“Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3 NIV).
Have you ever eaten an apple from an apple tree you planted?
My guess is “no.” I know I haven’t. When it comes to apples, I’ve been the happy recipient of another’s “living hope.” Someone else had enough hope in the future to plant an apple tree.
What is this “living hope?” Maybe one way of answering this would be to ask what would “dead hope” be?
If we consider that the apostle James said there was a kind of faith without works that he called “dead faith,” then perhaps the same may be applied to hope. If dead faith is faith that has no effect, takes no action, bears no fruit, then living faith must be faith that works, faith that acts, faith that does bear fruit.
By analogy, “dead hope” would be hope without present result. This kind of “dead hope” might explain the spectator Christian who passively waits for heaven while watching the world go to hell. This hope bears no fruit. This hope has no “life” for today. This is not the hope of which Peter preaches.
When we have “living hope,” we plant today with a confidence that Christ will cause it to bear fruit tomorrow. This “living hope” is not made of thin, doubtful stuff. No, it is a certain expectancy that since Christ kept His promise to be raised from the dead, He will keep all of His other promises for us too, especially the one that we will be raised like Him.
This living hope should move us to bear fruit in our present world and with our present bodies, knowing that what we do by faith and by the power of the Spirit will be kept for us in eternity.
Christ’s resurrection means that we can finally get to taste an apple from a tree we planted.