1 Peter 1:3-5

From Peter the Disciple, to the exiles.

In exile, your whole life is disconnected from not only where you were but also where you had been going. 

Back at home, you looked down the road into the future, and you could see where it was taking you. You built up skills and accomplishments up to this point. You had history in your relationships that you expected to carry through. You couldn’t see the future; but you saw other people walk the road ahead of you, and you banked on following them.

Then the exile. You were cut off from that home, that life. Your future path took a sharp right turn, and now you’re facing off into at best a cloudy unknown and at worst a systematic dismantling of everything you care about.

Will the exile end? Will the path turn back and join up with the straight and certain dream that you had at home? Or will it march you off and away, farther and deeper into...whatever this is...this place you never wanted to go, this land that is so very much not what you had imagined.

In exile, blessed be the Father. Let me show you the path in front of you that the future holds, the path that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ has laid out for you, stone by stone.

He laid the path according to his great mercy. All this that he has made for you, he made in perfect alignment with his natural character, a character that gives food to the hungry, that takes the murderer’s head out of the noose, that plucks a low and miserable creature out of the mud, washes it off, clothes it in gold, and places it next to him at the dinner table. That mercy, that is the driving force, a great and powerful force, which caused and causes the heavenly Father to move and act.

What was the action that he took? He brought you to a new life. He caused you to be born again. “I feel alive,”—that is what he makes in you. But not only the fleeting feeling caused sometimes by being in love or by having exciting work or by seeing the sunlight on the branches of a tree in the morning. More than that, he makes you to be born to something. You are alive TO something: in fact you are alive to TWO things.

First: you are born to a living hope—a lifting of the eyes, a lightening of the heart, a reason to endure great suffering, a wish or a guess or a hunch or a certain assurance that after all that is wrong is over, there will be something right. Everything will be right. Because the impossible happened: a man died and then came to life again. 

If Jesus Christ died and then came to life again, then isn’t it possible that everything that is dead; everything that is tragic and traumatized and broken and beyond help; everything molded and spoiled; everything tainted and poisoned—isn’t it possible that every single one of those things can also be brought back to beauty and newness, purity and holiness and glory?

The hope for all this is not just an idea; it isn’t wishful thinking; it isn’t naive. It is a hope that is alive in heaven, seated at the right hand of the throne of the Father, proof in person that even exile, even the collapse of the card castle of your life, can be brought to a happy ending.

Second: you are born to an inheritance. What could be more than the hope, than the person of Jesus alive and the reality he both represents and is? Still, you get more. 

The buried treasure. The mansion on a hill. The prudently invested capitol that will bring in a living wage until the end of your days. Whatever it may be: an inheritance. It can’t be destroyed or scattered. It bears no hint of guilt to come along with it. It will never be used up. The law of diminishing returns does not apply, and the inheritance kept in heaven for you will taste as fresh and rich on the millionth day as it ever did on the first.

It will be revealed. The hope. The inheritance. And the salvation. When the time is complete and the years all roll up together into the end, it will all be revealed.

Do you see the path in front of you? You in exile, you walk this path. This is the future your Father has given. And as you walk that path, you will go through troubles and darkness. But you have a great protection from evil: God’s power, made real through faith. The power that raised Jesus from the dead. The power that made heaven and earth. That is the power your faith lets you access, so that it can guard you day by day as you walk into the future. 

Exile, you are cut off from the path you were on. But do not be afraid. Bless the Father for bringing you to a new path, shining.

1 Peter 1: 3-5 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, 4 to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, 5 who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.