Hope Against Hope
Sermon
Together In Christ
Sermons and Prayers For the Christian Year
Sometimes, as we get to this point in the year, it seems that winter will go on forever. It's been cold for so long that you can hardly remember the last time you put on a pair of shorts and basked in the warmth of the sun. You are so sick of shoveling the driveway that you would almost rather go to the dentist with an impacted wisdom tooth than go through another snowstorm. The trees have been bare for so long that you wonder whether things like flowers and leaves are just figments of your imagination.
If you have little children, you are just trying to hang on until the spring. By now, your kids are practically bouncing off the walls because they have been kept inside for four months and you wonder if your house will still be standing when it is finally warm enough to send the kids outside to play again.
Winter can be a very trying and depressing season, for young and old alike. But even in the very depths of winter, amid the snow and ice and blustery cold, you never lose hope completely. You always know in the back of your mind that sooner or later, flowers, birds and baseball will all come back. Even as the blizzards rage, you can pull out your calendar and be reassured that it is just a matter of time before this long night of winter gives way to the brightening dawn of spring.
It's easy to be reassured and it's easy to cling to hope, where the seasons of the calendar year are concerned. But what about the seasons of life? What about the winter seasons we go through in life, when we are discouraged and disappointed; when we are filled with doubt and discontent? How do we live with the conviction that our spiritual winters will pass? Where do we find our hope and reassurance when there's no calendar on the wall to promise us that March must someday give way to May.
When we are young, we want to be reassured about the direction of our lives. We want to know that we will find our place and make our way in this world. The future is a little frightening and we wish we could know what it will bring.
When we are middle aged, we want to be reassured about the meaning of our lives. We want to know that our lives are still significant, even if some of our dreams and delusions have faded. The future is a little too familiar and we wish we could know that it will be as satisfying as once we had hoped.
And when we are older, we want to be reassured about the promises of life, the promises of our golden years, and in particular, the promise of eternal life. The future is the great unknown and we wish we could face it with perfect grace and faith.
We can endure spiritual winters at any stage of life and we can wonder if we'll ever know the joys of spring again. That is why we need a way to live with hope, year in and year out, even when there seems no reason to hope. As faithful people, we need a way to believe in tomorrow even when we are troubled about today.
The Bible tells us - in both the Old and New Testaments - that we can learn something about hope by looking up at Abraham. It suggests that we can find something in the story of Abraham's life which will help us live better lives of our own.
When we first meet Abraham, he is already an old man. Having worked hard all his life, he is now a fairly wealthy man, living on his Social Security checks and the income from a few well-placed stock investments made when he was younger. He and his wife, Sarah, are on the waiting list for an exclusive nursing home and are happy with that decision. Everything about their life seems well-planned and in order, the way one's "golden years" are supposed to be.
Still, there is a gaping hole in their lives and a consuming sorrow in their hearts - they have no children. As things stand now, Abraham will have to leave his estate to a n'er-do-well third cousin who lives out of state and he's not happy about that (cf. Genesis 15:2). It looks like the family name will die with Abraham.
He and Sarah tried mightily to have children over the years, but to no avail, with each failure proving more painful than the last. The fertility drugs were ineffective. The frozen embryos didn't take and neither did the artificial implantation. At one point, they used a surrogate mother named Hagar, who conceived a child for Abraham, but as often happens in such arrangements, things got messy after the child was born. Sarah thought Hagar was mocking her barrenness and flouting her own fertility and in a fit of jealousy sent Hagar and the child away (cf. Genesis 16).
Then one day, God came to Abraham and told him to forget about the nursing home - God was going to make a covenant with Abraham, giving him a new land to live in, where he would become the father of many nations. His descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and they would live in this new land as an "everlasting possession."
Abraham took his nephew, Lot, to look at this new land. Part of it was rich and fertile and when Lot said he wanted that section for himself, Abraham assented. Then Abraham went to look at the remainder of the land and, lo and behold, it was as barren as Sarah was! The local zoning commission said he couldn't do anything with it. This covenant business with God seemed to get off to a rather shaky start.
Then the rest of God's covenant sunk in: Abraham and Sarah were going to conceive a child! Abraham thought this was hysterical and fell on the floor laughing. Sarah joined in, crying out between gales of laughter, "Shall I still have pleasure with my husband who is so old?" (cf. 18:12). Abraham thought the question was a little unkind but admitted that she had a point.
This is where Paul steps in, with some commentary from our text in Romans. Paul says that in an objective sense, in the sense of looking at the physical evidence, Abraham had no reason to hope that the Promised Land would amount to a hill of beans, or that he would, in fact, become the father of many nations. But Abraham also had every reason to hope, because God had made that promise to him. So, Paul uses a beautiful phrase to describe Abraham's faith: "In hope he believed against hope."
If we would find that same faith and hope ourselves, we should note three aspects of this covenant between God and Abraham which speak to our own spiritual lives today.
First, God chose the most unlikely means to fulfill His Word. The Promised Land was barren and so was the woman God chose to be the mother of many nations.
But then again, it didn't matter that the land seemed unpromising and the chosen people seemed inadequate. Their relative merits or demerits as agents of God's will were unimportant - what mattered was God's will. "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" (Genesis 18:14). When God says something will be done, He doesn't need superhumans to get it done - just ordinary people like Abraham and Sarah, or you and me.
The second aspect of God's covenant with Abraham is that it was initiated by God. God came to Abraham; Abraham didn't go to God. We see the same thing with Moses and Jeremiah and Mary and Paul - none of them went to God. What can we learn from that?
A lot of Christians are confused today because they hear people telling them what they must do to draw near to God. "Say this prayer, read this book, send this tithe, join this ministry, do this, that or the other thing and then you will feel close to God." Well, some people try and try, and when they don't feel close to God like they think they are supposed to, they get mad at God or think something is wrong with their faith.
That's not the way to be intimate with God! To say, "I want to draw near to God, if only He will let me" is feeble and doomed to failure. God has already drawn near to you! He did it most decisively by coming in the person of Jesus Christ and He does it again and again in the hearts of those who are ready to receive a God who is constantly seeking out His people.
If you are frustrated because you can't feel close to God, maybe you are going about it in the wrong way. Maybe you are assuming too much for yourself, thinking that by your own effort, you can draw near to the Almighty. Maybe you should stop and realize that God is the One who is drawing near to you.
Finally, the third aspect of God's covenant with Abraham is the heart of what I want to say this morning: that the whole basis of Abraham's hope did not rest in himself; his hope rested completely and utterly in God. That is why he could "hope against hope that he would become the father of many nations."
As we already know, Abraham had no reason to hope, he had a barren wasteland and a barren wife and he himself was old. Yet Abraham had every reason to hope, because God had made a covenant with him. How do you live with hope against hope, even when all the evidence says otherwise? You do it by holding on to your faith in God and letting go of your faith in yourself.
For most of us, our first instinct is to trust in ourselves. We rely on our own powers to sustain us or accomplish our goals, and then, when we fall short, we turn to God as a last resort, asking Him to fulfill a promise which we never really believed in anyway.
But we should know better. Think of our life's journey as a non-stop, cross country drive and you'll see what I mean. We share the driving with someone else because we can't do it all ourselves, and when we sleep as the other person drives, we are literally putting our life in the other driver's hands. If we trust our lives to other people who are mere flesh and blood, how much more should we be willing to trust our lives to God?
When we are young, we have no real way of knowing that we will find our direction in life. We have no concrete evidence that we will master the future and find our place in the world, because we haven't been there yet! We're just starting out! We have no reason to hope, yet we have every reason to hope and so we may live with hope against hope because we place our trust in God.
When we are middle aged, we have no real way of knowing the meaning of our lives. We have no clear evidence that our lives mean much more than getting the next paycheck or putting the next meal on the table. We have no reason to hope, yet we have every reason to hope and so we may live with hope against hope because we place our trust in God.
And when we are older, we have no real way of knowing how the promises of life will be given to us. Golden years can be hard and we certainly have no physical evidence of the promise of eternal life from anyone who has been there. We have no reason to hope, yet we have every reason to hope and so we may live with hope against hope because we place our trust in God.
And what about those of us, at any age, who worry about the future our children and grandchildren will inherit? What do we see but violence and brutality; sickness, sorrow and scandal; trial and tribulation at every turn? What do we see but a steadily more degraded environment and a diminution of human dignity, with rich nations too wealthy to help the poor and poor nations too impoverished to help themselves? When we look at the world our children and grandchildren will inherit, we have no reason to hope, yet we have every reason to hope and so we may live with hope against hope, because God has promised that His will shall be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Hope against hope. God chooses the most unlikely people to do His will - even people like you and me. He comes here to initiate His covenant with us; we don't have to go to Him. And most importantly, when we have no reason to hope in ourselves, we have every reason to hope in God.
Our God is just and faithful. He keeps His promises. And through His Son, Jesus, who goes to Calvary this Lenten season to die for our sins, we have a source of faith and strength which is available to us at every turn of life's highway. When we follow this Jesus to the foot of the Cross, we see how a worldly symbol of defeat and rejection is transformed by the grace of God into the ultimate symbol of victory and redemption.
With perfect trust in Him, there is no such thing as hopelessness any more. There is only the love of God in Jesus Christ, in whom we may hope against hope. Even in the bleak midwinters of life, when springtime seems so far away, what is there to defeat us when we place our faith in Christ, who lives even now in heaven and whose Spirit draws near to us today, filling our hearts and minds with an unquenchable hope which truly does overcome the world. Amen
Pastoral Prayer
O Holy and Righteous God, who is our help in ages past and our hope for years to come, teach us to live with hope against all hope, perfecting our faith in the promises of Your Word. Teach us to look up in faith to thee, even to the Lamb of Calvary, that we may never be weak or weary for long. Help us to know that You are with us always, even to the end of the age, that we may never feel abandoned or alone. Most of all, dear God, fill us with the joy of knowing that we are loved, so that we in turn may love one another as ourselves.
Everlasting Lord, who lives in every faithful heart and who comes again to judge the world, we pray today for those whose lives and work bring hope where there was no hope before. We pray for those nameless people who work to bring peace where only war has been and for all those people everywhere whose lives stand as islands of concern in the midst of a sea of callousness. Help us to be a small measure of hope for others, that they, in turn, may find the fullness of hope in You. In the name of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen
If you have little children, you are just trying to hang on until the spring. By now, your kids are practically bouncing off the walls because they have been kept inside for four months and you wonder if your house will still be standing when it is finally warm enough to send the kids outside to play again.
Winter can be a very trying and depressing season, for young and old alike. But even in the very depths of winter, amid the snow and ice and blustery cold, you never lose hope completely. You always know in the back of your mind that sooner or later, flowers, birds and baseball will all come back. Even as the blizzards rage, you can pull out your calendar and be reassured that it is just a matter of time before this long night of winter gives way to the brightening dawn of spring.
It's easy to be reassured and it's easy to cling to hope, where the seasons of the calendar year are concerned. But what about the seasons of life? What about the winter seasons we go through in life, when we are discouraged and disappointed; when we are filled with doubt and discontent? How do we live with the conviction that our spiritual winters will pass? Where do we find our hope and reassurance when there's no calendar on the wall to promise us that March must someday give way to May.
When we are young, we want to be reassured about the direction of our lives. We want to know that we will find our place and make our way in this world. The future is a little frightening and we wish we could know what it will bring.
When we are middle aged, we want to be reassured about the meaning of our lives. We want to know that our lives are still significant, even if some of our dreams and delusions have faded. The future is a little too familiar and we wish we could know that it will be as satisfying as once we had hoped.
And when we are older, we want to be reassured about the promises of life, the promises of our golden years, and in particular, the promise of eternal life. The future is the great unknown and we wish we could face it with perfect grace and faith.
We can endure spiritual winters at any stage of life and we can wonder if we'll ever know the joys of spring again. That is why we need a way to live with hope, year in and year out, even when there seems no reason to hope. As faithful people, we need a way to believe in tomorrow even when we are troubled about today.
The Bible tells us - in both the Old and New Testaments - that we can learn something about hope by looking up at Abraham. It suggests that we can find something in the story of Abraham's life which will help us live better lives of our own.
When we first meet Abraham, he is already an old man. Having worked hard all his life, he is now a fairly wealthy man, living on his Social Security checks and the income from a few well-placed stock investments made when he was younger. He and his wife, Sarah, are on the waiting list for an exclusive nursing home and are happy with that decision. Everything about their life seems well-planned and in order, the way one's "golden years" are supposed to be.
Still, there is a gaping hole in their lives and a consuming sorrow in their hearts - they have no children. As things stand now, Abraham will have to leave his estate to a n'er-do-well third cousin who lives out of state and he's not happy about that (cf. Genesis 15:2). It looks like the family name will die with Abraham.
He and Sarah tried mightily to have children over the years, but to no avail, with each failure proving more painful than the last. The fertility drugs were ineffective. The frozen embryos didn't take and neither did the artificial implantation. At one point, they used a surrogate mother named Hagar, who conceived a child for Abraham, but as often happens in such arrangements, things got messy after the child was born. Sarah thought Hagar was mocking her barrenness and flouting her own fertility and in a fit of jealousy sent Hagar and the child away (cf. Genesis 16).
Then one day, God came to Abraham and told him to forget about the nursing home - God was going to make a covenant with Abraham, giving him a new land to live in, where he would become the father of many nations. His descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and they would live in this new land as an "everlasting possession."
Abraham took his nephew, Lot, to look at this new land. Part of it was rich and fertile and when Lot said he wanted that section for himself, Abraham assented. Then Abraham went to look at the remainder of the land and, lo and behold, it was as barren as Sarah was! The local zoning commission said he couldn't do anything with it. This covenant business with God seemed to get off to a rather shaky start.
Then the rest of God's covenant sunk in: Abraham and Sarah were going to conceive a child! Abraham thought this was hysterical and fell on the floor laughing. Sarah joined in, crying out between gales of laughter, "Shall I still have pleasure with my husband who is so old?" (cf. 18:12). Abraham thought the question was a little unkind but admitted that she had a point.
This is where Paul steps in, with some commentary from our text in Romans. Paul says that in an objective sense, in the sense of looking at the physical evidence, Abraham had no reason to hope that the Promised Land would amount to a hill of beans, or that he would, in fact, become the father of many nations. But Abraham also had every reason to hope, because God had made that promise to him. So, Paul uses a beautiful phrase to describe Abraham's faith: "In hope he believed against hope."
If we would find that same faith and hope ourselves, we should note three aspects of this covenant between God and Abraham which speak to our own spiritual lives today.
First, God chose the most unlikely means to fulfill His Word. The Promised Land was barren and so was the woman God chose to be the mother of many nations.
But then again, it didn't matter that the land seemed unpromising and the chosen people seemed inadequate. Their relative merits or demerits as agents of God's will were unimportant - what mattered was God's will. "Is anything too hard for the Lord?" (Genesis 18:14). When God says something will be done, He doesn't need superhumans to get it done - just ordinary people like Abraham and Sarah, or you and me.
The second aspect of God's covenant with Abraham is that it was initiated by God. God came to Abraham; Abraham didn't go to God. We see the same thing with Moses and Jeremiah and Mary and Paul - none of them went to God. What can we learn from that?
A lot of Christians are confused today because they hear people telling them what they must do to draw near to God. "Say this prayer, read this book, send this tithe, join this ministry, do this, that or the other thing and then you will feel close to God." Well, some people try and try, and when they don't feel close to God like they think they are supposed to, they get mad at God or think something is wrong with their faith.
That's not the way to be intimate with God! To say, "I want to draw near to God, if only He will let me" is feeble and doomed to failure. God has already drawn near to you! He did it most decisively by coming in the person of Jesus Christ and He does it again and again in the hearts of those who are ready to receive a God who is constantly seeking out His people.
If you are frustrated because you can't feel close to God, maybe you are going about it in the wrong way. Maybe you are assuming too much for yourself, thinking that by your own effort, you can draw near to the Almighty. Maybe you should stop and realize that God is the One who is drawing near to you.
Finally, the third aspect of God's covenant with Abraham is the heart of what I want to say this morning: that the whole basis of Abraham's hope did not rest in himself; his hope rested completely and utterly in God. That is why he could "hope against hope that he would become the father of many nations."
As we already know, Abraham had no reason to hope, he had a barren wasteland and a barren wife and he himself was old. Yet Abraham had every reason to hope, because God had made a covenant with him. How do you live with hope against hope, even when all the evidence says otherwise? You do it by holding on to your faith in God and letting go of your faith in yourself.
For most of us, our first instinct is to trust in ourselves. We rely on our own powers to sustain us or accomplish our goals, and then, when we fall short, we turn to God as a last resort, asking Him to fulfill a promise which we never really believed in anyway.
But we should know better. Think of our life's journey as a non-stop, cross country drive and you'll see what I mean. We share the driving with someone else because we can't do it all ourselves, and when we sleep as the other person drives, we are literally putting our life in the other driver's hands. If we trust our lives to other people who are mere flesh and blood, how much more should we be willing to trust our lives to God?
When we are young, we have no real way of knowing that we will find our direction in life. We have no concrete evidence that we will master the future and find our place in the world, because we haven't been there yet! We're just starting out! We have no reason to hope, yet we have every reason to hope and so we may live with hope against hope because we place our trust in God.
When we are middle aged, we have no real way of knowing the meaning of our lives. We have no clear evidence that our lives mean much more than getting the next paycheck or putting the next meal on the table. We have no reason to hope, yet we have every reason to hope and so we may live with hope against hope because we place our trust in God.
And when we are older, we have no real way of knowing how the promises of life will be given to us. Golden years can be hard and we certainly have no physical evidence of the promise of eternal life from anyone who has been there. We have no reason to hope, yet we have every reason to hope and so we may live with hope against hope because we place our trust in God.
And what about those of us, at any age, who worry about the future our children and grandchildren will inherit? What do we see but violence and brutality; sickness, sorrow and scandal; trial and tribulation at every turn? What do we see but a steadily more degraded environment and a diminution of human dignity, with rich nations too wealthy to help the poor and poor nations too impoverished to help themselves? When we look at the world our children and grandchildren will inherit, we have no reason to hope, yet we have every reason to hope and so we may live with hope against hope, because God has promised that His will shall be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Hope against hope. God chooses the most unlikely people to do His will - even people like you and me. He comes here to initiate His covenant with us; we don't have to go to Him. And most importantly, when we have no reason to hope in ourselves, we have every reason to hope in God.
Our God is just and faithful. He keeps His promises. And through His Son, Jesus, who goes to Calvary this Lenten season to die for our sins, we have a source of faith and strength which is available to us at every turn of life's highway. When we follow this Jesus to the foot of the Cross, we see how a worldly symbol of defeat and rejection is transformed by the grace of God into the ultimate symbol of victory and redemption.
With perfect trust in Him, there is no such thing as hopelessness any more. There is only the love of God in Jesus Christ, in whom we may hope against hope. Even in the bleak midwinters of life, when springtime seems so far away, what is there to defeat us when we place our faith in Christ, who lives even now in heaven and whose Spirit draws near to us today, filling our hearts and minds with an unquenchable hope which truly does overcome the world. Amen
Pastoral Prayer
O Holy and Righteous God, who is our help in ages past and our hope for years to come, teach us to live with hope against all hope, perfecting our faith in the promises of Your Word. Teach us to look up in faith to thee, even to the Lamb of Calvary, that we may never be weak or weary for long. Help us to know that You are with us always, even to the end of the age, that we may never feel abandoned or alone. Most of all, dear God, fill us with the joy of knowing that we are loved, so that we in turn may love one another as ourselves.
Everlasting Lord, who lives in every faithful heart and who comes again to judge the world, we pray today for those whose lives and work bring hope where there was no hope before. We pray for those nameless people who work to bring peace where only war has been and for all those people everywhere whose lives stand as islands of concern in the midst of a sea of callousness. Help us to be a small measure of hope for others, that they, in turn, may find the fullness of hope in You. In the name of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen
