A LIVING HOPE FOR WHOM WE WAIT. 1st Peter 1:3, 4, 8, 21. The resurrection of Christ is central to Christianity. The early Christians had no difficulty believing in the resurrection and ascension of Christ. The death and resurrection of Christ unleashed a world- changing force that has transformed people's lives. The Christians in this room are evidence of the Living Christ. Without God, death ends all hope, is the final indignity to the body, and is the final frustration to a purposeless life.
Christ’s resurrection changed all that. Christians know that Christ’s resurrection opened the doorway to eternal glory for all the redeemed. His resurrection was the promise of our own resurrection. Early Christians who had never seen Jesus (“whom having not seen we love”) actually loved Him. All Christians speak of their love for Christ as a Living Person whom we haven’t seen, but we love. We sing to Him, talk to Him, worship Him, and live our lives to please Him. This is not a fantasy or an assumption, but a real response to substantial evidence for Christ’s resurrection.
When a believer has received Christ by faith and genuinely trusts Him, for some reason sins—an act of the old nature that remains and deceives us—tie us to our surroundings. It is the responsibility of a child of God who has been born again to "reckon dead" what binds us to a life of sin and, in a spiritual sense, to truly live by the power of what has been accomplished for us. We have been born again by the Spirit of God. Now, we are to "walk in the Spirit," and we will not fulfill the lusts of the flesh. Our sin-prone bodies and natural flesh currently tie us to the earth. Our sin and failures grieve us and also hurt the Holy Spirit within us. But when "this mortal shall put on immortality, and this corruptible shall put on incorruption," then we will experience the full joy of our inheritance, being "with Him and like Him."