Advent 2025 Week 1

Where is your Hope

Introduction

Sometimes hope feels wishful, like crossing our fingers and dreaming of a better outcome. We might hope for better employment, healed relationships, or a brighter future. But that kind of hope is based on things that may or may not happen. When things don’t go as we hoped, it can be crushing—our hope disappearing like vapor. 

As a season of reflection and contemplation, Advent invites us to imagine a different kind of hope, rooted in the unchanging nature of God and his promise to restore every part of his creation. Advent hope does not minimize pain or difficulty, nor does it assume things will soon get better. Instead, it faces the darkness with courage and chooses to trust that God’s promises will come to pass, guaranteed by his long-proven, faithful character. 

In the Hebrew Bible, the words most often used for hope—qavah and yakhal—are also translated as “wait.” To hope in God means to wait with patient expectation, trusting that he will fulfill his promises. This kind of waiting leans forward, anticipating the day when Jesus will return to make all things new. Such hope empowers people to persevere, to act justly, and to serve others as a sign of the restoration that will arrive through Jesus.

Today we look at a passage of Restoration to kick off our advent season a passage that should serve as a reset for us to truly prepare our hearts for the coming holiday season.

Psalm 130 ESV

A Song of Ascents. 1 Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! 2 O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy! 3 If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand? 4 But with you there is forgiveness, that you may be feared. 5 I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; 6 my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning. 7 O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption. 8 And he will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.

Summery

There are many things we can pull from this passage but the biggest thing that we can point out is that God has been a God of redemption since the start. He does not add up the inequities or look at are faults he gives us his forgiveness over all of it.

The question becomes how can I have that level of Hope that is offered in this passage this holiday season?

There are times when the serving the Lord requires us to wait and listen rather than always be moving. ( It is better to wait for the lord to give us directions then it is so move in a direction that leads us into the opposite direction of where we are called to serve. Ex: the military has a rule of alway hold to the orders that you were previously given till you get new orders . The reason is that in the overall big picture of this people that go off and make up there own orders could end up dead. In the same way when we try to play God by moving when he tells us to wait we could end up suffering and being pushed father away from him. We tend to blame God. )

Hope in the Lord requires mental fortitude. ( One of the most challenging thing that can happen when it come to having Hope in the Lord is to go through a season of hardship and having to make the mental choice to give it to the lord and wait for the outcome to turn in favor to what it is we want it to be. There is a level of mental fortitude that we have to pursue to get us to a point where giving it to the lord become second nature. How do we do this it comes by reading God word and actively pursuing a relationship with God to get a better understand of exactly who he truly is. )

God is attentive to your cry for mercy. ( We can have hope in understanding that there is nothing that you have done or are going to do to cause him to not listen to you. He is waiting for you patiently to cry out to him so he can give you the rest you need. this season there might be something that pulls you away from God lost of a love one, financial burden, broken homes. God is calling and waiting for you to come running so he can give you rest. Wife giving birth related to Jesus on the cross. )