Verse: 1 Peter 1:3-5
3 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.
Devotional Thoughts:
I read a story recently about a journalist living in New York. She had known several movie stars who had made it big, except she knew them before they’d had success in the movie industry. She had known them back when they were working dead-end jobs while acting and auditioning on the side. In one newspaper column, she wrote some observations regarding these people she had known that had “made it”:
One of the funny things was, that after they got famous, if anything, they were more unhappy, more angry and more mean than they had been before… Because that giant thing they were striving for, that fame thing that was going to make everything okay, that was going to make their lives bearable, that was going to provide them with personal fulfillment… had happened, and nothing changed. They were still them. The disillusionment turned them howling and insufferable. I’ve come to believe that if God really wants to play a rotten practical joke on you, He grants your deepest wish…
Now, this lady is certainly no theological scholar, but she is onto something significant when it comes to human nature. People that have “made it,” who have achieved the thing that they’ve been striving for – they understand that it truly is an empty achievement. It doesn’t bring the fulfillment that it promises.
Points to Ponder:
Then again, how many of us who haven’t “made it” still live in the illusion that if we can only get “that,” then we will be happy, fulfilled, satisfied, content, etc.?
How many of us know this, but at the same time, we don’t know it? How many of us still think: If I can just make enough money to be comfortable, if I can just buy my own house without going into too much debt, if I can just lose the weight, if my business would just take off… then I’ll be content in life?
The reality is that these things, among countless others, are just a mirage in the desert. Anything we look to outside of the Lord with the hope of bringing us contentment and fulfillment is simply a mirage.
That’s why this journalist says that God is playing a practical joke because He lets them reach that mirage, and they discover it for exactly what it is. They realize that it doesn’t hold for them what they thought it would. But, on the other hand, for those of us who never really “make it” when it comes to those goals, we can live our entire lives with the delusion that the mirage is real and the hope that it’ll provide us the fulfillment we long for if we could just reach it.
Peter tells it to us straight when it comes to hope though. He tells us that we, as believers, have a living hope in Jesus. Only in Jesus do we find contentment and fulfillment. Only in Jesus do we find hope for our lives, even hope for our lives after we die. Only in Jesus is our hope not a hope in a mirage, but rather a hope in the One who said, “…whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
