Advent - 1 - Hope

Scripture: Isaiah 2:1-5

Isaiah 2:1–5 NIV

1 This is what Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem: 2 In the last days the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it. 3 Many peoples will come and say, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the temple of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, so that we may walk in his paths.” The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. 4 He will judge between the nations and will settle disputes for many peoples. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. 5 Come, descendants of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord.

11/30/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Advent Candle Reading

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Standard

Opening Prayer:

God of light in truth, we confess that we have walked in darkness. We have turned away from Your ways and sought our own paths. Forgive our complacency and lack of urgency in following You. Renew our hope in your eternal promises and guide our steps to walk in your radiant light, so that we may live an illuminated life with Christ. We pray this, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Hope

Hope is Hard to Hold

In the musical, The Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, a poor Jewish farmer in Russia, stops his farm work to dream what he would do if he were a rich man. He sings about spoiling his five daughters and his wife. The whole musical is about hopes and how they don't always pan out the way we wish. But God calls us to keep our faith in Him and to trust that He'll lead, guide, and provide for us.

One line always struck me as odd. Taking care of friends and family would probably top most people's priorities if they came into money. But Tevye says he'd stop working and devote his life to studying God's law. You see, God's law and Israel's history were not things most people could afford until recently. Any snippets of that teaching would have been memorized and passed down from person to person. It would be a treasure to hold all of that in your hands and study it.

Our passage today is a prophecy from Isaiah that looks back through Israel's history—even to the first psalm—and shows us God's vision for His people.

The Jewish people were founded on righteousness, justice, and love. Their founding fathers were prophets who led with God's word, not military might. Like Tevye, we know what it's like when hopes are delayed. We know what it's like to have our lives turned upside down and find ourselves grateful for what little we have left.

Hope is hard to hold onto, especially when you have no control over the outcome. But like so many lessons we learn from God, it's sometimes those really hard places that we have to start. Because sometimes we don't really appreciate all that God is doing for us until we've lost our hope in everything else, and even ourselves. Sometimes we have to get to that point before we even really see all that he's doing around us.

Our scripture today challenges us at the very beginning of Advent. In the darkest times, to put our hope in Jesus, and trust in the light that he shines on our path.

God's Hope - All People in Loving Relationships

We just finished this month a series that looked at the end and beginning with the end in mind, and here we have God beginning with the end in mind. Long before Jesus—really long before this prophecy from Isaiah—God called His people and gave them His word. He taught them His ways and gave them the Tabernacle and then the temple as places where they could come and be taught. Not just them, but the whole world.

This prophecy came to them when they were no longer one nation under God. They faced division and civil war. Over half of their people were gone in exile. The ones left were trying to figure out which foreign nations they needed to make deals with for protection.

Israel never had military might. When we read their history, we see that God won their battles for them. So the hope we're talking about here really isn't Israel's hope. It's God's hope being lived out through them. His hope, from the very beginning, was that they would be a people who would invite the entire world in, to come and be in God's presence, and they would teach the world how to be in relationship with Him.

In Exodus, God calls His people to be a kingdom of priests, meaning everyone is called to share their faith. But first, we need to understand Isaiah's vision. What does God's fulfilled hope look like? Isaiah shows us in two parts.

First, God is lifted up. In ancient times, mountains and high places were considered sacred. The Old Testament warns against setting up altars and idols in these high places instead of following God. In this prophecy, God's mountain—Mount Zion, Jerusalem—is the highest of all mountains. Not physically, but in superiority and majesty over all other spiritual forces and religious traditions. The Temple of God is there, at the pinnacle.

We're familiar with lifting someone up—our teams, our leaders, our nation. But when Isaiah says God's mountain is the highest, he's not inviting competition with other religions. God is lifted up because He alone is the true source of hope and life. We don't lift Him up to judge, but to offer real, lasting hope to everyone searching for it. That's why Isaiah says all nations, all people, will come streaming to that mountain.

When Isaiah describes people coming to God's mountain, our translations say they 'stream' to the temple. But the Hebrew word is much more powerful—it's 'river.' Not a gentle brook or quiet creek, but those great bodies of water constantly in motion, deep and wide. When rivers spill from their source, they don't just fill a pond and stop. They flow all the way to the ocean.

So the kind of people and the number of people who are coming into God's house are not a steady stream. It's a river of people, and the people of God weren't ready for that. I've never met anyone, never seen a church, or met a church leader who was truly prepared to welcome a nonstop river of people.

A few years back, a river of people rushed into Wilmore, Kentucky, because they were experiencing God's presence powerfully. Within days, the chapel was full 24/7. People wouldn't leave, afraid they'd lose their spot. Parking became impossible. It was truly a river of people.

But they came for an experience—powerful, but temporary. God's hope is far more. He doesn't want us to visit His presence and return to normal. He wants to transform us so completely that we become His people—living in His presence, carrying His hope everywhere, and inviting the whole world to join us.

Now, a good marketer would say, 'Let's scale this. Bring people in with shock and awe, train the committed ones, and send them to their hometowns to create temple branches—spreading this river into manageable streams. Bad experience at one location? Try another branch. By the time we're done, Lord, your name will be everywhere. We'll make you famous.'

That might be a good plan. And I think we, with our human innovation, have kind of lived into it. We're good at creating comfortable little boxes where people stay put and stay happy. But that's not God's plan. He wants to bring the river on, and you can't box up a river. The river will always win.

Some of you have witnessed the power of great rivers that have shaped the world around us. Science and History both have shown us that we don't control them; they shape us. In Isaiah's vision, God calls the entire world to come to Him in one single location. God doesn't want lots of temples all over the world. He could have if he wanted to. He is everywhere. There's nowhere he can't get to. In all that he said, "I want one single location where people come to be in my presence." Now, we might be thinking, "But pastor, we have churches everywhere. What about that?" Hold that thought—because God's plan for how to accomplish this is even more beautiful than we could imagine. He is going to come and call the world. The world is going to come to him, like a river. Where deep calls out to deep in the depths of God's love and grace. He invites us to come with our deepest need and be filled.

Transformation - From War to Peace

That's just the first part of these five verses. That first part is the hope that God will establish a place and work through a people that will teach all the world how to be in a loving relationship with Him, how to receive His love and love Him in return. But there's a second part. It says that the people will beat their swords into plowshares, and then they won't learn war anymore.

Much of the world has traded swords for guns, but let's talk about swords. They were treasured, passed down, symbols of protection and status. But here's the thing: swords weren't helpful for survival. You can't fish with them. They're not good for hunting. For dangerous animals, you'd want a spear. Swords were made for fighting people. That's what they're best at.

There's something in our nature attracted to the power of swords. We see it in how young boys turn anything into a sword. You don't see that excitement about shovels or spades—maybe among farmers, but not most people. Who would get more excited about swords? Who would trade them for gardening tools?

The second part of God's hope is that what people experience in His presence would change their very nature. They would look at these tools and attitudes passed down for generations—meant to protect, empower, and give status—and trade them all in. Trade them for something that goes back to Adam and Eve's first calling: not to be protectors or defenders, but gardeners. To cultivate, nurture, and grow. To use their time, energy, and influence to care for basic needs and give away what's left to help others. This vision isn't just poetry. It's been proven true throughout history.

Some economists might point back to the World Wars and say, "War is what got us out of the Depression." Selling bullets and bombs. But every person I've met who lived through the Depression said it was their garden, and their neighbors' gardens, that were the reason they survived.

There is a way of life that will not survive without war. The world teaches us war, conflict, fighting, protecting, and defending to preserve that way of life. But God questions whether that way of life is truly living. His hope is that we will find new life in him. Not many different versions, but from a single source. It'll change us so much that we'll let go of that old way of life. We will be so busy learning new ways to live, grow closer to God, and take care of our world and one another that we won't have time to learn war anymore. We'll take some of those old ways of living, the swords we have up on the mantle, and say, "You know what? I bet with a little tinkering, I can make something useful out of that." That's God's hope.

That was God's hope from the beginning, when he called His people to be a kingdom of priests, and Isaiah reminded them after their country had been destroyed. Even in that darkness, Isaiah proclaimed this hope: that God would draw all nations to Himself and teach them the way of peace. To us, that hope feels fragile, like a bubble we're waiting to pop. Because a lot of days we feel like we've tried everything.

Hope in Jesus

Sitting in conferences with pastors, we talk about how we've tried everything. Banners, mailings, online ads, windshield flyers, school programs, massive giveaways. We spend hundreds, often thousands of dollars, hoping to get one new person in the door. Yet what studies and experience show is that the best way to reach people always has been, and always will be, a personal invitation from someone they trust.

We don't think a personal invitation will bring a river of people, so we don't put much energy into it. And that's just the first part—getting people to God. If we can't do that, what hope do we have for peace on Earth? We struggle with nations warring, division in our country, and conflict in communities. Sometimes our own families can't stop hurting one another. Every level feels impossibly out of reach.

But do you see how, from God's perspective, this whole vision comes down to teaching people to love Him and receive His love, and to love one another well? Not just in thought, but in the way they live their lives. Not just for a moment, but for eternity. That may be impossible for me, but all things are possible with God, and He has a plan.

He didn't send us a program or curriculum. His plan isn't to send threats when we do wrong and blessings when we do right, until we finally learn to live right. His plan was to make His love unmistakable, to come as a single source, not in a building, but in a person—Jesus.

We talked about how God wanted one single location where all people would come to Him. But there is no building on Earth that could hold the river of people or satisfy the depths of their need. So Jesus became that location. He gave His life and plunged headfirst into the depths of that need. In Him, as He took it all into Himself, as only God could do, we found the water of life that takes away our thirst forever. We found a love deeper than our need and greater than our sin. In Him alone, we learn how to love God with all we have and all we are. As we grow in Him, He fills our lives and teaches us to love each other the way that He loves us.

God has that hope for us, our world, and all of creation. But He doesn't put that hope on our shoulders. His hope is for us, not in us. Today, God invites us to join Him in placing all our hope in Jesus.

God has been setting up this hope since the very beginning. From the garden where He called us to be cultivators, to the covenant where He made us a kingdom of priests, to Isaiah's prophecy—this has always been the plan. It's like a river flowing across the ages, gathering the stories of creation, gathering the stories of His people, gathering your story and mine, all flowing toward Jesus.

History has been leading us here. The whole sweep of scripture has been pointing us here. Even our own past—all the twists and turns, the failures and the longings—has been bringing us here. Now we have to decide: Will we let the river of God's story carry us to Jesus? Or will we spend our lives fighting against the current, trying to go our own way?

The river is stronger than we are. God's plan is bigger than our resistance. Jesus is already there, standing in the depths, arms open, ready to receive all who come. This Advent, will you stop fighting the current and let God's river of hope carry you home to Jesus?

REFLECTION QUESTIONS

First: As we begin this Advent journey, what does putting all your hope in Jesus actually look like? When you wake up tomorrow morning, how will you invite Jesus into your first thoughts, your worries, your plans for the day?

Second: Are you surrendering to God's river of hope, moving closer to Jesus even through difficulty? Or are you exhausted from fighting the current, trying to make your own plans work?

Third: Advent is about hope—and hope is meant to be shared. Who has God placed in your life that needs the hope you've found in Jesus? What would it look like this week to simply invite them into your life and let them see Jesus in you?

And finally: God's hope is for us, not in us. It doesn't rest on our shoulders or depend on our ability to make it happen. This Advent, what burden are you carrying that God is inviting you to release? What would it feel like to let Jesus carry that weight instead?

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus, in the midst of our darkness, help us see your lights. Lord Jesus, in our morning and loss, help us feel your comfort.

Lord Jesus, in our poverty, help us know your provision. Lord Jesus, in our doubt, help us have faith in you. Lord Jesus, in our despair, be our true hope.

In Your Holy Name. Amen.

Closing Slide