Hope in the Face of God - Advent 1 - 12/3/2017

Thesis - Hope is found face to face with God.

Thesis - Hope is found face to face with God.

For Kids: Mary, the first to know. Waiting to meet Jesus face to face. (9 months)

Sermon

Me

Our true colors come out in crisis!

Losing grandpa 13 years ago, seems like only a couple years.

Mad at God

Alyx lost her husband

I want to tell her about my experience

Right now she just needs to be shown love.

We

Our true colors stand out when things don't go as we hope, and we become desperate.

With ourselves, we struggle to find stability... trying to fix our lives as best we can

With others, we try too hard to fix their problems to make ourselves feel better around them.

The proof of this is that when we get frustrated enough with them, we stop feeling sorry for them and stop trying to fix their problems.

What we need and what everyone else needs is God... not church, not a bible, not a meal brought to them, nor any other of these absolutely wonderful things.

We all need a real, personal, face-to-face encounter with God

It's what we hope for most of all in heaven, because it is about the only thing we know for sure about heaven.

It's what the Jews hoped for the first time the Messiah came to earth. They wanted to see Their God face-to-face.

God: Psalm 80

1 Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel,

you who lead Joseph like a flock!

You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth

2 before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh.

Stir up your might,

and come to save us!

3 Restore us, O God;

let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Give ear O Shepherd

TO BE SHARP, ACUTE, POINTED; to prick up the ears;; to listen; to hear and answer; to obey, to hear and obey

Praise

Restore us!

Let your face shine

That we may be saved

4 O Lord God of hosts,

how long will you be angry with your people’s prayers?

5 You have fed them with the bread of tears,

and given them tears to drink in full measure.

6 You make us the scorn of our neighbors;

our enemies laugh among themselves.

7 Restore us, O God of hosts;

let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Angry with your people's prayers

"You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through the countries on the way here. You saw among them their detestable images and idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold. Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.

When such a person hears the words of this oath and they invoke a blessing on themselves, thinking, “I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way,” they will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry. The Lord will never be willing to forgive them; his wrath and zeal will burn against them. All the curses written in this book will fall on them, and the Lord will blot out their names from under heaven. The Lord will single them out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this Book of the Law.

Your children who follow you in later generations and foreigners who come from distant lands will see the calamities that have fallen on the land and the diseases with which the Lord has afflicted it. The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it. It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim, which the Lord overthrew in fierce anger. All the nations will ask: “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?”

And the answer will be: “It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the covenant he made with them when he brought them out of Egypt. They went off and worshiped other gods and bowed down to them, gods they did not know, gods he had not given them. Therefore the Lord’s anger burned against this land, so that he brought on it all the curses written in this book. In furious anger and in great wrath the Lord uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now.”

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.

-

Eating and drinking tears

Scorn of neighbors

Neighbors = enemies

If you quit shining God's light to the world, He quits shining on you.

Desire to go back to a time before responsibility

Spiritual immaturity

When someone else simply provided for you

Like the 1st generation of Israel wandering the wilderness for 40 years

God's miraculous provision is not something that mature believers require...they simply celebrate every gift that God brings them.

They fully expect to be working in the fields themselves to share and receive the blessing of serving God.

Restore us!

Let your face shine

That we may be saved

8 You brought a vine out of Egypt;

you drove out the nations and planted it.

9 You cleared the ground for it;

it took deep root and filled the land.

10 The mountains were covered with its shade,

the mighty cedars with its branches;

11 it sent out its branches to the sea,

and its shoots to the River.

12 Why then have you broken down its walls,

so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit?

13 The boar from the forest ravages it,

and all that move in the field feed on it.

Story of the foreign vine

Bernie Skaggs and his green thumb

No one else can seem to get that tropical plant to grow.

What's the difference between Israel and Egypt?

Source of water

Egypt has the Nile River.

Israel has more wells than major rivers.

Soil

Egypt has softer, sandier soil

Israel has harder, rockier soil

Overall, the parts of Egypt near the Nile River are very productive pieces of farmland that can have 2 or 3 harvests each year. It is almost like tropical agriculture there.

Israel, on the other hand, has no place that compares to that level of productivity.

God took a tropical vine into the desert to replant and tend it there.

And somehow, miraculously it flourished!

If this vine was such a miracle, why would you leave it so vulnerable?

If something is valuable to us, we protect it.

Why does God not do the same?

God left His vine open for any person or creature to come take advantage of.

It wasn't accidental either.

God broke down the walls!

14 Turn again, O God of hosts;

look down from heaven, and see;

have regard for this vine,

15 the stock that your right hand planted.

16 They have burned it with fire, they have cut it down;

may they perish at the rebuke of your countenance.

17 But let your hand be upon the one at your right hand,

the one whom you made strong for yourself.

18 Then we will never turn back from you;

give us life, and we will call on your name.

19 Restore us, O Lord God of hosts;

let your face shine, that we may be saved.

Asaph did not ask for protection

Even when dealing with actual abuse... i.e. burning the vine, cutting it down...

He does not ask God to rebuild the walls.

Instead he wants God to turn back to them.

He wants to see God's face.

If he can see God's face he knows he will be saved

He promises to never turn away from God's face again

He finds his hope in seeing God, face to face.

The walls we build in our lives separate and protect us from everyone.

Those who would take advantage and abuse us

As well as those who would bring blessing and grace into our lives

You

The walls we build

Not just for shy people

Grandma Truelove's last act of tearing down her walls

Desperate for relationship and not knowing how to be in one.

The Need for Confession

To God

To one another

In places that can become more natural.

Not strangers

Not the internet and Facebook

Friends and Family, especially church family

Sometimes the desire to spend time with others is also a desire to confess and unburden ourselves among those we trust and love.

We all need that.

You will never find better than God to listen to you.

But we also need others to listen to us and for us to listen to them as well.

Some days you need the invisible, all powerful Jesus, and other days you just need Jesus who comes incarnate or in-the-flesh of someone else.

We

If we want to truly share God with the world around us, we have to first admit our own desperate need of Him in our own lives.

We come to the altar simply as sinners, simply seeking God.