Sermon Tone Analysis
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A Future Filled with Hope
There is an older song about “Looking for love in all the wrong places.”
I run across people all the time who are looking for love, but they keep looking in all of the wrong places.
I have people, men in particular, who tell me about the bad experiences that they have had with women in their lives.
When I ask them about where they go to find female companionship.
I here that a friend sets them up or they meet them at work, or they meet them at a bar.
I often will tell them they may need to change where they are looking, because obviously what they have been doing is not working.
We can do the same thing with hope.
I read a story this past week about an elderly man sat at North Port, where he sat each day for many years.
One day, a stranger came by and asked him what he was waiting for.
“I’m waiting for my ship to come in,” replied the man.
“I don’t see any ships round here,” exclaimed the man.
“Why don’t you come back to town with us.
What comes will come.”
“I really couldn’t do that,” said the elderly man.
“If I leave this spot, that may just be the time my ship comes in.”
The man looked worried, “Don’t you think you could come join us for dinner?”
“No, I really cannot,” insisted the elderly man.
I don’t want to miss my ship.
One day, I know it’s coming.”
“How do you know it’s coming here,” the man asked.
“Because this is where it came before,” said the elderly man.
Shaking his head, the other man departed.
So, the elderly man sat, and sat, and sat, and sat, month after month, year after year, but his ship never came in.”
Exhausted and discouraged, at last he got up and went into town dejected looking for something to eat.
“There you are,” exclaimed his friends.
While you were away, a ship came into South Port with your name on it.
But we didn’t know where you were, so we divided the bounty among us, and it left again.”
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Hope is a very powerful emotion and feeling.
I said a few weeks ago that we are to be purveyors of hope.
The psalmist wrote
Hope is more than wishful thinking.
It is more than creating a list of wants.
If you do a Google search for that word hope you will find over 4.5 billion hits.
It is hard to distill all of that down.
Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakian author and political leader, describes hope in the following way: “Hope is a state of mind, not of the world.
Hope in this deep and powerful sense is…an ability to work for something because it is good.”
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How easy it is to let our desires and wishes set the pattern of our hopes, rather than to trust the promises of God! Wishful thinking must give way to the realities of the word of God
If a group of people needed hope, hope from God, it was the ones who were taken into exile in Babylon.
Jeremiah is in Jerusalem and God inspires him to write a letter to those in exile.
There were some false prophets amongst the exiles.
They were telling the people that Babylon was going to collapse and the people would return home in short order.
The raising the people’s hopes with a false sense of hope.
A false hope though is no hope.
One author wrote:
False hope is hope that is based on ignorance.
Hope is justified when the hoping person knows and accepts experts’ judgement about the probability of hope fulfillment.
Justification determines if hope is realistic.
What matters for evaluating someone’s hope is not only whether it is realistic, but also whether it is reasonable.
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I tend to agree with him.
That author was not writing from Christian point of view, but his definition of false hope aligns with a Christian view point.
These prophets were stating that God was going to intervene in a very short period of time.
It was a false hope that they were creating.
They were giving their opinion, they weren’t listening to God.
Jeremiah hears about what is being said to the people and he sends this inspired letter.
In that short letter found in these 14 verses he has five things to say to them.
The first is to Build Jeremiah 29:5
Jeremiah 29:5 (CEB)
5 Build houses and settle down
If this was going to be a short lived situation, there would be no need to build houses.
They could live in tents if they were only going to be there for a short period.
We know from Jeremiah that God had established the period of exile was 70 years.
They need to build houses and settle down because they were in this situation for the long haul.
There is a saying that we should “bloom where we are planted.”
That is basically what Jeremiah is tell them.
A lot of people live with the distant future in mind.
That’s all well and good, but you have to live today.
As Christians, as a church we have to live today.
What is God telling us to build today?
When this building was built it was built with at least two purposes.
It was built with the immediate need of the congregation at that time.
They had outgrown their present sanctuary so they needed a larger place to worship.
The second purpose was future looking.
In the plans that I found and are in my office this sanctuary was built so that it could almost be doubled in size in order to seat 400 plus people.
If I understood the plans, there was the idea of building an addition that would be gym/fellowship building.
This building has been built, it is almost 30 years old now.
I have heard people say that they know that we’re here, they just are to lazy to come to church.
The truth is that they do not even know that we are here.
I know from talking with long time residents of Boswell that when they ask about the church I pastor that they look at me like I have two heads when I tell them.
I have to describe where the church is.
Some will tell me that they did not know there was a church there.
Houston, we have a problem!
We’ve built, but does anyone know?
He next tells them
Jeremiah 29:5 (CEB)
cultivate gardens and eat what they produce.
They are to plant gardens.
That is not a short term process.
You have to invest time and energy to plant a garden and then tend to it until it begins to produce a crop.
As Christians and as a church we have to be about planting the seed of the Gospel.
Paul wrote
We are to plant and water, God is going to take care of the growing.
When we plant something, we can only plant, fertilize, and water it.
We can’t force it to grow.
If we are serious about a revival, we have to be as equally serious about planting and watering.
We have to honestly ask ourselves when was the last time you shared Jesus with someone?
Whether in word or deed, did you share Jesus with someone this past week, this past month, year, or in your lifetime?
Paul wrote
Whatever you do, whether you have to use words or if you do something, do it in the name of Jesus!
That is part of the planting and watering.
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