Hope Stuff: Resources for Restoring Hope

I beg your patience and understanding today because I want to read something that you are probably not used to hearing in a Sunday church meeting.

Lamentations 3:1–24 (ESV)

I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath;

he has driven and brought me into darkness without any light…

He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy;

though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer…

He is a bear lying in wait for me, a lion in hiding;

he turned aside my steps and tore me to pieces; he has made me desolate;

he bent his bow and set me as a target for his arrow.

He drove into my kidneys the arrows of his quiver;

I have become the laughingstock of all peoples, the object of their taunts all day long….

my soul is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is;

so I say, “My endurance has perished; so has my hope from the Lord…”

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end;

they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”

On Resurrection Sunday, I preached a sermon called “Keep Hope Alive” and last week, the subtitle was “How The Church Can Defend Against Disappointment”

Those sermons assume that you have hope that you are trying to defend and to keep.

But, what if the ship of hope has already run aground in your life?

Is there a word for that person who says, it would have been nice to have heard these sermons a year ago or 10 years ago. I maybe could have kept hope alive…and defended my hope against disappointment.

But I didn’t hear these sermons and I don’t have any hope left to keep or to defend.

It is with that experience in mind that we turn to book of Lamentations

If anybody ever dealt with a bout of hopelessness, it was the prophet Jeremiah.

Jeremiah composed this book of poetry after the holy city of Jerusalem and temple in it was destroyed by the Babylonians and the people of God carried away into exile.

The word Lamentation means “dirge” or “a sad song”

And this is an appropriate title because Lamentation is just that, a collection of sad songs.

Jeremiah experienced a loss of hope. And the truth is that none of us are more spiritual or better prepared than Jeremiah. All of us have the potential to face experiences that exhaust our supply of hope.

A severe or a prolonged illness.

A rapid succession of financial setbacks

A death spiral of marital conflict that you can’t seem to escape

A sudden loss of relationships to death and/or circumstances

Or any number of calamities

And so we turn to this book of sad songs because embedded within this book…particularly within this central chapter…is a theology about what hope is made of.

Every hope story is different…the renewal of hope involves the work of the Holy Spirit and engagement of community.

But, I think about it like making a cake.

Every cake is a little different

There are different flavors and flare involved with various types of cake.

But, there are basic ingredients that you need if you are going to bake a cake…sugar…flour…butter

In the same way, there are some basic ingredients of hope

I want to preach a sermon today called “The Stuff of Hope: Resources for Restoring Confidence in God”

PRAYER

The first resource that I will point us to is The Dignity Tears

We understand this point from the existence of the text.

Consider what it means that we have the book of Lamentations in the inspired canon of scripture.

This is not historical narrative like the book of Kings or the Gospels

The is not the doctrinal expose we find Deuteronomy or the Pauline Epistles

Lamentations is not really proper prophecy like Isaiah and Ezekiel…

And yet, it is not the praise-focused poetry of the Psalms

Lamentations is a book of mourning…it is the poetry of a prophet who is an emotional wreck.

In the Masoretic Hebrew text, the title of the book is the first word in the book “’êkāh” which would translate to English as roughly “HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?”

The purpose of Lamentations is to describe calamity and layout in detail the practical, spiritual, and emotional crisis which is the outcome of catastrophic events.

Lamentations is a liturgy of grief…

It is a record of Jeremiah’s season of weeping over all that has been lost to him personally and to the people as a whole.

But, these sad songs are not just written by Jeremiah.

But, they were breathed out by God and are “useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.”

You see beloved, there are things that you will never know about God unless you learn them as you pass through what one writer calls “the dark night of the soul”

It is a dangerous teaching to suggest that the Christian should never weep and mourn.

Weeping is a part of life…yes even the Christian life

God honors sorrow and takes note of grief

You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book. (Psalm 56:8, NLT)

There is no shame in sorrow.

Weeping is not a sign of weakness.

Beloved you have to remember that there is a Dignity to Tears. Tears are not an indication of failure, they are an indication that you are going through an important human and spiritual experience…and you can know that God honors it.

The Second Resource is The Clarity of Knowledge

Something happens in the poem between verse 18 and verse 21

Verse 18: “I have no hope”.

Verse 21: “I have hope”

Wait…What?

If we can catch what happens in the middle, then we will grab what is perhaps the greatest wisdom that Lamentations offers.

What is the action that takes place between “I have no hope” and “I have hope”?

Do they get out of Babylonian captivity? No.

Does somebody start building up Jerusalem? No.

Does Jeremiah realize that some family member he thought had died in siege is actually alive? No.

NOTHING CHANGES IN THE MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE PROPHET AND NOTHING CHANGES IN THE MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE PEOPLE.

What happens is that Jeremiah remembers what he knows about God.

“This I call to mind and therefore I have hope”

And that knowing gives him back his confidence.

He still doesn’t know how it is going to get better, but he can be sure that it will.

I’ve been keeping a more aggressive schedule this year that involves a lot of plane travel.

One thing you learn being on a plane all the time is that it takes pretty severe weather to actually ground a plane.

Now they will blame any delay on the weather because if it’s weather they don’t have to compensate passengers for delays and cancellations

When when the plane is there and crew is there and tickets are sold, they fly through a lot of storms (no food service…and plenty of turbulence.

But the reason they can fly through the storm is because even though the pilots can’t see much out of the window, they can “fly the instruments”.

Flying The Instruments means to fly an aircraft using only the instruments of the cockpit, rather than relying on visual cues outside the aircraft.

Inside that cockpit, they have

Altimeter - Measures the aircraft's altitude above sea level, helping the pilot maintain a safe flying height.

Attitude Indicator - Shows the aircraft's orientation relative to the horizon. It indicates whether the wings are level and if the aircraft is climbing or descending.

Airspeed Indicator - Displays the speed of the aircraft through the air, which is crucial for maintaining control and for operating within the safe speed limits of the aircraft's flight envelope.

Heading Indicator - Shows the aircraft's current direction in relation to magnetic north, helping with navigation.

Beloved, when you’re flying through a storm in your life, you can’t go by what is happening outside the craft…there no clarity in that, you’ve got to get back to your training that you learned in flight school and trust what you know from the instruments on the inside.

Imagine imagine for a moment that you are in an Alabama jail cell circa 1952. You are there with 35 other negro people (that’s the polite thing to call you in 1952).

You were going to register to vote when the police came and told you to leave. And you know what happened when you refused to leave.

Now here you are…Heads are bloodied. Some Limbs are broken. You can hear the whimpering of the ones you only now are beginning to realize are just children 14 and 15 years old.

The shock of the experience is settling in and folks are beginning to consider how and even if anyone is going to make it out of here alive.

And from the back of the cell across the way you hear the voice of a lady. Clearly she is through her tears, but she’s singing a song, “We shall overcome…”.

Somebody might say, “that lady has completely lost it”.

But, if you know, you know.

That lady is not crazy or delusional, that lady is flying the instruments.

She sees everything that is going on around her.

But, she knows something about the love of God.

She knows something about the mercy of God.

She knows something about the faithfulness of God.

And therefore she has hope.

The third resource is The Victory of Jesus

Verse 1 of Lamentations Chapter 3 Jeremiah goes from speaking in 3rd person about the city (in chapters 1 and 2) to speaking in the first person “I am the man who has seen affliction”

What he really doing here is sharpening the complaint

It is a Job-like positioning where Jeremiah is saying, “I am a prophet. I spoke against all of the wickedness in the land. I do not deserve this.”

Beloved, Jeremiah may have intended to sharpen his complaint. But, God was breathing out a Messianic prophecy.

See, Jeremiah was God’s prophet, but Jeremiah could not claim the kind of sinless perfection that would absolve him from taking on his share of the suffering which attends our universal brokenness.

Everybody suffers sometimes

But, there is a man who was bruised and broken and crushed by Jehovah even though He did not deserve it.

There is one who “had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him”

I’m speaking of none other than the Lord Jesus Christ

He is the man of sorrow, acquainted with grief.

He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows

He was wounded for our transgressions

He was bruised for our iniquities

The chastisement that brought us peace was upon Him

And by His stripes we are healed.

What I am going through may be the greatest test of my life, but it is not they great test of life.

This experience that I am going through is not the test of God’s love for me or His faithfulness toward me.

No, the compassion and faithfulness of God will not be measured by how this thing turns out.

The ultimate expression of the compassion and faithfulness of God is found in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Because of Jesus, I can say with Paul, that “this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison”.

I like to bake and my daughter has also taken up the pastime.

She and I have both had the experience of getting ready to bake something only to find the other person has used the last of the sugar or the butter or the milk.

And it makes it a lot harder to bake a cake when you have to run out to the store to get the ingredients at the moment you are about to bake.

So here’s my closing exhortation to you: KEEP YOUR HOPE STUFF IN STOCK

What does that look like? I’m glad you asked.

Remember when you’re not the one crying that there is DIGNITY in tears.

Fly the instruments in good times. Even when it feels good, keep a CLARITY about yourself based on the scriptures and guided by the Holy Spirit of God.

And even when you’re winning, remind yourself that the ultimate VICTORY is the victory that Jesus won at Calvary.

But, still there are times when you just don’t have the ingredients in stock. If you’re baking a cake, you have to run to grocery. If you’re trying to renew your hope, you have to run to the Father.

If you are in that place right now, we want to pray for you. (Prayer is where you connect with the Father)

You need to restore the Dignity of Tears

Regain that Clarity

Remember the Victory

EVEN IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST TIME RUNNING TO THE FATHER, IT IS STILL YOUR TIME!