Titus 2:13; 2 Thessalonians 1:3-10

Here are a couple more ways that the blessed hope encourages believers in living a godly life in this present age.

·        1 Thess. 1:10; 5:9; 1 John 4:17-18: The blessed hope frees the believer from the fear of wrath.  As we accept the inevitability of our appointment with Christ in judgment we are nevertheless freed with the fact that this is not an appointment with wrath.  He has delivered us from the wrath to come.  How does this fact help us now in living a godly life?  Let me give an illustration.  One of my sons played high school basketball.  They were a team that always did well but also regularly failed in the most important games.  We laid a lot of this on the coach who was one of those kind that has overly hard on his players.  If they made even a small mistake he would yank them from the game and chew them out publicly.  He was exactly the opposite of one of my childhood heroes, John Wooden, the legendary UCLA coach whose teams won repeated championships, who sat quietly on the bench with his program rolled up in his hands, and who taught his players rather than berating them.  It’s a known fact: we do better with John Wooden than with our sons coach.  It’s hard to play well when you are afraid of offending the coach.  This fits our theme.  For believers the fear of judgment has been replaced with love.  We are freed up to love our Lord in return and to serve Him faithfully knowing He will love us enough to correct us but will not pour out His wrath on us.

·        2 Thess. 1:6-10: The blessed hope helps us to let go of revenge.  When we come to understand that everyone will be judged by Christ at His appearing, and that God will avenge His people, we are able to be at peace when we are persecuted for Christ.  We can leave vengeance to God.  What a great freedom that brings for those who serve Christ.  We lose a lot of time and energy being upset with people, especially those we are convinced have taken advantage of us.  When you read the Psalms you see how David, time and again, took his adversaries and simply gave them to the Lord.  These imprecatory Psalms were David’s way of getting release from revenge.  You may remember the story of David and Abigail, how he was on his way to exact righteous revenge on her husband.  She intercepted him and saved him from a mistake that would have scarred him for the rest of his life (read her words in 1 Sam. 25:25-31).  The blessed hope tells us to stop judging the people around us and to leave it with Christ.  This will lead us to patience and faith (1 Thess. 1:4).

What we have been saying in all this is that there is value in teaching and meditating on the glorious appearing of Christ.  It must not be omitted from our spiritual diet, so to speak, or clearly we will exhibit a great weakness in our ability to live godly in this present age.