Sermon Tone Analysis

There is a story about a man who stopped by the local Little League baseball field one Saturday afternoon and became interested in the game.

Standing by the dugout for one of the teams, he leaned over to one of the players and asked, “Hey, what’s the score?”

“18-0, sir, and we’re losing,” came the young boy’s reply.

“Oh my,” the man said.

“That must be very discouraging.”

“What do you mean?” the boy replied.

“Why would we be discouraged?

We haven’t even been up to bat yet!”

Now there’s a young lad who had a handle on hope.

You may recall that we talked a bit about hope last week.

What we learned was that God’s faithfulness provides a foundation for sure faith and unwavering hope and that those things should drive us to thoughtful love within the church.

For Christians, our faith has God’s faithfulness as its foundation, and our faith expresses itself in hope.

Hope, too, is rooted in God’s faithfulness.

It is built upon the righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ, and upon His death on a cross to save sinners like you and me.

"My hope is built on nothing less/than Jesus’ blood and righteousness./I

dare not trust the sweetest frame/But wholly lean on Jesus’ name!”

If you are standing on the sold Rock of Jesus Christ, you have hope, no matter how much it may seem as if the world is falling apart around you.

Friends, I’ve got news for you, the world IS falling apart around you.

It has been doing so since Adam and Eve rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden.

From that day forward, everything has been broken.

Relationships are broken, and even the good ones are never as good as they were meant to be.

We hurt the people we love without even intending to do so.

Society is broken, and no matter how we try to fix it, it just winds up more broken.

We are defined to a greater and greater extent by our differences, rather than our similarities.

And as we focus on the differences, animosities grow and society falls further into the abyss.

The earth itself is broken, cursed by God at the Fall in the Garden, and our best solutions to fix it look like they will cause even greater problems for us.

And those are just the First-World problems.

Take a look at Haiti.

Take a look at Africa.

Take a look at North Korea, and parts of China and the Middle East, and it’s hard to come away with hope.

The problems in those places seem to be intractable.

Sometimes it seems there are no solutions to the suffering we see in the world.

We were made in the image of God.

We were made to display His Kingdom across the earth, but we have failed to do so.

Adam and Eve failed.

The nation of Israel — God’s chosen people — failed in the Old Testament times.

The church fails more often than we would like to admit.

After all, the church is made up of people who are struggling against the sins of their flesh — the same selfishness and the self-directedness, the same self-righteousness that plagued Israel.

And the world just keeps falling further into the pit.

But Jesus is coming.

And just as the people of Israel were waiting for the appearance of the Messiah in that first Advent, we now wait for His return.

They were waiting for a mighty Savior who would come and redeem His people, a conquering King who would establish His Kingdom in Jerusalem.

They expected Him to

What they did not expect was for this King to come in the humble flesh of a baby born to a young virgin who placed Him in a manger, where He was worshiped by lowly shepherds.

What they did not expect was for this King to come as a servant.

What they did not expect was for this King to give His life as a sacrifice for the sins of all mankind.

And now, we wait, much as they did more than 2,000 years ago.

We wait for the risen Jesus — He who conquered the grave and ascended back into Heaven to be with the Father — we wait for this Jesus to return.

And this time, we know that He WILL come in all His power and glory.

This time, we know that He will come with the sound of a trumpet to take home with Him those who have followed Him in faith.

We wait with the knowledge that the next time our risen Savior sets foot on earth, He will finally build His perfectly righteous Kingdom here, and He will rule in all righteousness.

We wait, knowing that at the end of that thousand-year reign, Jesus will finally and completely wipe the slate clean.

We wait, knowing that one fine day, He will create new heavens and a new earth, and all who have believed in Him will live with Him and the Father there in eternity.

Right now, it looks like we’re losing, and losing badly.

But we can have hope, just like that young lad on the Little League baseball field, because we know that when Jesus steps onto the field, everything will change.

We can have this unwavering hope, because it is anchored in the promises of the God who is always faithful.

We can have this unwavering hope, because we have been given a sure faith by this same faithful God, the Father who gives good gifts to His children.

Even in our darkest hours, He is there for us, reminding us through His Holy Spirit of the promises He has made.

And when we remember HIS faithfulness, we can find light in those dark times.

We’re going to be looking at a passage from the first chapter of the Book of Luke today, and while you are turning there, let me talk a bit about the darkness that the Jewish people were facing at the time of the birth of Jesus Christ.

At this time in history, Rome was a powerful empire, and the Jewish people were its subjects.

Their nation had been cut up into administrative districts under the rule of Roman proconsuls.

Herod the Great was a puppet king of the Roman Empire, and he had embarked upon a series of huge construction projects that helped drive taxation as high as 50 percent for the people who lived in the land.

He was an evil and cruel man who ensured loyalty through beatings and murder, executing even members of his own family whom he thought might represent a threat to his rule.

Revolutionary zealots from among the Jewish people rose up occasionally to try to force the Romans out of the land, and each time they failed, things got worse for everybody else.

This was truly a dark time for the Jewish people.

But it is often in our darkest times that God makes His presence known most clearly.

He uses our sufferings and troubles to show us that He is our only source of strength.

And right in the darkest hour, God had made Himself known to one of the priests in Israel.

This man, Zechariah, was old, and so was his wife, Elizabeth.

She had been barren, so they never had children.

But an angel had come to Zechariah while he was serving in the temple and had told him that Elizabeth would become pregnant and they would have a son who would be filled with the Holy Spirit, even before his birth and who would prepare the people for the coming of the Lord.

And when that son, John the Baptist, was born, it was clear to all that he was special.

“What will this child turn out to be?” they asked.

And now, picking up in Verse 67 of chapter 1 (I’m reading from the New Living Translation today, because the text there is a bit more accessible):

READ 67-80

Now, Zechariah had been skeptical when the angel had told him he would have a son at his advanced age.

And because of his skepticism, Zechariah had been struck dumb, and he wasn’t able to speak a word until the son had been born and they had taken him to the temple for his circumcision.

Contrast that with what happens here in today’s text.

Whereas Zechariah couldn’t even speak his own words previously, here he is speaking the divinely inspired words of God.

Here, he is revealing God’s divine purpose.

The difference is that here he is filled with the Holy Spirit, and I think there’s a lesson for us in that.

When Zechariah lacked faith, God would not use him.

But when he had surrendered to God’s plan — when he finally put his faith fully in the God who keeps all His promises — then God filled him with His Spirit and used Zechariah in a mighty way.

68

And Zechariah starts where we should all start.

He starts by praising God.

But note what He is praising God for.

“He has visited and redeemed His people.”

Now we don’t know when Zechariah made this prophecy.

It was sometime after the birth of John the Baptist, and the context of the passage suggests that John probably was no longer a baby.

But we do know that he was still a child, which means that Jesus, who was John’s second cousin and six months younger than John, was also a child.

And yet, Zechariah says here that God has redeemed His people.

The sense of the verb tense here is that this redemption, though it has not yet been manifested, has already been accomplished.

Luke

Zechariah had surely heard of the angel’s visit to Mary, of the virgin birth of Jesus and of the promise that He would reign over Israel as the Son of God.

But Jesus was still a boy.

How could he be spoken of as a mighty Savior?

What we see here is Zechariah’s faith in the promises of God.

What we see is an absolute confidence that God had ALREADY accomplished salvation for His people, even if the Son through whom that salvation would come was still a boy.

Jesus’ public ministry was still years away.