A Hope and a Future
Sermon notes for April 14, 1996. Preached at the Marbury Church of God.
The focus is on the future. Most peoples of the earth are identified by their past: human descent, bloodlines, political and cultural and social history. Each of us has physical parentage, a political and cultural heritage, and a social setting that has to some extent shaped us. But the people of God are identified not by history but by promise, not by the past but by the future, and this is what gives us our common life.
This was true for Abraham. He was unique in his generation not for what he had accomplished, but for what God promised him… for the future that was given to him. His defining human characteristic was faith, which the author of Hebrews defines as “the substance of things hoped for.” Now just as all children of faith are children of Abraham, we become people of promise and a new covenant just exactly when we align ourselves with what God has set before us as a future, and let that define who we are, what our relationships are, and how we behave in the world. Like T.H. White’s Merlin, we are unlike all the people around us in that we live “backwards in time.” We “remember” the future, because the future is God’s promise and is more sure than our present circumstances and even more sure than our past, from which we are set free by grace. Look what happens to the defining moments of our past: “So far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
“For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper [heb., shalom] you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future…” (Jeremiah 29:11, NIV)
“This one thing I do, forgetting the things that are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” ( Philippians 3:13-14)
Our future is established by Jesus Christ, who is the Pioneer and Finisher of faith (Hebrews 12:2), and our “forerunner” (Heb.
