Rediscover Hope

This is a season of hope. Advent is all about hope. The word Advent means “coming” or “arrival,” and the season is traditionally a time of expectation, waiting, anticipation, and longing.

Advent is not just an extension of Christmas—it is a season that links the past, present, and future. Advent offers us the opportunity to share in the ancient longing for the coming of the Messiah, to celebrate His birth, and to be alert for His second coming. Advent looks back in celebration at the hope fulfilled in Jesus’s coming, while at the same time looking forward in hopeful and eager anticipation to the coming of Christ’s kingdom when He returns for His people. During Advent we wait for both—it’s an active, assured, and hopeful waiting.

Far too often, our Christmases have become frenzied and overwhelmingly busy. We pack our schedules with so many seasonal happenings. Our stores start pushing Christmas decor and merchandise and fueling a gift-buying frenzy in October. Our season of peace is quickly overloaded as a season of stress.

But Advent is an opportunity to set all that aside. Advent is a time to prepare our hearts and help us place our focus on a far greater story than our own—the story of God’s redeeming love for our world. It’s not a season of pretending to be happy or covering up the pain or hardships we have experienced during the past year or continue to experience—it is a season of digging deep into the reality of what it means that God sent His Son into the world to be Immanuel, God With Us. It is a season of expectation and preparation, an opportunity to align ourselves with God’s presence more than just the hectic season of presents.

So wherever you are on your level of 2020 anxiety and uncertainty, wherever you are on your own spiritual journey, I invite you into this season of Advent. I’d like to even suggest that in the craziness and uncertainty and pandemic of this year, we’ve been given a gift. We’ve been given the opportunity to rediscover Christmas.

For the next four weeks, we’re going to be exploring the attributes of Christ encapsulated in His birth and the Christmas season: hope, peace, joy, and love. And on Christmas Eve, we will celebrate the arrival of Jesus, the Christ. Today we begin with rediscovering the hope of Christmas, even when we are surrounded by uncertainty.

HOPE

The word hope can be described as “an expectation or belief in a desired outcome.” I like to think of it as in “hanging it all out for something you believe in.” Hope can be the fuel of the Christian life, empowering people to go into the world and work on Christ’s behalf. Jurgen Moltmann’s theology of hope says that the future is the basis for changing the present, and that Christian service should be an attempt to make otherworldly hopes a present reality

Make no mistake, friends, hope is very different from optimism. Optimism looks at a situation and believes that things will one day get better. There is a sense of “better days ahead” in optimism and it is built on emotionalism. Hope is not like that. Where optimism says things will get better; hope; specifically Christian hope, says even if things do not get better- God is still good and I am still loved. Hope rises against emotionalism and plants itself in the truth that lives in the heart- Jesus is king. As one old saying goes, hope is not the belief that everything will come out good; but that everything comes out how God wants it to.”

Simeon and Anna

Simeon and Anna are flickers of hope in Israel, and in the Christmas story. Simeon and Anna both had lived many years waiting for the Savior of Israel. They had lived in hope that the promises that they read in the Old Testament and the messages that God had spoken to their hearts would come true. Anna had been waiting somewhere between 50-70 years for this Savior, praying and worshipping in the temple every day; and Simeon had been given a revelation by the Spirit that he would see the Savior, and he had been waiting for this moment.

We can see the hope in Simeon and Anna, because neither the effects of time or circumstance had caused them to waiver from their belief.

If you read through the Christmas story you might notice something different about Simeon and Anna. Everyone else in the story needs a little convincing to believe in this Jesus Child. Not Simeon and Anna, though. They were not shocked, surprised, or skeptical- their hope had arrived and they were confident and blessed.

Simeon and Anna teach us some really important truths about hope. Let’s look at them.

HOPE LOOKS BEYOND

Hope is forward looking. In Romans 8 Paul is teaching about hope and he comes to the height of his thoughts on hope in verses 24-30; listen to verses 24-25:

Romans 8:24–25 ESV

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

Paul reminds us that hope has to look beyond the current situation and circumstance because one cannot hope when you see what you want or expect. For example, I can hope to find a $50 dollar bill in my pocket- maybe I lost $50 last week and I am hoping I left it in my jacket pocket, but the moment that I reach my hand into my pocket my hope either materializes into joy, or dives into despair. Hope is not focused in the present moment, but in something coming down the road.

This is why Paul says we must have patience in order to have hope- because many times hope is an endurance game. Many of the things that we hope are long range hopes. The hope of heaven, the hope of salvation, the hope of many answered prayers all take time. There is little instant gratification in discipleship.

This is why Christians are challenged to put our hope in God, and our hope in God’s work. Because, I don’t know about you, but if I only hoped in what my eyes can see in the present moment, many times I don't see much hope. We live in a culture that is built on fear mongering-

“You better refinance now, because the market is going to crash and rates are going to skyrocket!”

“You better get that new insurance plan, don’t leave your family with all your debt!”

But the Psalmist calls to us in Ps 39:7 ““And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you”

HOPE FINDS FOUNDATION IN THE PAST

I used to have this old, rickety ladder in my garage. It had plenty of use on it, if you know what I mean. I used it pretty often to get up to shelves, or paint trim, all sorts of odds and ends. Now, please know that I am not scared of ladders, but I do have some caution on them, because I am a big guy and not the most coordinated man in the world, so I pick my shots when using a ladder.” It was all good with this ladder until one day I stepped up on the 3rd or fourth step and the step just broke- SNAP. Now I caught myself before going all the way to the floor. You know what I did next? I threw that ladder in the trash and went and bought an aluminum ladder built for bigger boys like me- why? Because I had doubts on the ladder’s ability to hold me any longer- I didnt feel safe and had compromised trust.

It is very hard to have faith if you have no trust in the thing you hope in.

Simeon and Anna hoped because they had seen the hand of God and built their hope on the work that God had done throughout history. So much of the Old Testament communicates the idea of leaving a legacy for the next generation.

Think of Joshua 4 after Israel had passed over the river Jordan and Joshua said

“Then Joshua called the twelve men from the people of Israel, whom he had appointed, a man from each tribe. And Joshua said to them, “Pass on before the ark of the LORD your God into the midst of the Jordan, and take up each of you a stone upon his shoulder, according to the number of the tribes of the people of Israel, that this may be a sign among you. When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ then you shall tell them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD. When it passed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. So these stones shall be to the people of Israel a memorial forever.”

Or in Exodus 24 after receiving the 10 Commandments “Moses came and told the people all the words of the LORD and all the rules. And all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words that the LORD has spoken we will do.” And Moses wrote down all the words of the LORD. He rose early in the morning and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel.”

Or After Samuel’s victory in Mizpah in 1 Sam 7 “Then Samuel took a stone and set it up between Mizpah and Shen and called its name Ebenezer; for he said, “Till now the LORD has helped us.”

If someone asked you “Why do you have hope in Jesus? What would your answer be? Sure, you might quote some Scriptures or stories from the Bible; but I bet for many, if not most of us, we would tells the story of how God saved us from addiction; or the cancer that God healed us from; or the story of your broken marriage that God repaired; or the way that God brought you through tragedy.

Hope in Christ is a fruit of trusting in Jesus, and we learn to trust God by personal encounter with him.

HOPE MAY NOT ANSWER EVERY QUESTION, BUT IT CAN GIVE US BOLDNESS

In Romans 5:6 Paul writes these words “ and hhope does not put us to shame, because God’s love ihas been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Shame causes us to be timid, passive, and cower in fear. Shameful feelings cause us to only think of self preservation and empower us to be so focused on keeping hidden we become useless in the Kingdom of God. Many times shameful living is primarily focused on you- specifically your past, your mistakes, your shortcomings and your failures.

The opposite of living with shame is living in boldness. Not the kind of boldness that wears lime green zebra striped pants to a business meeting, or the kind of boldness that sings karaoke at the top of your lungs in front of a room of random strangers, but the kind of boldness that is sure of who you are in Jesus, confident in his love and presence in your life, and the kind of boldness that stands against the lies of the Devil and proclaims NOT TODAY SATAN!

And where does this boldness come from? Hope! Paul tells us that good hope never puts us to shame. Instead, when the love of Christ is poured into our hearts it empowers us to live in boldness because of the hope of Jesus.

The kind of boldness that empowreed Peter to walk on the water on the water

The boldness that called Lazarus from the grave

The boldness that helped a boys give his lunch to feed thousands

The boldness that helped some friends lower a paralyzed friend through the roof.

Tom Moore, now Captain Sir Tom Moore, since he was knighted by the Queen of England, is the 100-year-old man who singlehandedly raised $40 million for the British health care system by walking 100 laps around his garden. That’s right, 100 laps for 100 years. What started as a challenge from his son-in-law to donate $1 per lap (technically a pound in England), went viral when his daughter posted the campaign on an online charity site. The news spread quickly, and suddenly this World War II veteran, gripping his walker, wearing a navy blue blazer decorated with his military medals, walking around his garden, became a national hero. Captain Tom was an inspiration.

What an amazing story! And he says he wants to travel the world once the pandemic subsides. I hope I’m that spry when I’m 100 years old. But there’s a great lesson about hope in this story. Listen to this, what Captain Tom told reporters:

“The first step was the hardest,” he said. “After that, I got into the swing of it and kept on going.”