he greatest, of course, is love. The apostle Paul taught
us plainly that out of that famous trinity of graces -- faith, hope and love --
love is supreme (1 Cor. 13:13). The Bible also teaches that love is the
liberating attitude of obedience which enables us to serve God, with no fear of
punishment following after us, or nagging at our hearts. Perfect love is that
which casts out fear (1 John 4:18).
Love From the Beginning
But where does this love originate? The Bible tells us that "the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us" (Rom. 5:5). We are taught here that the love we have for God, and for our neighbor, is a gift to us from God. But does this mean that the Holy Spirit just mechanically creates certain robotic "emotions" in us? This is obviously not the case; we are not rocks or posts. But if this is not the way the Lord accomplishes His purposes in us, then how is this love brought about? The answer the Bible gives is related to love's two inseparable companions: faith and hope.
We are taught that we love God because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). Our love for God is responsive. He initiates; we respond. He is masculine; we are feminine. He is the bridegroom; we the bride. Now the initiating love of God is not, by definition, what many assume love to be: an emotional state. Jesus did not go to the cross on an emotional high. He submitted to that ignominious death as an act of obedience. God's love is therefore seen in what He has done for us, as well as in what He has promised to do in the future. In the same way, our responsive love must have the same characteristic of activity. It is measured and seen, not by how we feel, but by how we obey Him in response to His word (1 John 5:3-4).
God has displayed His great love for His own people in the death and resurrection of His Son. When we are first enabled to come to the cross in faith, our love for God is born. But as Christians, our love continues to grow. The growth of that love is not just based on what God has already done in the cross, but also on what He has promised to do for us and in us in the future. Our love is directly connected to our understanding of our hope.
"We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints; because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel, which has come to you . . ." (Col. 1:3-6). Notice that both faith and love spring from the hope that is stored up for us in the heavenly realms. Love is greater than hope but not independent of that hope; it arises from it. Just as the Persons of the Trinity can be distinguished but not separated, so love can be distinguished from hope and faith, but they cannot be separated. The faith we have in Christ, and the love we have for our fellow Christians, depend upon our hope of glory, the hope laid up in heaven for us. That glory will be revealed when Jesus returns, and we become finally and completely like Him.
One of the characteristics of genuine Christianity is a longing for the day of resurrection. Ever since the Lord ascended into heaven, Christians have prayed for their Lord to return in glory. But for that day, we always pray with some amount of ignorance. We do not know how to pray for such things. We can pray easily for our daily bread, because we know what daily bread looks like. But how can we pray for these things?
In this weakness, the Spirit comes to our assistance. "Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered" (Rom. 8:26). The context of this passage shows us that the Spirit helps us as we pray for our adoption as sons -- i.e. the redemption of our bodies. We were saved in the hope of this resurrection (Rom. 8:24). The hope of resurrection is an integral part of a biblical presentation of the Christian gospel.
Our love is therefore built on the foundation of hope. As we pray for the day of resurrection, the Holy Spirit helps us articulate that hope with groans. Consequently, the Spirit pours out love in our hearts by helping us as we pray on the basis of our hope.
Faith From the Beginning
What, then, is the relationship of faith to this hope? The Bible teaches that "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1). Faith, when it looks to the future, is confidence in the hope that God has given to us. Faith can look in two directions. It can look at events in the past such as the cross and resurrection and clearly see the faithfulness of God there. But it also looks to the future with confidence. Faith understands that the God who has kept all His promises in the past will continue to do so in the future. His word is eternal.
The Bible teaches that true Christians have a guarantee of their coming inheritance. This guarantee is the indwelling Holy Spirit, the seal of our coming bodily redemption. Not only does the Holy Spirit help us with our hope, He is the One Who guarantees that hope. This means that Christian hope can be a confident, humble assurance, as opposed to the sins which merely ape true faith, either anemic wish or violent presumption. The ground of this assurance is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer's heart. The Spirit helps us carry our hope of glory, and it results in a faith which continues to grow.
Because this is the case, we must clearly understand the Scripture's teaching on hope. The Bible teaches that when a Christian dies, he goes to be with Christ. "For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But if I live on in the flesh, this will mean fruit from my labor; yet what I shall choose I cannot tell. For I am hard pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better. Nevertheless to remain in the flesh is more needful for you" (Phil. 1:21-24). But this gracious promise is only an intermediate blessing; it is only halfway between this life and that of the resurrection.
Many Christians have mistaken this intermediate state for the final resurrection hope. Consequently, we hear a lot of Christians who talk about "going to heaven," but very few who look forward to the day of resurrection. But our final state does not consist in "going to heaven" when we die. It occurs when Jesus comes back, and Christians receive glorified bodies like His. The resurrection does not take place in heaven; it happens here. At that time, Christians will be revealed as glorious sons of God, the groaning creation will be transformed, and we will be forever with the Lord.
While Paul looks forward to being with Christ, it is certainly not his final hope. We find his ultimate hope in Philippians 3:20-21: "For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body that it may be conformed to His glorious body, according to the working by which He is able even to subdue all things to Himself." This was Paul's hope, the transformation of his lowly body into Christ-like conformity and perfection. That was his hope when he wrote these words, and, although he is now with Christ, the apostle Paul is still longing for that day. When Christ returns, the dead, including Paul, will rise first. Then those who remain alive will join them with the Lord (1 Thess. 4:15-16).
Our citizenship is currently in heaven because Christ is there. But the text does not say that we will all join Christ there. It says that we are waiting for Him to come here in order to transform our bodies. It is true that Christians who die immediately join Christ there. But again, this intermediate state must not be confused with our blessed hope, out of which faith and love grow so naturally.
The Disciplines of Hope
Now as Christians we desire earnestly to be men and women of love and faith. We also understand that a disciplined cultivation of all these graces is necessary in order for them to flourish and grow. If we have understood the teaching of Scripture up to this point, we should see the importance of a disciplined cultivation of our hope.
First, we must discipline ourselves to understand our biblical hope. Tragically, many modern Christians have obtained more of their beliefs about the resurrected state from Far Side cartoons than from the Scriptures. When it comes to an intellectual understanding of our hope, most modern Christians are functionally gnostics. In their minds, they have separated the material and the spiritual into two realms, and they have assumed that the spiritual is good and the material is not, and when we go to heaven, we shall inhabit the spiritual realm; we shall all be ghosts of some sort.
But Jesus "Davidson," our Elder Brother, physically rose from the dead. When he appeared to His disciples, He invited them to touch Him. "Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have" (Luke 24:39). This is a truth which all evangelical Christians affirm. Tragically, the faith of many modern evangelicals only applies to a brief period of a month and a half (the time between the resurrection and the ascension), after which point they throw their hope away. They assume that when Jesus ascended into heaven, as soon as He got out of the disciples' sight, He somehow vaporized into a spiritual existence, one that suited His divine status. The Bible teaches that the Incarnation was permanent. Our High Priest lives to make intercession for us.
The Bible teaches that we will be like Him when we see Him. But because most Christians think that He became a ghost at the ascension, they think we will become ghosts as well. This is not our biblical hope; it is doctrinally erroneous. As Christians, we do not affirm the pagan Greek concept of the immortality of the soul, we affirm the resurrection of the dead. So part of our discipline here must be doctrinal discipline; we must come to understand what the Bible teaches about our final physical state. Our bodies will be imperishable, glorious, powerful, and spiritual (1 Cor. 15:42-44), but they will be bodies nonetheless.
The fact that we look forward to a bodily resurrection should give us a hint concerning another important area for disciplining ourselves. We are going to dwell in bodies forever. We will be flesh and bone forever. This means that our unredeemed bodies do matter.
The Bible clearly connects physical endurance and disciplined purity to our resurrection hope. Why did certain godly individuals persevere when their earthly bodies were being tortured? They saw the connection between what is done in this body, and what is received in the coming body. They hoped for a better resurrection (Heb. 11:35).
A very clear connection is made in Titus between sexual purity and the blessed hope: "teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" (Tit. 2:12-13). The glory of the resurrection body is a great inducement to moral purity now.
One of the ancient errors that accompanied the gnostic teaching that matter was inherently evil was the natural conclusion that our physical behavior does not matter. If something is perpetually soaked, it does not matter if it gets wet. To the extent that gnostic doctrine is embraced in any way, it should not be surprising that moral laxity quickly follows.
If our bodies are unredeemable, then it will not be long before people abandon themselves. Many professing Christians are morally loose for precisely this reason. They have probably all heard sermons on ethical and moral behavior. But they are still ill-equipped for living out Christian morality because they have never heard a message on the resurrection of the dead. Bodily discipline is therefore necessary as we meditate on our coming resurrection. Those who have resurrection hope purify themselves (1 John 3:3).
Finally, we must discipline our affections as we long for the resurrection. Our hearts should cry out within us as we contrast the sickliness of existence now with the glorious tidal wave of everlasting life that will one day engulf all God's people. As we grow older, we realize more and more that our bodies are unredeemed, and by faith we long for the day when that will no longer be so.
The language that Scripture uses to describe this longing for the resurrection is hardly academic -- it is emotional language. As we look forward to our final adoption as sons, the resurrection, we groan (Rom. 8:23). Our bodies are dead because of sin, but we long to be freed from this leaky pup tent and its burdens, and enveloped in a mansion that shall never age or wear out.
"For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven . . . For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:2,4).
Our bodies are all dying; they are as good as dead. As Augustine put it so memorably, in all human society the dead are replaced by the dying. This death that encases us provides a wonderful point of contrast as we think about what is to come.
We must therefore discipline our affections in the way the Bible describes. We do this by turning our hearts away from the reminder of mortality that fills our lungs, and meditate on a different Breath, a different Spirit. "And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you" (Rom. 8:10-11).
Our modern idolatrous cult of youth worship is a hindrance to this biblical discipline. Health, life, vitality, and so on, are all seen to be a product of the untamed animal spirits of the young. If we are wise, as we age, our thoughts should turn increasingly to the fact that our bodies are falling apart, and that this is a tremendous blessing. Who would want this body for eternity? God promises us another.
If we are unwise, we will spend much time looking longingly over our shoulders at a lost youth, and utterly neglect the coming glory. Such thoughtless neglect places the one who indulges it in frightful peril.
