A Note from Michael Gossett | June 26, 2026

A Deeper Hope

2 Peter 3:1-13

Robert Pattinson has had the kind of career most actors would love to have. He was Edward in the Twilight films, Cedric in the Harry Potter series, and eventually he put on the costume as Batman. Yet between the roles everyone remembers, he also had quieter seasons and projects that came and went without much notice. There were good years with strong work and harder years with forgettable work. He has been honest about how unsettling that uncertainty can be, how fame is fickle, and how an actor is only ever as respected as his last role, which makes the next one feel even more weighty.

In one interview, when asked how he decides what to do next, he admitted that he did not want to make a mistake, and that his plan, more or less, was to hope that a miracle might happen and everything would turn out fine. Then, almost laughing at himself, he said the plan was really just to hope.

There is something honest and a little heartbreaking in that, because most of us manage a great deal of life in the same way. We hope the test results come back clean. We hope the marriage holds, the job comes through, the kids turn out alright, or the money stretches to the end of the month. But hoping for what we cannot be sure of is not really hope at all. It is wishful thinking in braver clothes. A hope pinned to an uncertain outcome cannot carry the weight we need it to carry, because the moment the outcome turns against us, the hope goes down with it.

The hope Peter writes about is something else entirely. It is not a wish thrown at the unknown. It is the overflow of what is certain, grounded in the character of God Himself. As he closes his second letter, Peter lays down four foundations for a hope that holds no matter what you are walking through. Not a thin, fragile, fingers-crossed hope, but a deeper one.

2 Peter 3:1-13 says, “Dear friends, this is now the second letter I have written to you; in both letters, I want to stir up your sincere understanding by way of reminder, 2 so that you recall the words previously spoken by the holy prophets and the command of our Lord and Savior given through your apostles. 3 Above all, be aware of this: Scoffers will come in the last days scoffing and following their own evil desires, 4 saying, “Where is his ‘coming’ that he promised? Ever since our ancestors fell asleep, all things continue as they have been since the beginning of creation.” 5 They deliberately overlook this: By the word of God the heavens came into being long ago and the earth was brought about from water and through water. 6 Through these the world of that time perished when it was flooded. 7 By the same word, the present heavens and earth are stored up for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. 8 Dear friends, don’t overlook this one fact: With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. 9 The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance. 10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief; on that day the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will burn and be dissolved, and the earth and the works on it will be disclosed. 11 Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, it is clear what sort of people you should be in holy conduct and godliness 12 as you wait for the day of God and hasten its coming. Because of that day, the heavens will be dissolved with fire and the elements will melt with heat. 13 But based on his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.”

In the previous chapter, Peter dealt with what it takes to keep a steady walk with Jesus, the kind of faith that remains constant. Now he turns the corner into chapter 3 and shows that hope is not a separate subject from belief. Hope grows straight out of what you are convinced is true. If your hope is running thin, the root of it is almost always something you believe, or have quietly stopped believing. If your hope runs deep, that too traces back to what you hold to be true. Peter begins where hope has to begin. He begins with the truth of God.

There Is Hope in the Truth of God

“I want to stir up your sincere understanding by way of reminder.” Notice that he is not giving them anything new. He is reiterating what they already know to be true. The word translated “sincere” is the Greek word eilikrinēs, an image drawn from holding pottery up to the sunlight to see whether any cracks had been filled in with wax. Something eilikrinēs is pure all the way through, tested by the light and found to be the real thing. That is the kind of understanding Peter wants to wake up in us, a settled grip on what is real.

We need it because the soul rarely sits still. The psalmist knew the feeling. “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God” (Psalm 42:5). We live between two realities, the despair of the night and the hope of the morning, and we walk back and forth between them more often than we would like to admit. The hard work is learning to hope in God when our circumstance does not necessarily align with it.

Here is where so many of us go wrong. When our circumstances and our feelings do not line up with God’s truth, we are tempted to let the feelings win. We start treating our emotions as the final authority and quietly rewriting the truth to match them. I have heard it a hundred ways. “I hear what Scripture says, but I feel like God would want this for me.” “I know what the Bible teaches, but good people I love are living differently.” Fill in the blank with your own version. Paul names exactly this drift: “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator” (Romans 1:25). There is no hope to be found in a life with a shifting authority. A hope built on how today happens to feel will rise and fall with the weather. Peter is calling us to something steadier, a hope anchored to what is true of God whether we feel it or not.

There Is Hope in the Judgment of God

It sounds strange to say there is hope in judgment, but watch how Peter frames it. The Greek word standing behind our English “judgment” is krisis, the very word that gives us “crisis.” Peter wants us to see that the coming reckoning of God, far from being something to dread away, is actually part of the ground our hope stands on.

He begins with the mockers. “Scoffers will come in the last days scoffing and following their own evil desires, saying, ‘Where is his coming that he promised?’” Their argument is as old as it is tired. Nothing has changed, they say, since the world began, so why believe anything will change now? Peter answers that they “deliberately overlook” something. They have conveniently forgotten that God already broke into history once in judgment, sending the flood, and that the same word which made the heavens and the earth has kept the present world in reserve for the day of judgment. This is functional deism, the assumption that God may have set the universe spinning but never reaches into it, never speaks, never judges. It is a comfortable belief, and it is a lie.

If we take God’s judgment seriously, we have to take hell seriously, and that is a doctrine the church today would rather not mention. We have made it a punchline or simply dropped it altogether. However, hell is no joke. It is the eternal absence of God’s salvation while remaining forever under God’s wrath, the endless consequence of choosing one’s own rebellion over the grace held out by the Lord Himself. Jesus did not soften it. “Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it” (Matthew 7:13). Jonathan Edwards made the point clear in his most famous sermon, reminding his hearers that the only reason any of us is not already destroyed is the patient restraint of God’s own hand, and that we are forever imagining ourselves safer than we truly are.

So where is the hope? It is here. A universe with judgment is a universe where evil does not get the last word, where every wrong is finally answered, and where being saved actually means something. If there is a judgment, then there is something real to be saved from, and Someone who saves. That door opens straight into mercy.

There Is Hope in the Mercy of God

People recoil at the topic and ask how a loving God could send anyone to hell. But Peter turns the question over to show us its other side. The real scandal is not that there is a hell that every one of us deserves. The real scandal is that there is a heaven, and that anyone at all could enter it. God’s mercy is the thing that ought to leave us absolutely speechless.

We struggle to feel the weight of that mercy because we carry such a small view of God’s holiness. We assume our sin is minor and our record is mostly clean. Yet even our best deeds carry the DNA of mixed motives, and on our own we cannot produce a righteousness that would stand. Once you see that every one of us is genuinely undeserving, you are finally in a position to be stunned by mercy. “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). The word for “patient” is makrothymeō, literally “long-tempered,” slow to burn, taking the long road before wrath. To the mockers asking where Christ is, Peter answers that what they sneer at as delay is in fact divine patience held open over their heads. You do not actually want the Lord to return on your schedule. His waiting is room to repent.

Thomas Watson wrote about that danger. Watson gave a warning that God’s mercy flows freely from His own heart and not from anything we earn, and that the great mistake is to confuse His patience for indifference or to treat His slowness to judge as though it were permission to keep sinning. Mercy that is presumed upon is mercy abused. But mercy that is received is the sweetest thing a guilty soul will ever know. “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses” (Ephesians 2:4-5). The call on your life today, and tomorrow, and in every season of waiting, is repentance, a real turning from sin once God lets you see it for what it is, and a turning to Him for who He truly is. Hell is real and judgment is coming, but for the one who turns, the mercy of God is greater still.

There Is Hope in the Promise of God

Now watch how Peter lands the plane. “The day of the Lord will come like a thief; on that day the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will burn and be dissolved.” And then, after all that fire, the promise: “But based on his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). He is not describing a lightly renovated version of the world we know. He is promising a world made qualitatively new, a place where righteousness is finally at home rather than a stranger.

And the promise is certain because of whose word it is. The same word that spoke the heavens into being, that hung the stars and holds the tide, the same word that sent the flood in the days of Noah, that called Abraham, that spoke to Moses, that reached down and called you to salvation, is the very word that guarantees what is coming. The God who kept every promise in the past will keep this one in the future. John Owen spent the last of his strength writing about beholding the glory of Christ, convinced that a soul fixed on the certainty of Christ’s appearing finds a steadiness this passing world can never offer. When your eyes are set there, the ground stops shaking.

This is why Peter ties the promise straight to the way we live. “Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, it is clear what sort of people you should be in holy conduct and godliness as you wait for the day of God and hasten its coming” (2 Peter 3:11-12). Hope is not passive. A people who truly believe Christ is returning will live like it. This is what makes this hope a deeper hope. It does not rise and fall with whether the cancer goes into remission, whether the marriage is saved, whether the job comes through. Those things may or may not happen. The return of Christ and the world made new does not depend on any of them. There are souls in eternity who would trade everything for one more hour to repent, and there is nothing on this earth a believer would trade for what is kept in heaven.

So the question was never whether the promise is true. The question is whether you are ready to see Him. “Both the Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ … He who testifies about these things says, ‘Yes, I am coming soon.’ Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!” (Revelation 22:17, 20). From the very beginning of His ministry, this was the heart of His call. “Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matthew 4:17). That is the deeper hope. Not a wish flung at the unknown, but a certainty waiting to be revealed.

One of the greatest ways we can love our city is by inviting people to hear the hope of the Gospel. That is exactly what we are praying God will do through our upcoming Celebrate Freedom event!

As our nation marks 250 years of history, we are grateful for the freedoms we enjoy as Americans. But even greater than political freedom is the eternal freedom that is found only through Jesus Christ. Scripture reminds us, “So if the Son sets you free, you really will be free” (John 8:36).

Celebrate Freedom will be a special opportunity for our church and community to come together for a night of family fun, drone show, fireworks, and most importantly, a clear presentation of the Gospel. We are praying that people from every neighborhood, every background, and every stage of life will hear the good news that true freedom is found in Christ alone.

Would you help us make this a church-wide and city-wide outreach effort?

First, share every social media post. A simple share may place an invitation in front of someone who would never otherwise hear about this event.

Second, personally invite people. Invite your neighbors, coworkers, classmates, friends, and family members. Most people who attend church for the first time do so because someone personally invited them.

Third, come and participate. Your presence matters. Every smiling face, every conversation, every handshake, and every act of hospitality helps create an environment where people can experience the love of Christ.

Let’s pray boldly, invite intentionally, and believe God to work powerfully! I hope and pray that Celebrate Freedom will be more than an event, but instead be an opportunity to see lives changed, families strengthened, and people discover the freedom that only Jesus can give.

Let’s fill our campus and reach our city with the hope of the Gospel!

A SPECIAL NOTE:

Church family, I wanted to let you know that I will be leaving to go on a 6-week sabbatical beginning June 29th. As I prepare to begin, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your love, encouragement, and support. Serving as your pastor is one of the greatest joys of my life, and Katie and I are deeply thankful for the privilege of being part of this church family these past seven years and five of them as pastor. 

This sabbatical is intended to provide a season of spiritual, focused prayer, study, finishing ministry projects, rest, and meaningful time with my family. I am grateful to our church for valuing both the long-term health of the ministries of our church. These past seven years have been such a joy for our family and we want to continue serving you and our entire church family well. 

While I am away, I want to encourage you to continue doing what you do so well. Keep gathering faithfully for worship, stay connected in your Connect Group, serve others, share the gospel, invite your friends and neighbors, and pray fervently. The mission of Green Acres does not depend on one person other than Christ Himself. He alone is the Head of His church, and He will continue to lead us as He always has. 

I also want to thank your staff and ministry leaders who are fully prepared to serve and lead during this period. I have complete confidence in them and in the work that God is already doing at GABC. Please pray that the Lord would use this time to refresh my heart, deepen my walk with Him, strengthen my family, and prepare me for the next season of ministry because I know it is going to be HUGE! God is up to something incredible with our church, and I want to be fully immersed in Him to lead us through it! 

Thank you for the great privilege of serving as your pastor. I love you, I am praying for you, and I cannot wait to see all that God will do in the weeks, months, and years ahead of us. 

Press on, 

Michael

Storms have a way of revealing what we really believe. This Sunday, we begin a new sermon series, The Sermon of Your Life, with Matthew 14:22-33, titled, “Fear Not.”When the disciples found themselves surrounded by wind and waves, Jesus came walking across the water with a message they desperately needed to hear: “Take courage. It is I. Don’t be afraid.”

Join us this Sunday as we discover how faith grows in the middle of life’s storms and why Jesus is greater than anything we face.

See you Sunday at Green Acres.

You are loved and prayed for!

Michael Gossett