back and read it in detail. When you get stuck on a detail think of how it fits into the overall book. This process helps make sense of what the writer was trying to say, remember they wrote a long time ago.
Choosing where to start is hard and can be fatal (there are some very difficult parts of the Bible!) Consider starting with one of the gospels. Mark is short and action packed. Matthew and Luke are longer and detailed. They spend a lot of time showing how Jesus is the fulfilment of the Old Testament. John is aimed at helping us believe Jesus is the Messiah and emphasises God’s love.
Additionally the psalms are good for reading. Thought them we learn how to talk with God, honestly and in a way that gives life even while facing difficulties. The psalms also show the character of God. Psalm 1 and 2 give an introduction to the psalms and God’s character. Psalms 103-105 are psalms of praise that give some of the ways God works by recounting some of the things He has done. Psalm 149 gives a good summary to the psalms and tells of God’s view of us and our hope. Finally psalm 19 gives a pattern for engaging with creation and the Bible.
After reading a gospel you can venture into the Old Testament. 1 Samuel is a great place to start. While it is in the middle of the story and so is a bit like starting a book in the middle it is a good read and teaches us deeply about the character of Jesus. Genisis is also a good read and provides the context for the whole of history, and the promises God makes, the start of our hope.
There are many resources to help with reading the Bible. The Bible Project[BibleProject, ] is a great resource helping with this. Their reading plan is very good and has good supporting material, though actually finishing it in a year is tough (perhaps aim to do it in two years initially). Additionly consider the Dig Deeper[Beynon and Andrew Sach, 2010, Sach and Hiorns, 2015, Sach and Alldritt, 2010] series of books which takes a book and works though it guiding you through how to unpack each passage. Finally consider “God’s Big Picture”[Roberts, 2003] which gives a condensed overview of the story of the Bible. A more detailed overview is given in “According to Plan”[Goldsworthy, 1991], and a very detailed exploration of the context and content of the four gospels is given in “The King of God’s Kingdom”[Seccombe, 2011], though this is not recommended for beginners as it is a large and dense, though wonderful, book.
Despite all these resources let me add some more advice to reading the Bible. Of first importance is to remember that you are not reading this because it is a good thing to do (though it is) or to given knowledge (though that is useful), no. We read the Bible to communicate with God. To draw near to Him and make space to listen to Him. As such it is closely related to prayer, where we talk with God. I would recommend taking each passage you read and talking to God about it in pray: “Father what does this mean?”, “My Lord, thank you for this promise.”, “Jesus you have shown me that this thing is not good, I repent, thank you for your forgiveness and your promise of healing, help me to walk with you today.” Combining reading with prayer and prayer with reading enhances both and helps with intimacy. An excellent book on prayer is “Prayer: experiencing awe and intimacy with God”[Keller, 2014].
Another really important thing when reading the Bible is to remember the character of God. It is easy to get caught up in trying to obey all the commands God gives, but miss Him in it. Psalm 196 gives a good approach to the Bible: it is perfect and refreshes the soul. Come to it expecting to be refreshed, or renewed, or guided (light to the eyes) or made wise, or comforted, rather than instructed/rebuked/corrected. God loves us more than we can understand, so come to His word expecting love from Him (though there is rebuke in love too).
Finally there is a lot of great writing outside of the Bible on what being a Christain means and is all about. In particular “Mere Christianity”[Lewis, 2012] is a classic and gives wonderful arguments for Christianity as well as an extended section on how to live in response, however so C.S. Lewis can be unfortunately hard to read. Another great book is “Simply Christian”[Wright, 2011] which is also great and a bit easier to read.
In summary: what next? join a community, start reading the Bible and praying, and perhaps start reading. In all of this remember our hope and the character of God. The world is broken and relationships are messy, but God loves more than we can understand and is making all things new, inviting us to be healed and take part in healing others.