Good Morning All,
Romans 15:13; “May the God of
hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the
Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.”
We are in the season of Advent.
Too often, we kind of try to pass by Advent; we would rather go right to
Christmas. Yet the season of Advent is
rich in what it offers us. One of the
elements of Advent that I enjoy is that tradition has named the four Sundays
with a gift that the coming of Jesus gives to us. They are the Sundays of hope, love, joy and
peace. These are four desires of redeemed
man; we desire to live in these states or with these qualities. The first Sunday is the Sunday of hope.
Hope is the expectation for something good to happen in the future
because of past events. That is the
definition of hope. It is not a
wishy-washy fantasy but rather it is an expectation of something. Many of us cheer for our favorite
professional football team or baseball team.
We say we “hope” they make the Super Bowl or the World Series but how
many of you, a month before the regular season started, bought tickets for the
Super Bowl or went to your boss and scheduled your vacation for the World Series
games that you will go to in 2017. If
you have hope, real hope, this is how you would act. Real hope changes our current existence. Real hope changes our outlook and our expectation
for the here and now. That is what hope
is and that is what hope does for us.
Our hope does not depend upon what we do or have; our hope depends
entirely upon God. Our hope is dependent
upon the promises that God has made to us in the person of Jesus. With the arrival of Jesus as a little baby in
Bethlehem, God kept the promises made to the Old Testament people to send a
Savior. In Jesus, God showed himself to
be faithful to his promises. With Jesus,
we now have the hope of eternal life, forgiveness of sins and of God’s presence
in our lives. With Jesus, we see the
past events and we can look forward, with certainty to the future events which
is the return of Jesus and the new creation.
Our hope is secured by God who never lies, never deceives, never
abandons and never quits. That is our
hope.
It does not matter if you are rich or poor, healthy or ill, liked or
disliked, tall, short, skinny, fat, what color your skin is; nothing about you
impacts your hope. Your hope is only
impacted by a God who loves you and sent Jesus to die in your place in order to
make you a member of his holy family. This loving God is the source, the only source
of our hope. So we can live today with
the knowledge and the confidence of this hope.
Our situation in life may be dramatically impacted by the sinful world
around us but our eternal salvation is only impacted by God and He loves us
with a love that will never die.
Father
of mercy, you give us hope. We know that
our life is in you and that in you we will never die. We know that death will only be a door to
your heavenly kingdom and we can confidently look forward to the return of
Jesus and the perfecting of creation.
Help us to live today as your people, trusting only in your grace. In the precious name of Jesus we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret
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