Already and Not Yet

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, and welcome. It’s good to see you all here for our worship service, and now I can officially say Merry Christmas to all of you.

I have a few announcements I’d like to mention before we begin our service.

First, I’m sure you’ve noticed our three new televisions that have replaced the old projector that served us well for many years. The screens are bright and clear and the words are nice and big – which means none of you have an excuse not to sing anymore.

Harvey took the lead in all of the ordering and installing, so thank you Harvey for all of that hard work to make our worship even better.

Thank you as well to all those who came out on Thursday morning to get our sanctuary ready for Christmas. Everything looks so beautiful in here.

And thank you as well to everyone who came to our church Christmas meal last night. It was a wonderful time together, and I look forward to that again next year. Thank you to all the ladies on our hospitality team who helped make that meal possible.

It’s still not too late to order your poinsettia for Christmas. If you’d like to do that, please fill out the form in your bulletin and make your check payable to Stuarts Draft Baptist Church.

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Father we are so thankful to be here among our brothers and sisters in Christ to worship and praise You and to learn more about You. We pray Your blessings upon this service and upon every person here, and this day we are so thankful for the hope You give to not only inspire and comfort us, but to lean upon as something completely assured and eternally set. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

Lighting of the Advent Wreath – The Candle of Hope

Today we celebrate the first Sunday of Advent by lighting the candle of hope.

We’re going to talk a lot about hope today, and how the hope you have as a Christian is a lot different – and a lot better – than the hope the world offers.

But for now, the candle of hope is also known as the prophecy candle, and assures us that we can have hope that God will fulfill the prophecies of the Old Testament about Jesus.

This candle is also purple, the color of royalty throughout the Bible, symbolizing God’s kingship and reign.

I’ll read for you Isaiah 11:1-6:

1 There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,

and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit.

2 And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,

the Spirit of wisdom and understanding,

the Spirit of counsel and might,

the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

3 And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.

He shall not judge by what his eyes see,

or decide disputes by what his ears hear,

4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,

and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

5 Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist,

and faithfulness the belt of his loins.

6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,

and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,

and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;

and a little child shall lead them.

Let’s pray:

Father as we enter into this sacred season of Christmas, we pray that You prepare our minds and hearts to welcome Your holy Son, born of a virgin, fully man and fully God, who died for our sins and rose again, that by him and him alone we all may also rise to eternal life. It is in his name we pray, Amen.

Sermon

Christmas has always been my favorite time of year, and the reasons why have changed as I have changed over the course of my life.

When I was a kid, it was all about the magic of Christmas. It was the lights and the tree and Santa.

As I grew older, the presents were what mattered. It was always amazing to me how all of those pictures I’d spent a month staring at in the JC Penny and Sears catalogs suddenly came to life covered in shiny paper.

I could unwrap them, play with them, enjoy them. Until I broke them, of course. Or worse, until I outgrew them.

For most people, that’s where the magic of Christmas ends. Christmas is when you get nice things that you can unwrap and play with until they break or you outgrow them. And then eventually all of that Christmas magic is gone.

What was once a time of joy and peace and happiness — and I’m talking about the worldly versions of those, the ones that are brittle and easily crumble — is now a month-long slog of crowds, and gifts you feel like you have to buy but can’t afford, and gatherings with people you spend the rest of the year trying to avoid.

For the Christian, though, this month has nothing at all to do with material things.

You don’t have to give God anything because God doesn’t need anything. You don’t have to go into debt because guess what? That debt’s been paid.

It turns out the only thing God’s Christmas and the world’s Christmas have in common are presents, but those presents are a lot different. The presents God gives you are so big they can’t fit in the entire world, much less under a tree.

They’re not to be played with, they’re to be lived by.

And while those gifts you’ll get Christmas morning will all at some point break or fade or be outgrown, the ones God gives you never will, because they’re eternal, just like Him.

There are four gifts that you as a Christian will receive from God this year. We talk about them every year during Advent. They’re hope, peace, joy, and love.

Today we’re going to talk about the first of those gifts, the gift of hope, because that gift is the foundation that all the rest of your gifts are built upon.

We have to be careful here, though, because what the world teaches you about what hope is and what God says hope is are two very different things.

I pulled my dictionary off the shelf this week to look up the exact definition of hope. According to Merriam Webster, hope is “to want something to happen or to be true.”

In other words, at best hope means waiting for something that could happen. And at worst, it’s waiting for something to happen that you know deep down won’t.

That’s the sort of hope the world drills into your head. And if we’re not careful, that’s the kind of hope we assign to the promises God makes too.

Hope is no different than a wish, and we all know how often our wishes come true. So the trick to happiness is to let go of hope, because then you can’t get disappointed.

That’s what some religions teach, like Buddhism, and it’s what a lot of secular psychologists will tell you too. If you’re down, if you’re depressed, if life constantly disappoints you, the problem is that you put too much weight on hope. The solution, they say, is to stop hoping. Don’t look forward to anything, just take life as it comes.

But there’s a big problem with that, and that problem is stated nowhere better than by Solomon in Proverbs 13:12 — “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” Without hope, all you have is despair.

That’s what Victor Frankl said. Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychologist who was held in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. In 1946, he published a book about his experience called Man’s Search for Meaning, and it is just an incredible work. I can’t recommend reading it enough.

What Solomon said about hope was what Frankl experienced firsthand in that concentration camp. He said the Nazis could do anything to their prisoners, but it was only when those prisoners lost hope that death soon followed.

People need food to survive, and water, and shelter, and clothing. And they need hope most of all. But not the worldly kind of hope that’s just another word for wishing. They need real hope. They need God’s hope. They need the hope of Christmas, the hope that God gives you every day.

Here’s the difference between hope as the world defines it and hope as God defines it, and it’s a big difference. I’m going to give you a short grammar lesson.

When the world talks about hope, it’s usually hope as an adjective or an adverb.

“Hopefully, I’ll go to heaven when I die.” Or, “I’m hopeful that everything’s going to work out.”

You see? When you use hope as an adjective or an adverb, it’s the same thing as making a wish.

But in the New Testament, “hope” is always used as either a verb or a noun.

Hope isn’t a wish for something that might or might not happen, it’s an expectation of something that’s guaranteed to happen.

And it’s guaranteed to happen because as a Christian, your hope isn’t in a thing or a circumstance or an idea, your hope is in a person who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. Your hope is in God, and Romans 15:13 says that He is “the God of hope.”

That’s what the writer of Hebrews talks about, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Turn with me to Hebrews chapter 6. We’ll be reading verses 13-20:

13 For when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself,

14 saying, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you.”

15 And thus Abraham, having patiently waited, obtained the promise.

16 For people swear by something greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation.

17 So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath,

18 so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.

19 We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain,

20 where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.

And this is God’s word.

There is a lot of Abraham all through the New Testament, especially with Paul, and then here in Hebrews, which some scholars believe Paul wrote.

That might seem strange since Abraham was an Old Testament guy. But Abraham is very important, because he’s considered not only the father of the Jews but the spiritual father of Christians as well. The way that God deals with Abraham in the Old Testament is the same way that God deals with you.

This passage of scripture is all about three things that make up your heavenly hope that cannot ever let you down, and those three things are God’s promise, God’s oath, and God’s Son. Let’s look at those one at a time.

First, let’s talk about God’s promise in verses 13-15.

You remember the story about God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham’s only son. It was a test of faith on Abraham’s part. He obeyed God and had faith that God would somehow save Isaac.

Abraham met that test of faith with trust and obedience. Because of that, God promised to bless Abraham. God said the number of Abraham’s descendants would be like the stars.

God says in verse 14, “Surely I will bless you and multiply you,” and in the Hebrew those words are repeated — it’s “Multiplying I will multiply thee, and blessing I will bless thee,” meaning that Abraham won’t just be blessed, he’ll be blessed beyond anything his imagination can even think possible.

“I promise you,” God said to Abraham.

The writer of Hebrews talks about Abraham here in chapter 6 because he’s saying that you have promises too.

You have promises every bit as much as Abraham had promises. You’re no different than Abraham is. And you’re going to reach those promises by doing the same thing Abraham did. That’s in verse 15 — Abraham persevered.

“Patiently waiting,” says verse 15. That’s how Abraham obtained the promise. That phrase means waiting with faith. It means waiting with hope.

God said, “I promise I will do this for you, Abraham,” and Abraham believed God. He believed God would do what He said. That was the only way Abraham could patiently wait.

God said it, and God would do it. God doesn’t make a promise He won’t keep. He can’t. If God said it, God will do it.

Now that doesn’t mean Abraham never wavered. Doesn’t mean he ever doubted. Genesis talks about all the times Abraham screwed up because he didn’t trust that God was going to keep his promises.

That makes Abraham just like us too, doesn’t it? We see him as a patriarch, we see him as our earthly father in the faith, but for all of that, Abraham was still just a man. Still just a human being. Still subject to doubt, even when it comes to all those things that God promised him. Just like you sometimes doubt the things that God’s promised you.

This scripture doesn’t say that Abraham was perfect. It just says that Abraham kept believing. Abraham hung on. There might be moments of doubt, and some of those moments had terrible consequences, but he never gave in to those doubts.

Abraham never let those doubts crush him to the point where he threw up his hands and said, “I can’t do this anymore, God. I’m done. I’m out.”

Instead he would stumble and let God help him right back up again. Abraham would stop moving forward because he was just so tired of waiting, but then God would say, “Nope. You have to keep moving. You can’t give up. Remember, I made a promise,” and Abraham would put one foot in front of the other and obey.

He had moments of doubt, but Abraham still believed.

He was 100 years old when he finally saw God’s promise revealed. That’s when Isaac was born. Abraham never got to see all those ancestors that would number the stars in the sky, or the Messiah who would be his descendant. But Abraham saw the certainty that it would happen. And that’s the key to what the writer of Hebrews is saying here.

Abraham is a hero of our faith because he knew what God had promised and still believed that promise even when everything around him said not to trust it.

That’s how Abraham obtained his promise, and that’s how you’ll obtain yours. And here’s the amazing thing — Abraham is this great father of our faith, he’s held up as one of the biggest figures of the Bible, but God’s given you more promises than Abraham got.

He’s promised you eternal life. He’s promised you a crown. He’s promised you a home made just for you, where you’ll be with your family and your friends forever in perfect peace and more joy than you can possibly hold. God’s promised you that.

But we still doubt it, don’t we? Just like Abraham. But just like Abraham, those moments of doubt can lead to even more faith. How could Abraham have the faith to do that? How could he believe that God would be true to his word? Because God did more than promise. God swore an oath.

Look back up in verse 13 — Since God had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself.

If you remember, we talked about that a few months back. About how God swore a covenant with Abraham by walking through those animals cut in half, and how the meaning of that was if God didn’t keep His promise, He would end up like those animals.

The writer of Hebrews gives us more detail about that in verses 16-18. In ancient times, an oath meant something. An oath was ironclad. If you made an oath and didn’t keep it, there were really bad consequences. It’s not like now, when people’s words don’t mean much.

An oath was used in very specific situations. It was used to put an end to something that was doubtful and to make something sure that was uncertain.

When people would make an oath, they would swear to someone greater than them. To the Jews, that was usually God. But to what can God make an oath? There’s no one greater than Himself.

That’s why verse 17 says that God guaranteed His promise to Abraham, and God guarantees His promises to you, with an oath sworn on His own name. God is willing to stake His entire existence on making sure that everything He’s promised you will happen.

But again, it’s not just enough that God makes you promises. He makes you promises that you can be sure of. That’s what verse 18 is all about.

You can be sure of God’s promises because of two unchangeable things. One is the fact that it’s impossible for God to lie.

We talk about God being all-powerful, but that doesn’t mean God can do anything. There are some things that God can’t do because it’s against His nature, against who He is. There are some things that, if God did them, would mean God becoming less than He is. God is the God of perfect truth, so God can’t lie, because if He lied, He would become less than perfect.

The other unchangeable thing in verse 18 is that oath — if God makes a promise and swears it by His own name on penalty of death, then that promise has to come true because God can’t die.

Those two things are so important in your life right now because of the picture the writer paints in the last half of this verse.

First he talks about “we who have fled for refuge.”

This is referring to a practice in the Old Testament of having cities of refuge. If you accidentally killed someone, you could flee to one of these cities of refuge, and the elders of that city would do an investigation. If they could show the death was an accident and not murder, you could stay in that city and be safe.

That’s you. You are guilty before God. Doesn’t matter how nice you think you are, or how good you think you are, or how hard you think you try, you can’t go three minutes without sinning and so you can’t stand innocent before a holy God.

But God’s given you a place of refuge. He’s given you a way to live with His forgiveness in the midst of that sin. God’s promised you that He can save you. He’s sworn to it.

That’s the strong encouragement the writer talks about at the end of verse 18. God’s promised it, God can’t lie, and God can’t go back on an oath.

Now let me ask you this: How much more proof do you need that God will do what He’s promised you? It’s guaranteed. The phrase strong encouragement in the Greek means the strongest sense of sureness your mind is capable of knowing. That’s what the Bible calls hope. The world says hope means a wish you doubt will come true. God says His hope means a certainty that’s guaranteed.

When the Bible says you have a hope, it doesn’t mean you have a wish, it means you have a person. The strong encouragement in verse 18 isn’t words, it’s a person. The city of refuge you have from the penalty of sin isn’t a place with walls, it’s a person.

It’s all Jesus.

God sent His promise to Abraham and to you. Then God sent His oath. And now in verses 19-20, the writer of Hebrews talks about God sending His Son. He talks about real hope, true hope, that was born into this world on that first Christmas.

The way that hope is described in verse 19 is one of the most beautiful descriptions in the Bible.

First, your hope is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul.”

An anchor is outside of a ship. The hope that keeps your life steady, your anchor that holds your life in place, can’t be something that’s inside of you. It can’t be your own strength, or your own goodness, or your own mind, because if it is, the strength of that anchor is always going to depend on your feelings, and your feelings are always changing.

Again, your hope isn’t in anything of this world. It’s not in anything that’s in you. Your hope is in a living God. That’s your anchor.

Verse 19 also has two words to describe that anchor.

The first one is sure. A sure anchor is one that doesn’t drag. Once it’s cast off the ship and sinks into the ground, there it stays. It doesn’t matter how strong the wind is. Doesn’t matter how high the waves are. That anchor is going to hold. It’s going to keep you in place.

In the Greek, the word sure is translated as certain. God’s promise to Abraham was certain. That was the anchor to Abraham’s life. God’s word was Abraham’s hope, because God not only always does what He says He’ll do, He has to, or else He wouldn’t be God.

But there’s a second word in verse 19 to describe your anchor too, and that word is steadfast. Another word for that is firm. The hope that is your anchor is one that will never break. It’s one that will never bend. It’s one that will never rust or snap. The more strain you put on that anchor, the more you depend on it to hold you in place, the stronger that anchor gets.

If the promise of God can be described as sure and certain, the oath of God is described as steadfast and firm. Put those two things together, and you have something that is completely reliable because it’s utterly indestructible. That’s your hope. That’s Christ.

And what that hope does for your life is the same thing that an anchor does for a ship. It keeps you safe and secure when the storms come. So long as the anchor of your life is Christ and Christ alone, you cannot be shaken.

And here’s why.

Look at the end of verse 19 and all of verse 20. Jesus is our hope, and that hope “enters into the inner place behind the curtain.” That’s a reference to the Temple in Jerusalem, the holy place of God.

In the back of the Temple there was a place called the holy of holies that held the ark of the covenant and the mercy seat, which was the cover for the ark of the covenant. The entire room was plated with gold, and it was separated from the rest of the sanctuary by a huge thick curtain.

The only person allowed behind that veil was the high priest, and then only once a year on the Day of Atonement. The high priest would sprinkle the blood of a bull and a goat on the mercy seat for the forgiveness of the people’s sins.

The room, the holy of holies, was the most sacred spot on earth, because that is where God’s glory dwelt. The most dangerous moments of the high priest’s life was when he went behind that veil. He had to bathe a special way before entering, and wear special clothes, and burn special incense.

One false move, and he’d be struck dead by God’s holiness. That’s why the high priest was tied with a length of rope around his waist before he went in — in case he died, he could be dragged back out without anyone having to go in there after him.

In other words, God dwelt with His people, but He was still unapproachable.

But your anchor took care of that. By Christ’s death and resurrection, he went behind that curtain. And best of all, he took you with him.

In fact, in Matthew 27:51, when Jesus died on the cross that curtain was torn in two. And it was torn in two from top to bottom — meaning that with the height and thickness of that curtain, the only way it could have been torn like that was if God Himself did it.

Jesus is right now sitting at the right hand of God, in the most important place in heaven. And he brought you right along with him.

Do you know what that means for you? What’s an anchor’s job? It’s to hold a ship in place when the storms come. Every human being, no matter who they are, has some sort of anchor for their lives.

For some it’s their work. For others, their money. Or family. Or good works.

But no matter what that anchor is, the place where it’s sunk into is still in this world, isn’t it? Meaning that anchor might be sunk into solid ground — that ground might be the most solid ground there is — but that ground still might not hold, because nothing in this world is going to last.

But you — you’re different. Your anchor isn’t suck down into the earth. Your anchor is sunk into heaven itself. You’re anchored upward, not downward. You are anchored to the throne of God itself, you are anchored to Jesus, you are tied to the most secure, the most solid, the most unmovable force possible. No matter what happens, you will not be moved.

That is your hope. That is God’s promise. You are anchored to heaven. How much more secure can you be?

But you have to do something. God’s going to keep His promises to you — He has to — but you need to do something too.

Look back up to verse 18. Your hope is set before you. It’s right there. But to have to hold fast to it.

You have that unmovable, sure, steadfast anchor tied right around your soul and sunk into heaven itself.

But it’s not going to do one single thing for you, it’s not going to make a single difference, if you don’t hang on to it for dear life. You have to do that, because you and I and every other believer in this world is stuck right in the middle of history.

Here’s what I mean by that.

It’s hard not to talk about Christmas without talking about Easter. I’m going to talk about Easter for a minute. When Jesus was resurrected on Easter morning and appeared to Mary Magdalene and the disciples, he was doing more than showing them he was alive. He was there with them in the flesh, he was there to prove the curtain had been torn and that through him the gulf between you and God had been bridged.

But Jesus was also there to show the disciples — and you — what the future is going to be like.

Jesus didn’t just teach the resurrection. Jesus was the resurrection. By appearing in the presence of the disciples, they learned what to expect from the end of history.

The body he had is just like the body we’ll have. We’ll be able to walk through walls. We’ll be able to appear and disappear, to move from one place to another that’s miles away in an instant.

It’s almost like when Jesus appeared to his disciples on that first Easter, he was traveling back in time. He was giving them a glimpse of something far off but that’s already happened too.

John 11:25-26 says, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

That’s our hope. That’s our anchor.

When the Bible talks about hope, it’s not talking about a wish for something that might or might not happen. It’s talking about something that’s already happened, it’s just not here yet. And that’s our problem, because we’re stuck in the middle. The kingdom of God has come already. Jesus is risen. But we’re not all the way there yet.

Whatever you go through in life, whatever your suffering, whatever your pains, they’re nothing compared to the joy that’s waiting for you. Heaven’s right there. But it’s still in the future, and the present can sometimes be so hard.

What you have to remember in those hard times is that there’s a heavenly rope tied around you, and on the other end is an anchor tied right to Jesus. Whatever you’re going through, God’s put a time limit on it. And after that time all that pain will be gone. All those tears will be gone. All those worries and sorrows, all those hard times, will be gone.

That’s not a wish, that’s a promise God makes to you, and He backs up that promise with an oath and with a Holy Son who died for you to make it all possible. A Holy Son who is your hope.

But you have to hold fast to that hope, verse 18 says. And you hold fast to that hope the same way Abraham did in verse 15 — he patiently waited.

It’s hard for us to wait, isn’t it? We don’t like waiting, especially when we’re suffering. But it’s easier to wait for something when we know without a doubt it’s going to happen.

We can get through work because the weekend’s coming.

We can make it through winter because summer’s on the way.

We can make it through the year because the beach is right around the corner.

It’s the same way with heaven. The same way with eternity. The same way with knowing beyond any doubt at all that one day everything’s going to be made right and every promise God’s ever made will come true.

One day we’ll have a family reunion like no other.

One day every tear you’ve ever cried will be dried by the hand that made every star and every blade of grass.

One day there will be no more sickness, no more worry, no more fear.

It’s already happened. Jesus proved that the moment the disciples laid eyes on him in wonder. All that’s left is getting there.

You are anchored right to Jesus. Don’t forget that, because he’s never going to forget you. That’s your hope, and that’s the first present of Advent because it’s the one all the others depend on. And if you need that hope this morning, I invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn.

Let’s pray:

Father this is a season of joy, and of peace, and of love, but the foundation of all those amazing gifts is the gift of hope, the blessed assurance we have that Jesus is ours, that he came into this world for each one of us – to save us, to teach us, and to one day bring us home to you. How wonderful it is that by a hope that is named Jesus, we can live in the grace and sureness that You will always keep Your word, and that every promise You have made us will be fulfilled. Help us to lean on that, and may the hope that fills Christmas fill our hearts all year. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray, Amen.

[1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Is 11:1–4.