December 4th Sermon
A voice cries out in our wilderness: Get ready for God to come! Even our good parts are like flowers in the field. Every low place in our life will be built up higher. Every mountain will be smoothed down. Every rough patch will be smoothed over. And God's glory will appear! Everybody will see it! Just as God said it would. Voices cry out: People are just like grass. Even our good parts are like flowers in the field. The grass withers, the flowers fade. But God's Word remains forever. Zion, Be a herald of the good news. Go tell it on the mountains. Jerusalem; Be a herald of the good news. Preach it! Speak it! Sing It! Don't be afraid to shout it! Here is your God!
Christ: Our Hope
These words have survived through the ages as words of hope; Words that are supposed to cheer us and give
us courage through the dark nights. But how can they? They tell us what we already know: We people are nothing. We are no different from a pretty little flower,
which grows up and looks pretty, but in the end it shrivels up and dries up in the winter wind. .
That is a pretty sad picture of humanity isn't it. We will fade away just like the flowers. Just like the grass. Nothing more, nothing
less. And it is easy to believe that. We look at our world around us, and things are getting worse. We listen to the political pundits, who predict terrible events
if we vote one way or another. Life is nothing more than a constant struggle to survive. Fear closes in around us and tells us there is nothing to be done, just
accept our fate.
That is exactly where many of us find ourselves. We look around us, and see our circumstances, and there is no reason to expect that
anything will change.
We as individuals, and as the human race are together in this: For as long as we have known the power of sin, and known the pain and
sorrow it brings, we have hoped for a way out. We have hoped for someone that would make it different. We have hoped for someone to make us different. We hope for
more than this. We dream of more than this. I want to be better, stronger, nicer, and braver; These are more than just complaints, but struggles against our own
humanity. The hope for more. The dream that we can be different.
Hope: an emotional state which helps us believe in a positive outcome. The ability to expect that everything will turn out for the
best, that things can get better in spite. Hope is most obvious when the odds are against it. When all the evidence points to a certain terrible end, yet hope
makes us fight for something more.
Our movies are filled with this kind of people. Take your favorite movie: and I don't care if it’s a chick flick where the girl is
looking for true love; or a shoot-em -up, the hero is up against incredible odds. Everything points to a terrible loss, or even death. But the hero keeps fighting,
finds the courage to keep going. And because of that ability to not give up, to HOPE against all odds, they get the girl, or they kill the bad guy and save the
world.
Hope has incredible power. When we let it, it can help else overcome our fear, help us see past our despair, and believe in a better
future.
Hope is:
1. Even in the dark places where the light rarely goes, even in that place, the light of God shines.
2. Hope is like the little bird that is so small it hides behind a single leaf, but when it lifts up its mighty voice, it fills the morning air with a song so
bright you have to smile.
3. Hope is like an Apple Tree:
Apples are wonderful. But Apple trees are prone to frost. And when a late frost happens in the spring, all the buds on the trees
freeze. When that happens, the apple tree does a miraculous thing: it stores up its energy in thousands of small bumps, or nodules. All that energy pulsates
through that tree, waiting inside all those little bumps, until the following year, and then, Bam! You have an exploding riot of buds, as the apple tree unleashes
all that stored up energy. And its branches are heavy under the weight of all its apples.
Sometimes circumstances hit our lives, like a hard late frost in spring. Cancer, money problems, marital problems. All this can
cause our hearts to freeze.
But at the core of the Christian faith we also live with an incredible promise, incredible hope. In and through Christ, there will be
a wonderful harvest in our lives. God's power, which is hidden now, will eventually burst forth. During certain season of our lives we feel our hearts waiting,
longing, and even aching for our frozen places to burst into life. Our living hope is that one day, all of God's glory will be unleashed in a joyful riot of
splendor. Keith Mannes
This is Hope: that what God has done in the past, He will do again in the future; believing that what God did for someone else, he will
do again for me. It may don’t look the same way, it may not happen in the same way, but god will reach down and make a difference in our lives.
What is Christmas? Is it just bout Christmas trees and buying gifts? What is Christmas? Is it just about getting further in debt
and pretended to be happy?
This is Christmas. Our yearly reminder To hope. To Believe. To not give up. To remind ourselves of our child like faith, when we
believed, that God had all the answers. Before life came at us and stole all our dreams, and smothered all our hopes.
Here is the Good News: Here is our Hope. This child is the one who can change all our tomorrows, redeem our past, make us stronger
than we are now, and make us braver. Make us nicer. This is the good news. We are not left to our own, to make our own way in this world. For God did not leave
us alone; But sent us the Son, Himself.
A Christmas Gift: A time to renew your hope. Prayer From Psalm 33: 18-22 Behold:
We wait for the Lord;
He is our help and shield.
For our hearts rejoice in Him,
Because we trust in His holy name.
May your faithful love rest on us, Lord,
For we put our hope in you.