Rejoice in our confident hope (Romans 12:12)Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the four Sundays that come before Christmas. Advent was designed by some on the early church as a watching time, waiting for the advent – or coming – of the Messiah.
The world then, like the one we live in now, was a world of no hope. And hope is a strange thing, something hard to define. You either have it or you don’t.
Those who have hope are happy, even when things are going badly. They have some point to life, some reason to get up in the morning. They live.
Those who do not have it are miserable, they are despairing. There is no point, no purpose to their lives. They just exist.
You see people like that around. They are just waiting for something to happen, dreading the day it does, not knowing how to get the strength to make it through another day. Their dreams are gone, their joy is gone, their lives are futile.
They may even be people in good jobs or with good families. It may seem that they have everything to live for. But in their eyes, you see it. There is no hope. They are null and void in life, just waiting to die.
The apostle Paul calls it our confident hope. It is a hope that shows. We may even be going through a rough time in our lives, but the hope is there, maybe even partially buried. But it is there. And it will come back. It is a certain confidence in the fact that we know we are loved and that there is some purpose or reason beyond what we have been able to cobble together ourselves.
It is like the confidence of a man who knows his physical limitations and is walking through a rough neighborhood. It is like the confidence of a pretty girl who can break her nose and know it will be fine and she will still be pretty. It is like the salesman who is good at sales but hasn’t had any customers come in. He knows sooner or later they will and he will sell.
It is like sister Ella in her new sparkly cap. It looks good and people stop to tell her. She is confident in it.
It is knowing that things will turnout fine even if they look bad.
That is the hope we celebrate today, the hope of the resurrection, the hope of eternal life, the hope of purpose and meaning beyond this world. We celebrate hope. Jesus brought us hope. God gives us hope through him. As a Christ-follower, we have hope.
And that is what today is all about: hope. Confident hope. Eternal hope. Extreme hope. A hope that is everlasting and will never die.
That is our gift from God. And when we hope in him, we give it back to him.
No comments:
Post a Comment
To comment, post your comment and click the anonymous button. It would be nice if you signed it so I could know who you are.
You are welcome to say anything you want as long as it is nice. If I don't like it, or it is ugly, I will take it off, place it into the garbage disposal, grind it up, and allow it to be flushed into the Gulf of Mexico where it will be eaten by a fish and then excreted where it will lie on the bottom of the ocean until it is covered up by other comments.