Sermon Tone Analysis

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message.

The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit.

Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

Engagement

My guess is that most everyone here today has participated in a gift exchange at Christmas time before - maybe at your office, or with your family or even with a group from church.

When Mary and I lived in Albuquerque, the young married group at our church had a white elephant gift exchange every year.

The fact that we were part of a young married group tells you that this was quite some time ago.

As with most white elephant gift exchanges, many of the gifts that people brought were gag gifts of some kind, although once in a while someone would bring something really nice that people would steal or fight over.

But what I remember most was this set of black ceramic swans that seemed to show up year after year.

So for the person who ended up with those swans at the end of the night, the challenge was to try and wrap them in a way that no one would know what was in the package the following year.

Fortunately Mary and I were never stuck with those swans, but to be real honest, I can’t remember even one of the gifts that I ended up with over the five or six years we took part in that gift exchange.

And my guess if that most of us remember very few of the Christmas gifts we’ve received over the years.

As we were reminded earlier, the fact that “God is with us” changes everything.

This year for our Christmas sermon series, we’re going to focus on four ways that Emmanuel - God with us - can change our lives by giving us lasting gifts in exchange for us giving him our problems, struggles, fears and doubts.

So we’re calling this series The Great Gift Exchange.

So we won’t be looking at what most of us would consider to be “traditional” Christmas passages like the accounts of the angel coming to Mary and Joseph in Matthew or the account of the birth of Jesus in Luke.

Instead we will be studying four different passages that give us some important insight into the eternal gifts Jesus wants to give each of us - gifts that were made possible when Jesus came to earth to be God with us.

Tension

We’ll begin this morning by talking about how Jesus wants to give us hope in return for our despair.

That is something I think all of us could use right now.

There are certainly a lot of legitimate reasons for despair right now.:

We’ve been dealing with the COVID pandemic for almost 2 years now and that has not only caused some dramatic changes to the way we live our lives, but it has also led to a lot of conflict in our culture.

And Christians and the church haven’t been immune to any of that.

The holidays can be a particularly difficult time for those who have family members who are no longer with them.

Inflation and supply line issues and businesses that are short-staffed have taken a toll on all of us.

In the latest poll, only 20% of the people in this country feel that we are on the right track, the lowest number in quite some time.

But, as we’ll see this morning, there is good news.

Jesus wants us to give Him that despair, and in return, he’ll give us hope.

Truth

Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Psalm 43.

This is actually a Psalm that we looked at earlier this year in our series on Praying the Psalms, but we’re going to approach it from a different perspective today.

Perhaps you remember that we said then that Psalms 42 and 43 were likely one Psalm that was split into two separate Psalms at some point.

So we looked at both Psalms together in that message.

But this morning we’re going to limit our attention to Psalm 43.

Since it’s only 5 verses, let’s go ahead and read it out loud together:

Although this Psalm consists of only five verses, it is packed with some very practical instruction for how to deal with our despair.

And here is the main idea we’ll be developing from this Psalm today:

Jesus gives me hope in exchange for my despair when I seek Him, not just a solution

Like most of us are prone to do, the psalmist begins by seeking a solution to his problem.

And his problem is certainly one that most of us can relate to.

He wants God to give him relief from the ungodly, deceitful and unjust people who oppose him.

That might not be a whole lot different than some of our prayers today, nearly 3,000 years later:

I think most of us have probably prayed for an end to the COVID pandemic.

The large majority of prayer requests that get shared in our church involve health issues and our prayers tend to focus on asking God to bring physical healing.

There are obviously a lot of people in our country, including a lot of Christians, who believe the answer to our problems is a change in our political leadership.

And I think we’d all like to see God bring down gas prices, right?

So like the psalmist, we tend to think, at least at first, that the way for us to have hope is for God to solve our problems or change our circumstances.

And when that doesn’t happen, we tend to get even more frustrated.

That is certainly the case for the psalmist.

Although he knows intellectually that God is his refuge, because God hasn’t answered his prayers in the way he wants by changing his situation, he feels like God has rejected him.

So he goes moping around, complaining about the continued oppression by his enemies.

I think if we’re honest, we often feel like that too, don’t we?

By the end of the Psalm there is not one shred of evidence that God does anything to change his circumstances.

And in some ways, not even his feelings have changed.

Instead God changes his perspective.

Rather than finding a solution to his problem, the psalmist finds God Himself.

And it is only once he has done that that he is able to exchange his despair for hope.

We are probably all a lot more like this psalmist than we realize.

When difficulties come, our first tendency is to do what he did and pray for God to change our circumstances.

And we see here that it is not necessarily wrong to do that.

So go ahead and pray for God to heal your cancer or to provide you with a new job or to provide for some need in your life or for Him to remove you from a difficult situation.

But we also learn here that even when God doesn’t answer those prayers in which we ask Him to change our circumstances, it is still possible for Him to turn our despair into hope.

So let’s take a look at the specific actions the psalmist took in order to exchange his despair for hope.

Application

HOW TO LET JESUS EXCHANGE MY DESPAIR FOR HOPE

Live according to God’s Word

Once he gets past his initial prayer in which he asks God to change his circumstances, the first thing the psalmist prays is:

Send out your light and your truth, let them lead me...

The psalmist is in a dark place, so he needs God’s light and truth.

But it’s clear here that he knows it’s not enough to just know God’s truth intellectually.

He needs to let that truth guide the way he lives his life.

When Pontius Pilate was interrogating Jesus, he ended with a question that Jesus never answered, at least not to Pilate: “What is truth?”

Apparently that is a question that Americans are still wrestling with today.

In a May 2020 survey, nearly 60% of the people surveyed believed that there are no moral absolutes and that it is up to each individual to determine to determine what truth is.

What is even more troubling is that almost half of people who attend evangelical churches hold that same belief.

Jesus made it clear that truth is more than just a concept or idea.

It is a person.

That is why Jesus declared “I am the truth” to His disciples shortly before His crucifixion.

And we are exposed to the truth that is embodied in Jesus in God’s Word - the Bible.

Right after Jesus declared that He is the truth, He prayed these words to His Father:

When we are dealing with despair, we often don’t feel like spending time in God’s Word.

But that is when we need it the most.

But it’s not enough to just read the Bible.

We have to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to help us understand it and put it into practice in our lives.

And sometimes that will mean that we have to obey God’s Word even when it doesn’t make sense to us.

Living according to God’s Word may not change our circumstances, but it will change us.

It will allow us to see things from God’s perspective.

And that makes it possible to have hope even in the hardest times.

Spend time with God’s people

When we’re in despair, we often have a tendency to become withdrawn and isolated.

But isolation actually tends to make our despair even worse.

Most of us have experienced firsthand the isolation that has been forced upon us due to the COVID pandemic.

I certainly know that I really enjoyed getting together with our extended family for Thanksgiving again this year after Mary and I celebrated on our own last year.

The isolation that has been forced on us as a result of the pandemic hasn’t been a good thing for most people.

It has led to a significant increase in substance abuse, depression and anxiety over the last two years.

That shouldn’t be surprising since God created us to live in community with others.

At the very beginning of creation, God declared that “it is not good for man to be alone”.

The psalmist seems to understand that here.

The references to God’s holy hill and His dwelling are clearly referring to the temple, where God’s people gathered for corporate worship.