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Hope Wins - 2
Introduction
I want to teach you a verse in the Bible that will help guide where we are headed with our time together today.
Repeat together.
- 22 Let your unfailing love surround us, Lord,
for our hope is in you alone.
We recognize the truth of those words.
We affirm them here.
God’s unfailing love surrounds us and we hope in him alone.
We trust in him, we look to him.
But, how do we reconcile these words with what we see in this world?
There’s a tension between what we read in the bible and what we read in the newspaper.
How do we reconcile this hope in God with the horrors we see every day?
There is this challenging tension that exists…how do I maintain hope in a hopelessly broken world?
If you’ve ever placed your hope in something or someone, and they let you down, you know this tension.
The tension between what I hoped for and what I got.
—If you’ve ever stood at the altar and promised “til death” but the other person apparently meant “til someone else.”
—If you have ever been promised something at work, a promotion or raise, and it didn’t come through.
—If you were an athlete poised to go the next level but got injured.
—If you are really intelligent but didn’t get the scholarship.
—If you have aspirations for your child but they have become something other than what you hoped.
—If you’ve ever said, “Why bother?”
Studying, working, loving.
You know this tension.
And if you don’t know it already, get ready because it’s coming.
How do you maintain hope in a hopelessly broken world?
Let’s start by defining hope.
Hope is that person or thing in which your expectations are centered.
It’s the things you’re leaning into, relying upon.
Your job, your abilities, looks.
To hope in something is to place your trust there.
To center your expectations for the future in it.
You lean into these things to bring stability to your life and your future.
In fact, here is how I want us to view hope…a ladder.
You might have noticed it sitting out here, that was on purpose.
Hope is what you lean the ladder of your life against.
It’s what you use to prop your life up.
When you put a ladder against a wall, it is an act of hope.
You are centering your expectations on the solid nature of that wall.
The same is true for your life.
When you are born, the ladder of your life is propped up against your parents.
You hope fully in them.
Because your life literally depends on them to feed you, keep you safe, nurture you.
Your ladder won’t stand without them.
As you get older, we build up on our own walls to lean on.
We put our hope a bit in our own ability to care for ourselves.
I can now walk, talk, drive, work.
We can now do much of this on our own.
And we start looking to our own walls to prop up our ladder.
Usually we don’t even think about this.
We aren’t concerned with this reality until it comes crashing down.
Only in that moment do we come to realize that we’ve been leaning the ladder against something that isn’t as solid as we’d hoped.
—You are in your 30’s and all your friends are married.
But you’re still single.
—You dream of being a parent only to find out you can’t have children.
—You put out your resume for your dream job but no one is calling.
Only when the ladder falls do we realize our mistake of leaning it up against something so insecure.
So how do you maintain hope in a hopelessly broken world?
How do you lean your ladder in the right place, against a wall that won’t fall?
The bible, to no one’s surprise, tells us to hope in God alone.
Of course the bible says that!
We expect it to.
But countless Christians don’t do that.
Why?
Because as Americans, we are the best in the history of the world at building up walls that seem solid.
We are elite wall-builders.
We believe if you have the right education, looks, connections, if I save enough, am disciplined enough, that it’s all going to work out for us.
And we lean our ladders against that.
And if you’re a Christian, you pray, “God, help my ladder not to fall.
Bless this wall I’ve constructed.”
And for the most part, it tends to work out for us.
It’s nice to have a good education.
Having the right looks help.
We can achieve our idea of success with the right combination of factors.
The problem is that it’s only a matter of time before that wall falls.
Even if that wall lasts for your entire life, ultimately, all walls fall.
We spent 6 weeks walking through Ecclesiastes…isn’t this what that book was about?
What was Solomon telling us the whole time?
Don’t lean your ladder against that wall!
Pleasure, wealth, education…these walls might deliver during your life, but they can’t withstand eternity.
So the bible tells us to hope in God alone because only God delivers in this life and in the next.
This is what is about.
It will tell us to place our hope in God, and then it will tell us why.
It will also remind us of this tension we live in today, of maintaining hope in a hopelessly broken world.
- 18 Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later.
19 For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are.
20 Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse.
But with eager hope, 21 the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay.
22 For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
23 And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering.
We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us.
24 We were given this hope when we were saved.
(If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it.
25 But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)
Now this is a section about hope!
All of the images used here speak to what we’ve been promised.
These images show us what to lean our ladder against.
—v.
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