Dear Friends,

Ours is a world in terrible turmoil. People are angry; cynicism and despair are on the rise. It becomes increasingly clear that we face a financial crisis of huge proportions, fuelled by too many people living beyond their means. (In a recent radio programme, Clem Sunter said that America’s total debt – government and private – was 48 trillion dollars. This in comparison to the annual GDP of 13 trillion dollars).

How we need to grasp the soul-settling hope found in the pages of God’s Word – not only grasp it, but allow the hope of God to fill and overflow our hearts, transforming us into people who are confident and at peace with themselves, their God, and their circumstances. Sometimes, suffering and difficult circumstances are the windows through which God is able to teach and encourage us. He wants us to know His peace, power and perspective.

John Stott says that the reference, “be joyful in hope”(Romans 12:12) is about our confident Christian expectation of the Lord’s return and the glory to follow. It’s the foundation of true hope, the source of our abiding joy. Earlier on in Romans, Paul says that we can consider our present sufferings not worth comparing with the joy that will be revealed in us. For the believer, physical death is the gateway to bodily resurrection and entry into the new heaven and the new earth – the new physical and spiritual realm that God will create when Christ returns. And so the struggle is always worth it for the sake of the destination.

Some of us have had the privilege of watching disabled athletes performing heroics at the Paralympics. It reminded me of Joni Ereckson Tada, who has been a quadriplegic for almost 40 years, who wrote: “For I sure hope I can bring this wheelchair to heaven. Now, I know that’s not theologically correct, but I hope to bring it and put it in a little corner of heaven, and then in my new, perfect, glorified body, standing on grateful glorified legs, I’ll stand next to my Saviour, holding His nail-pierced hands.”

So, we’ll have new bodies, not in bondage to decay, but bodies more physical, more real than these bodies that won’t be transient, that won’t wear out - redeemed and eternal bodies. And we will see Jesus face-to-face. Like C.S. Lewis once hinted, the Lord’s overcoming of this world will be the lifting of the curtain on our five senses, and we shall see Him and we shall be like Him, and we shall see the whole universe in plain sight.

Of course, we live in a dark, diseased world under the curse of sin. Hell is real, and God owes this rebellious planet absolutely nothing. But aren’t you glad that God has rescued us and given us the gospel? And the plan of the gospel is to convince this unbelieving, sarcastic and skeptical world of His power to save. And so from amongst them He will gather in His people, who share this hope of the glory to come.

God bless

Peter