2 Thessalonians chapter 2, and
I want us to begin reading at verse 13, and read down through the remainder
of that chapter. Paul had been speaking here about
the coming of the Antichrist, the wicked one that would be
revealed, and how he would perform great signs and lion wonders,
and how many would perish He would deceive many and they would
perish. They believe not the love of the truth, he said in
verse 10, that they might be saved. And God shall send them strong
delusions that they should believe a lie, verse 11, that they might
all be damned who believe not the truth, but have pleasure
in unrighteousness. Men won't blame God when they
perish, will they? They won't blame God. They took
pleasure in unrighteousness. Would not believe the gospel.
Thank God He didn't leave it there in verse 13. But we are
bound to give thanks always to God for you. Brethren, you're
the beloved of the Lord, because God has from the beginning chosen
you to salvation. through sanctification of the
spirit and belief of the truth, whereunto he called you by our
gospel to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, brethren, stand fast,
hold the traditions which you have been taught, whether by
word or by epistle. Now our Lord Jesus Christ himself,
and God, even our Father, which hath loved us, and hath given
us everlasting consolation, and good hope through grace, comfort
your hearts, and establish you in every good word and work."
I'm often coming back here to this subject of hope, and most
usually when I preach on hope, it's for me. Because I want to
hear this over and over again. The older I get, the more I want
to hear about hope. And we're told here, in this
verse 16, that God hath given us everlasting comfort, and he's
given us a good hope. A good hope. A hope. We all know what hope is, don't
we? But the Donny Bell explained one time the difference between
hope and faith. And hope looks up right now and
lays hold upon the reality of the promises of God. Faith looks
up right now. Faith looks up. But hope looks
out. Faith has to do with present.
Hope has to do with what's to come. We're saved by hope, but
hope that's seen is not hope. What a man seeth, why does he
yet hope for it? But if we hope for those things
that we see not, then do we with patience wait. Faith brings it
down now. We live in the present reality
by faith. Hope says we're waiting. We're
waiting for that which is to come. What do we hope for? Well, this
is the hope that we have, that when we die, as all others shall,
we'll not be rejected at death. will be received unto the presence
of our Lord. That's a good hope. That's the
hope. Paul said, I have a desire to
depart and to be with Christ, which is far better. To be absent
from the body is to be present with the Lord. That's a hope,
ain't it? Today shall you be with me in
paradise. That's a good hope. Today. The
other thief died and he went down. But the other one was with Christ
in paradise. Lazarus was born up to heaven
into the presence of our Lord. The rich man went down. That's
hope. That's hope. That when we come
down to die, we will go to be with the Lord Jesus Christ. Solomon
said, the wicked are driven away. But the righteous has hope in
His death. Now if death ended it, if that
was all there was to it, then we wouldn't worry if we had hope
or not. But it's appointed unto men once to die, and after this,
after that. That's the hope that we have.
But not only this, but we hope of being with Jesus Christ when
He comes again in Jacob. We hope to be in His presence,
hid with Him when He comes again. To die and leave this world and
to go be with the Lord and to be hid in Him. Them which sleep
in Jesus will God bring with Him. I tell you, I don't know
too much about the judgment. I know there's going to be one.
I don't completely understand it, I'll be honest with you.
But it won't matter if we're with Him. If we're in His presence,
nothing else will matter. And Paul said, what's our hope
of you? I don't only have a hope for
myself, I've got a hope for you. And this is my hope for you,
that you'll be in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ at His
coming. I'll be with Him, and you'll
be with Him. That's our hope, one for another
end. It would give us no greater joy, Larry, to be there together
in the presence of our Lord. Them which sleep in Jesus will
God bring with Him. But you know our hope doesn't
stop there. Paul said this, Brethren, I have hope towards God that
there shall be a resurrection both of the just and of the unjust. There's going to be a resurrection
of our bodies. We love our bodies. Christ purchased
our bodies. And we have hope that there's
coming a day in the history of this world that when the Son
of God comes again, that he's going to speak to the dead bodies
that's in the dirt, and they're going to come forth. There's
going to be a resurrection of the body. Those who are dead
and those who have decayed and there's nothing left, nobody
knows where they're at. But the Lord knows where they're
at. That's the miracle. I show you a mystery. Here's
a miracle. One of the things that this religious
world has been trying now for a long time, especially the intellectuals,
is to explain away miracles. Let us tell you how this happened.
It seemed like it was marvelous, but it had this way of coming
to pass that really wasn't marvelous. Well, it's not a miracle then.
A miracle is something only God can do. Ain't that what you said?
Here's a miracle. The bodies that are in the grave,
that's decayed, He's going to speak to them. And those corruptible
bodies shall be changed and brought up and flesh and life unto His
glorious body. Now, brothers and sisters, that's
a good hope, ain't it? That's a lively hope, a wonderful, wonderful
hope. He said this, Now are we the
sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be,
but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is. What a glorious hope! to be changed
and to be life, the Lord Jesus Christ. That cheers us up. Conquer
one another with these words. There are two things about such
a hope, and it seems that God has set these two things over
against each other. And here is one of them. What a believer hopes for is
so foreign and contrary to what he knows by nature. to what He
knows by nature. It's beyond our power, our ability
to obtain such a hope. We're helpless to obtain such
a hope. To leave this life and to raise
beyond the starry heavens? That's impossible. You and I
are so confined to this world by our nature and by gravity,
we can't rise above three or four feet in our own We are helpless
to affect such a hope when we consider ourselves to be the
most vile things that have ever walked the face of the earth
for you and me to be in the presence of the Lord of Glory. Could we have such a hope? And to build a home there? To
have these bodies to decay and eaten by skin worms or to be
burned with ashes and yet to be raised in power, in glory
and beauty and majesty, never again to be subject to these
physical and temporal infirmities, never to be sick again, never
to shed a tear, never to have any pain. Could such a hope be real? I
tell you, it's foreign to us, ain't it? It's foreign to us. You won't find it in any place
else but this Bible. And to be there and to have the
company of glorified saints and holy angels and God and Christ
and to see Him and know Him and to worship Him as we long to
in this life and never could. I've never experienced that in
this life, have you? But we will learn. That's the
hope. That's the hope. But it's so
foreign to us that we live in hope. It's all contrary to our
nature, and it's outside our power and ability to obtain it,
and yet we work for it. The scripture says that Abraham
against hope. Against hope. What does that
mean? The Lord said, Abraham, you're
going to have a child. You and Sarah are going to have
a child. And he said, well, when you first told me that, I was
seventy-five years old, and Sarah was sixty-five, then possibly,
but now I'm a hundred, and Sarah's ninety. Her womb is shut up. It ceased to be with her after
the man or woman. There's no hope, he said. It's
hopeless. Against hope. Believed in hope. Believing that what God had promised
he was able to perform. And brothers and sisters, when
you and I consider this hope of dying and ascending beyond
the stars, to be with the Son of God and to be with God and
angels, and to rest there from all our works and labors, and
to someday be brought with Christ and changed and our bodies and
souls unite in a glorious union, and to be made like the Son of
God, and to live without any natural infirmities in a glorious
place of heaven. I tell you, when I consider that,
I think, well, there's no way for me against hope. But we believe in hope. There's
hope. There's hope. And when you consider this, not
only that It's so contrary to us, and we can't obtain it by
our own strength in nature, when God adds these words to our hope,
that he tells us that it's sure and steadfast. Listen to what
he says. We have this hope as an anchor
of our souls, both sure and steadfast. It would be enough if we lived
in perhaps. Maybe, but the Lord says, no,
that's not enough. When I give you hope, it's such
a good hope, and it's a sure hope. It's a steadfast hope. Job said this, though the skin
worms devour my body, in my flesh I shall, I shall see God. I shall. We don't have such a maybe-so
hope. We don't live that way, do we?
It's a sure hope. We walk around sometimes to our
own shame and disgrace, and we wonder why we don't impress anybody.
You wonder why we don't impress our kids and our grandkids? Because
we walk around so groovy as if we've got about a half a hope.
Maybe we'll be there, but we're just not for sure. Ain't that
the way we act? We need to go over there and
read that Word in Hebrews 6, until it gets deep into our hearts,
a hope that's sure and steadfast, and which enters into that, that's
within today, where our forerunner is, for us in, in our place,
to assure our entrance in there. And all of Job said, I shall
see it. I shall. Job, are you sure? You
don't like us? We go drooping around. We're
so sad. We're Christians, but we've got
faces like mules. No, Joseph, you need to go get
on your knees and read your Bibles. This is a sure and steadfast
hope. If it's a maybe-so or a hope-so,
a guess-so, then we may have reason to go around and be sad.
But it's not that way, brothers and sisters. It's a sure and
steadfast hope. And I tell you, to live and die
without this good hope, it would be better for us to have never
been born. Because those who die without
this hope, they'll never possess it. Once a man leaves this world,
it's too late then to possess a hope. Those that go down to
the pit cannot hope without truth. They are lost and gone forever.
That poor rich man that's in hell, while you and I are here
this evening in reasonable health and free, he's still hopeless. He was hopeless when our Lord
Jesus told us about him, and he's still hopeless today. And
he'll never be able to hope. In this life is where we must
have the good hope. If there's a good hope, then
that brings us to this thought, there must be a bad hope. He hath given us a good hope,
then there must be a bad hope. What's a bad hope? There's a
few people who do not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ at all.
I'll take them at their word. Most of them may not be sober. But there are a few people. There's
a few people that you can read about. Those five horsemen. That's
not what I call them. I don't call them the five horsemen.
I call them another kind of animal, you know. Not the horsemen. We
used to play with them. Big, long ears. That's what I
call them. It may be so that those fellows
don't believe in God. I tell you, they're doing everything
they can contrary to it. And here's their hope. Here's
their hope. There is no God. The fool has
said in his heart, there is no God. But he's in trouble if there
is a God. Because that means his hopes
are false. If there's a God, his hopes are
dashed. His hopes are dashed. There's hope of a procrastinator. Phillips said, go your way for
now. When I have convenient season,
I'll hear you. I'll hear you. I don't intend
to die without hope, but I just don't want to hope right now.
I want to wait a while. I've got things I want to do,
people I want to visit, places I want to see. Some seeds I want
to sow, but when I have convenient season, when the time is right,
I'm going to talk to you about this hope." As far as we know,
he never did. Never did. How many procrastinators. Somebody said the road to hell
is paved with good intentions. People who said someday, someday. But that's a bad hope. I have much goods laid up for
many years after the battle of this night. And Job talked about
the hope of a hypocrite. The hope of a hypocrite shall
perish. There's hopes hypocrites have.
The Lord Jesus called those Pharisees hypocrites, didn't he? You hypocrites. You're hypocrites. But they had
a hope, that they're all Pharisees. He said, you are they who justify
yourselves before men, but God knows your hearts. You're hypocrites. You're not honest. You're not
sincere. And those who hope in their wealth,
They have a false hope. Aesop said they have more than
their hearts could desire. Boy, they have means. They can
buy anything they want. They can go any place they want
to. They can do just about anything they want to do. And they trust
in that. They make silver. They make well.
They're confident. And they say to their gold, you
are my hope. You're my hope. And here's another
bad hope, those who hope in the religious works. That's a bad
hope. Not everyone that saith unto
me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven. Many will
say to me in that day, have we not done many wonderful works
in your name? We've cast out devils, we've
preached in your name, we've been very religious, and that
was their hope. The religious works that they
were doing. And the Lord Jesus said, you've
got a bad hope. Depart from me. What is a good hope? Well, we're
told here in our text what it is. Look here in verse 16. A good hope is something that
God gives us. He hath given us good hope. He's given it to us. It's something
that He gives us when we didn't have it. We didn't have it when
we came into this world. He hath given us a good hope. You remember, you look back.
You can look back now, and it's more clear now than it was then.
You can look back now when you didn't have a hope, can't you?
What hope you had was a false hope. But you look back now and
you say, oh my, I was hopeless. You knew something about it then,
but boy, in retrospect, my goodness. And it makes you afraid, doesn't
it? Oh, and it fills your heart with appreciation. When I didn't
have a hope, He come to me and He give me a hope. Where did
you get it? From Him. from Him. He gave you a good hope. He didn't
come into the world with it, but He gave it to you. And look
what else. Through grace, He hath given
us a good hope through His unmerited favor. We didn't earn it. There's no way we merit it. Couldn't
work to get it. We didn't deserve it. But He
graciously, and lovingly, and mercifully gave us a hope. Now brothers and sisters, if
you can trace, if you can trace your hope back to Him, that He
gave it to you when you were hopeless, and He didn't have
to do it, He did it because of His grace, His free unmerited
favor, if you can trace that back to there, to Him, and say
He begun it, then that's a good hope. That's a good hope. He hath given us a good hope
through grace. And here's something else, and
I read it to you here in verse 13. Look at this. He chose to give us this hope
long before we knew it. We're bound to give thanks always
to God for you, brother and beloved of the Lord, because He hath
from the beginning chosen you to salvation. He chose you to
this hope before you was ever born. You have not chosen me,
he told his disciples, but I've chosen you. They didn't even
know him until he made himself known to them. They had no knowledge
of how to come to him until he drew They didn't even know why
he came to this earth until he actually died. Lord, be it far
from you to die. They never understood him. They
didn't love him until they found out he loved them. And they didn't
follow him until he called them. You have not chosen me, he said. You're not the one that did the
choosing. But I chose you. I chose you. I tell you, there's
a lot of people that can't go here. Do you know that? They
say, well, I just can't understand that. I think you just don't
believe it. You better check to see if you believe it, haven't
you? And there's something wrong when you don't want the very
foundation of your hope to be in God's elect and love and His
choice. Would you rather choose yourself?
Would you rather the choice be left up to you? "'Twas not that
I did choose you, Lord, that could not be." This heart would
still refuse you. But thou hast chosen me. You've chosen me. Long before
I knew, you chose me to salvation. You chose to give me this good
hope. And when you can trace it back
to Him and ascribe all the glory to Him for doing the choosing
of you, then that's a good indication that He's begun the work. He
chose you. And not only that, but he says
here that he sanctified you by his Holy Spirit, set you aside
for what? To hear and believe the gospel. Look how he says it. He chose
you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit. and believe of
the truth were unto he called you by our gospel. I said to somebody the other
night, this is sort of the way it works. Here you are just going
along. And God begins to open your conscience. He begins to open your understanding.
And he does it by multitudes of ways. Something someone has
said to you. about the Lord, or about judgment. And you never paid any attention
to it then. But he brings it back to your memory. John Newton,
he was out on an old slave ship, and he got washed overboard.
And he said the words that his mother had preached to him began
to come back to him. That's the way the Lord works.
He gets you by yourself, and these things begin to come back
to you. Or He gets you looking at creation, and He smites your
conscience and makes you afraid. And then, He gives you an interest
in this Gospel, and you begin to seek Him. And He finally brings
you to faith through this Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. But He does it to give you a
good hope. He brings us the truth concerning
the Lord Jesus Christ. He calls us. He calls us. You remember when your mother
used to call you? Your dad used to call you? I
remember that so well. My mom used to call me. She'd
have a big pot of cornbread and a big kit of beans and she would
call me. I remember that call so well.
My dear precious mother calling me. The Lord calls us. He calls us. He said, I call my sheep by their
name. It don't mean He calls His clerks. What that means is
when He says to you, you know He's speaking to you. Just as if He calls your name.
He's speaking to me. He's speaking to me. And how
does he do it? By the Gospel. By the Gospel. And you come to see that Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, did actually come into this world. And did
take your humanity. And in your own humanity, He
was a sacrifice for your sin. He paid a debt that you could
not pay. And He brings you, through this
Gospel of Good News, to believe in Him. He compels you. And then
from that moment on, what do you start doing? You start hoping.
You start hoping. And sometimes your hope seems
so dim, and it drives you to these promises. And you lay hold
of these promises, because hope means something to you now. And look what he says, and we'll
close with this. Weren't you He called you by
our gospel, To the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus
Christ. The sharing in the glory of our
Lord Jesus Christ. How in the world can I explain
that? To partake, to obtain, to share in the glory of the
Lord Jesus Christ. Let me explain something like
this. Let me tell you something like
this. I tell you what, you talk about the difficulty of preaching
when you come upon a verse like this, a passage like this. Obtaining? Now it couldn't be speaking of
his essential glory. He don't share that with anybody.
He could not share it with anybody. But let me explain it like this.
Jesus Christ left heaven. and came to this world in our
likeness, in our humanity, and look what he went through when
he was here. He humbled himself, and he hungered,
he thirsted, he grew weak, he was mocked, he was scourged,
he cried, tears ran down his precious cheeks, He suffered
so that the blood ran through the pores of His skin, and on
the cross finally, after this lifelong of suffering, He that
was rich, for your sake He became poor, finally gave up His life
upon Calvary's tree. And they laid His lifeless, dead
body in the cellar. But you know something? And this
has to do with His glory. God raised him from the dead
and freed him and delivered him from all this life and its sorrows
and its sufferings. He's free. He's free. He's nothing now like he was
before. He suffered. He was weak. only for a time. He was tempted
only for a time. He denied himself only for a
time. Now he's free. God received him
to heaven and sat on his own right hand, and he's in this
glorious body there in the glorious heaven. Never, never, never to
know any more sorrow, any more pain, any more suffering, any
more fear. And that has something to do
with His glory. It's the glory of Him being the
man, the mediator between God and man. He has been glorified
by His Father. Father, glorify Your Son. That word means to honor, to
praise, to dignify, to exalt. That's what the Father did. He's
delivered Him and given Him and filled Him with honor and glory
and eternal good. Whatever's good, whatever's eternal
good, God has given to the Lord Jesus Christ. And you know something? His full intention is to share
that eternal good with His people. You'll have to search and find
for yourself what that eternal good is. There's two things that we crave
as creatures. One is joy. And one is pleasures. I don't excuse men living in
the pleasures of sin, but I can understand it. God created us to seek pleasure. But since the fall, our affections
are so warped. We can't find pleasures in Him
by nature, so what do we do? Find pleasures in sin. We find
pleasures in this world, but they're temporal and fading.
But the Lord Jesus Christ said this, because I live, you shall
live also. But what kind of life does He
live? He really lives. And I tell you
this much, He lives a life of joy and a life of eternal, unlimited
pleasure. God is a God of pleasure. We
know He's a God of joy. And when He made us, He created
us in His image. We crave joy, don't we? And we
crave pleasures. That has to do something with
His glory that He's going to share with His people. He's going
to share His joy and His pleasure. I will see you again, He said,
and your heart shall rejoice. And no man takes your joy from
you. When they saw Him again after His resurrection, they
did rejoice. But that word wasn't just for
this life. If they rejoiced to see Him here,
how much will they rejoice to see His face? Yonder. They shall
see His face. And you know something? When
men and women and boys and girls see His face yonder, they'll
rejoice. What is heaven about? Rejoicing. That's what it's about. And that's
what we crave. I crave joy. I want to be happy. That's why sometimes I'll go
to the hardware store, and I'll go to Home Depot, and I'll just
go through that place looking for something to make me happy.
And they just don't last, does they? It's going to last. Me and Joe went over there and
bought a bunch of stuff. Three or four big old carts of stuff. Last
year, a year before last. I was so happy we left one of
the carts sitting there. Got all the way home that call
back. We love joy though. We love rejoicing. But here it's
faded. But he'll not be young. fullness of joy. Listen to what
David said in Psalm 1611. Thou wilt show me the path of
life. That's what we're talking about.
Because I live. Christ is life. Thou wilt show
me Christ is what he said. And then he said in your presence,
in your physical presence is fullness of joy. That's what His glory is about.
The Father glorified Him, put in Him this eternal goodness,
these eternal blessings of joy. You've been faithful over a few
things. Come thou unto the joy of the Lord. I tell you, when
Peter told that cripple, I don't have anything but such as I have,
give I you. In the name of Christ, rise up
and walk. That fellow got so full of joy, he was leaping and
praising God. I tell you, heaven is going to
be full of leaping people. Because there's going to be so
much joy. Fullness in your presence is fullness and fullness, fullness
of joy. And he didn't stop there. Listen
to what else he said in that very verse. At your right hand
there are pleasures, there are pleasures forevermore. I love pleasures. I love pleasures. I seek after pleasures. But I
tell you, we've found the lasting pleasures in it. Not these simple
faded pleasures of this world and the things of it. But in
that blessed world that's to come. Pleasures forevermore. Not single. Not just one pleasure. God is not for. But pleasures. And not just for a while. the
pleasures for evermore. Unlimited, everlasting pleasure. And listen to this verse in Psalms
36a. They shall be abundantly satisfied
with the fatness of your house. In my Father's house are many
mansions. And thou shalt make them drink of the river of pleasures. Ain't that amazing? It's unlimited. You shall make them drink. And
brothers and sisters, in that day, in the day of the resurrection,
when the Lord Jesus changes our body and we're in glory with
Him, we'll obtain His eternal pleasures. He will make them
to drink of the river of His pleasure. Why does He call it
a river? That tells us there's a supply
of it. It's not a stream. And you know what John said about
this river? You trace it up to its fountainhead, and there's
a river that flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb. And it's
a pure river of water of life, pure pleasures, holy pleasures,
eternal pleasures. And it's a river that has no
end. Oh, David said, there's a river,
the streams whereof shall make glad, shall make glad the children
of God. Pleasures. What are they? You'll
have to search that out for yourself. I don't know what all they are,
but I tell you what, it's unlimited, eternal pleasures. You remember
when the Lord made creation? He said He made every tree that
was pleasant to the eye. The Lord takes pleasure. He likes
pleasure Himself. And if He made this world, well
the scripture says everything that He made, He made for His
own pleasure. He likes pleasure too. And if
He made this world to look upon and to bring pleasure, how much
more that world is to come. That's His glory. At Thy right
hand there's pleasure forevermore. And this is the hope, this endless,
endless perfection and endless joy and pleasure. And this is
the hope. And every one God calls by His
gospel. May the Lord bless His Word.