God’s Gift of Hope
Rev. Robert D. Shofner, Jr.
St. John's UCC Boonville
I’ve got a confession to make. I watched that movie again. The one called “It’s a Wonderful Life.” My favorite line in that movie comes pretty close to the beginning. Clarence, the second class angel, is about to get his assignment. Clarence’s superior tells him, “You’ve got to go and help George Baley.” Clarence says, “Well, what is it? Is the guy sick?” The angel says, “No, no. It’s worse than that. He’s discouraged.” I love that line because it’s true. Discouragement, the lack of hope, can be a lot worse than physical illness.
There’s a guy by the name of Major Harold Cushner, who was a P.O.W. in Vietnam. He talks about the devastating effect of hopelessness on human beings. He describes one twenty-four year old Marine, also a P.O.W. in Vietnam. He went to his captors and promised he’d do whatever it took to help them if they promised to let him go. They said, “Sure.” He became a model prisoner, cooperating in every way he could. But after a while it became clear that they were lying to him; they weren’t going to let him go. Major Cushner describes it this way; “When the full realization of this took hold, he became a zombie. He refused to do any work, and he rejected all offers of food and encouragement. He simply lay on his cot, sucking his thumb. In a matter of weeks, he was dead.” I would guess that if there was one word to describe the cause of death, it would be “hopelessness.”
The human spirit needs hope to survive and to thrive. One expert said, “Since my early years as a physician, I’ve learned that taking away hope is, for most people, like pronouncing a death sentence. Their already hard-pressed will to live can become paralyzed, and they may give up and die.”
The writers of the Bible recognized this over 2500 years ago. Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” It’s not surprising that if God created human beings with this craving for hope, that it would make sense that He would also serve as our ultimate hope. In fact Romans 15:13 describes God as the God of hope. There are 95 references to “hope” in the Old Testament. There are another 85 references in the New Testament. The theme of hope is woven all throughout Scripture. And that’s our theme today as we get ready to enter into this season on the eve of a New Year.
George Gallup has said, “People in many nations appear to be searching, with new intensity, for spiritual moorings.” Why is that? He said, “One of the key factors prompting this search is a need for hope in these troubled times.”
The point we want to make is that the God of the Bible is that source of hope; that God offers a hope that is so powerful that it can transform a person’s life and rewrite that person’s eternity.
That’s not the kind of hope we think of when we use the word in everyday conversation. Sometimes when we talk about hope, what we really mean is “wishful thinking.” What’s that? Wishful thinking is when we try to hope things in or out of existence. We blow out the candles on our birthday cake and say, “I hope I have another year of health and happiness.” We pick up the Wall Street Journal and say, “I hope my Blue Chips have gone up again, finally.” Wishful thinking is that kind of hopeful feeling that somehow, someway, things are going to go the way we want them to, even though we really have no power over the situation. We don’t have any power to make it happen.
Another kind of hopeful attitude is “blind optimism.” Now, I think it’s great to be an optimistic person. I tend to be one myself. But some optimists see everything through rose colored glasses. They paper over their problems as if they didn’t exist. They avert their eyes from the ugliness of the world. To them, everything is just fine all the time.
Like the sign on the bulletin board at the grocery store that read, “Lost. Dog with three legs; blind in left eye; missing right ear; broken tail; and recently neutered. Answers to the name, ‘Lucky.’” We can call him “Lucky” all we want, but he’s not a lucky dog. And sometimes people, in their blind optimism will pretend thing are great … when they’re not. That’s not biblical hope.
And then there are ambitious dreams. These are those lofty goals that we tend to set right about this time of year. We set this lofty goal; “Next year I’m going to retire.” We’ve been saving the money and carefully watching our portfolio. Or we say, “This next year, I’m really going to improve my golf game.” So we go out to the practice range and we really practice hard. Now, all of that is fine, it’s wonderful to set ambitious goals and then to work toward achieving them. The problem is that often we are restricted by our own limitations, or by things that are outside of our control. I can go to the practice range day after day and hit buckets of balls, but I will never realize the dream of beating Tiger Woods. Can’t even beat Ray Meinert! Thousands of people had the ambitious dream of retiring with a modest nest egg, but then the market crashed, and their dreams were dashed.
Let’s contrast wishful thinking and blind optimism and ambitious dreams with biblical hope. For most people, hoping is something that they do. But the Bible talks about hope as something that we can have. See the difference? The world thinks of hope as an action, something we do. The Bible says that hope is something we have; we can possess it; we can own it; we can grab a hold of it.
For someone who follows Jesus Christ, here is a definition of hope. Hope is the confident expectation that God is willing and able to fulfill His promises to us. God is not only able, He is willing to fulfill the promises He has made to you.
The Bible refers to this as living hope, because it is always directly linked to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 1:4 says; “In [God’s] great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade – kept in heaven for you.”
Through His resurrection, Jesus Christ demonstrated once and for all, beyond any doubt, that He is God, and that He really does possess the power to fulfill the promises that He makes to us. Promises that He’ll change our lives; promises that He’ll guide us; promises that He will walk side by side with us through the storms of life; promises that He will grant us eternal life in heaven with Him. The resurrection is an actual, physical event of history that sealed Christ’s identity as being the God who loves us and who is committed to helping us.
Hebrews 6:19 tells us; “We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.” Think on that. Our hope is only as good as what it is attached to; as what it is anchored to. Hope, in and of itself, has no power. We can wish for something, we can hope for something, we might make ourselves feel a little better about it, but the only way hope as any real power is when it is anchored to the God who has real power. And not only real power, but a real desire, out of His love for us, to help us.
Why do Christians have hope? First, we have hope because we are absolved of our past. We are absolved of our past. Lamentations 3:21 tells us; “This I call to mind and therefore I have hope: because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning.” We can live with hope as followers of Jesus Christ. Because even though we may fail God, which we all do; and even though we may fail our children or parents in some way, which we all do; and even though we may fail our partner in some way, which we all do; even so … God’s compassion, His forgiveness, His absolution for those wrongs we’ve done in our past … is a renewable resource. It is never exhausted. It is fresh and available every single day.
Remember the movie City Slickers? In one of the scenes, one of the characters breaks down sobbing. He confesses that his wife had caught him in adultery and had left him; his wife’s father was his boss, so he’d lose his job. He was nearly 40 years old, and he was afraid that he had wasted his life. His friends tried to cheer him up and reminded him that when they were kids together, and the ball got stuck up in a tree or something, they’d call out “Do over.” They told him, “Your life is a do over!”
When I heard them say that, I thought, “Where is this guy … whose life is a mess … going to get a do over? Where’s he going to get a fresh slate … if not from Jesus Christ?” Jesus Christ is in the do over business! That’s His job; that’s His ministry; that’s His mission!
To give “do overs” to people like us. God says, “I forgive you; I absolve you of your past; because My compassions are new every morning. They never fail.”
Isn’t this the perfect time to ask God for a do over? If you feel weighed down by guilt in your life over something … the way you treated your kids while they were growing up … a marriage that fell apart … whatever it is … why would you want to carry this backpack of guilt into a whole new year? God is saying, “”My mercies are fresh every day.” In 1 John 1:9 God says, “You don’t have to wonder if I’ll forgive you. You just ask Me. Confess your sin, and I will forgive you.” The question is, are we going to ask?
The second reason Christians can have hope is because we are assured of our future. We are assured of our future.
Lee Strobel, author of The Case for Christ and other great books, spent the first 30 years of his life as an atheist. He tells how he woke up so many times in the middle of the night, looking into the blackness. He said that’s how his soul felt. Blackness. He realized there was nothing after he died. He realized that when he died everything he was, everything he had, would be buried in a casket, and that’s it. Talk about a prescription for hopelessness! And yet one out of every six Americans believe there is nothing after this life. No wonder there is hopelessness in our nation! It’s a hopelessness so black that people can’t face it.
So, some people engage in blind optimism. They say, “I just won’t think about it. Maybe by the time I get sick and I’m ready to die, they’ll find some cure for whatever it is I have.” Or they pursue ambitious dreams. They say, “Hey, I’ll lose thirty pounds, cut my cholesterol in half, I’ll extend my lifespan through discipline and self-control and hard work.”
Those defense mechanisms can make people feel alright for a while, but … there is one really ugly statistic in this world. And that is … death plays a perfect game. One out of one dies. That’s 100 percent.
I’ve learned over the years that how we face death says a whole lot about how we face life. And when we are assured of a future in eternity with God, then we have a sense of confidence and boldness and courage in this world. It turns us from hopelessness to hope.
Back before Nancy Kerrigan became real famous, she was filmed for a documentary on up and coming figure skaters. They filmed her doing this beautiful routine; then they panned down to a shot of her mother. She’s standing in front of a large TV monitor, with her face pressed against the screen. At age 31, she became virtually blind. Here her daughter was just a few feet away, skating this beautiful routine. And her mom is trying to watch her on the monitor. The correspondent asked her, “What do you see?” She said, “Well, I see a bit of color. I can see movement, I guess it’s when Nancy jumps. I can’t really tell.” Then she began to cry. She said, “But I can’t see her face. I can’t see my daughter’s face.”
When I saw that, I thought, “That’s how I feel.” Unlike Lee Strobel, who was an atheist until he was thirty, I’ve been a Christian all of my life. And over the years, I have felt the Lord’s presence in my life. Sometimes it’s been a powerful feeling; sometimes not. I have felt the liberation that came when I finally realized He forgave me, and continues to forgive me. I have sensed His presence that comforts me when I’ve gone through tough times. I have sensed His gentle guidance when He’s led me through some tough choices in life. He’s very real to me at times. But I can’t see His face. I can’t see His face, and I want to. And I know that some day … I have the confident expectation that God is going to fulfill His promises to me … that one day I will stand in the presence of Jesus Christ, and I will look Him fully in His face. And it will be the greatest moment in my life! There will be nothing like that moment when we first “drink in” the face of Jesus.
Death is not something to be afraid of when we are assured of our future. So, here’s my question. As we approach a new year, why would you want to spend another 365 days wondering? “Is it going to be oblivion, or is it going to be the face of Jesus Christ?” Do we want to spend another year uncertain of our future? I don’t think so. So, what do we do?
Look at Titus 3, there in the outline; “He saved us through his mercy – not by virtue of any moral achievement of ours … We are acquitted by his grace, and can look forward in hope to inheriting eternal life.”
Where do we get that hope? One more story.
The summer when I was 8 years old, I stole a book off the Book Sale table at church. The pastor saw me take it, and he called my grandma, since he knew I was spending the month with her. She called me into the front room and said, “Bobby, what book did you steal from church?” I broke into hysterics! “I’m sorry, Grandma! I didn’t mean to steal it. I don’t know why I did it. I’ll never do it again! I promise! Cross my heart and hope to die!” Actually, I was so humiliated, I did hope to die! Grandma said, “I know, dear. I know you won’t do it again. But that doesn’t take care of now. Here’s what you’re going to do. First, you and I are going to church and you are going to apologize to Pastor. Then you’re going to pay for the book. Pastor said it cost $2.00. You’ll pay for that, and then you’re going to pay three times that much as a punishment. That’s $6.00. Do you think that’s fair?”
I didn’t have six dollars. Why did she think I stole the book in the first place? But I didn’t say that. In fact, I was terrified! I knew I was in deep weeds then. Where was I going to get the money? So I said, “Yeah, that’s fair … I guess.” I was still in tears. I felt hopelessness … despair … “What’s going to happen?” I thought.
Then Grandma did an amazing thing. She got up and went over to the china hutch and got down the cookie jar. She took out several folded bills and counted out six tattered dollars. She handed me the money and said, “I just want to teach you something about Jesus. Bobby, here’s the $6.00 for you. I want to pay your penalty so that you don’t have to. Now, why would I do that?” she asked me. “I don’t know.” “I’m doing it because I love you. You are valuable to me. Because I care about you. So I want you to take the money. We’ll go down to church and you can pay Pastor back. But I want you to remember something always. Jesus loves you, too. And this little $6.00 paying for your penalty … that’s just a little taste of what Jesus has done for you.”
I wish I could fully describe for you the look on my face. Relief, joy, wonder … I was giddy with gratitude!
I’ve seen that kind of face on adults when they’ve come to the realization of what Jesus did for them. When they come to the realization … they’ve done things, just like I have … things they’ve never should have done. And they ought to be held accountable for them. The Bible says the penalty is separation from God forever. Because God is perfect, pure, and holy … and we’re not! We’ve messed up.
But Jesus Christ, because He loves us, because we’re valuable to Him, went to the cross the pay the penalty for every sin we ever have and ever will commit. And just like Grandma offered me those tattered dollars, He’s offering a gift to you. He’s asking, “Do you want to be absolved of your past and assured of your future in heaven with Me? It’s a gift. Free. But you must take it.” I could have turned Grandma’s gift down, but why would I? Why would you?
The last written words I have from my Grandma I’ve shared with you before. She wrote them following her description of the last full year of her earthly life. It had been a year during which she and Grandpa had to give up their independence and worldly possessions and home of 50 years because of declining health. Yet, in spite of all that happened, she had the confident, expectant hope that God would yet fulfill all His promises to her. She wrote, “With Jesus as my Savior, I know the best is yet to be.”
That is my prayer for you. Claim God’s gift of hope this Christmas season … and then you will be assured that the best is surely yet to be!
Let’s pray.
Father, we’ve all done a lot of things that we know are wrong. We know the consequence of our wrongdoing. But we know, too, that Your Son died on the cross as my substitute, to pay for the sins we have committed. And even as we repent of our sins, we reach out and receive His free gift of forgiveness and eternal life. Thank You for giving us this ultimate gift of hope.
And the people said, “Amen.”
