Drawing on the Well-Spring of Hope

Good morning, everyone. It's always nice to see the choir begin to develop every year for ABC. This is the first time I think I've heard their first debut performance. Very nice. I appreciate all the work that has gone into that and what we have to look forward to as well. It's good to be with all of you again here in the AMs. It's been a few weeks since we have been here. We're into the winter period and all of that means I have these tunes racing through my head, depending on what store I've gone in and out of or whatever. So it's good to sing some hymns here on the Sabbath. Here's some special music to get some of the others out, at least for a few days anyway. Say hello to all who are watching in from wherever you may be. We've done a bit of travel through Canada this past fall with the feast and other trips. A lot of people may have made comments to us that the Cincinnati Congregations here with the webcast is their church. Steve Myers is their pastor. They are in remote areas where they don't have the opportunity to be in Sabbath services on a regular basis with other members. This becomes their place, their home base. We have a Bevit audience out there widespread. To all of you who are there, particularly in Newfoundland, I'll give a shout out for that far-flung area here. We had met a number of people from that part of Canada at the feast this past year. So I hope your Sabbath is going well. In 1 Corinthians 13, there's a well-known verse that ends that particular chapter. It is one of those early memory verses, perhaps, that we might all know. 1 Corinthians 13 and verse 13, the apostle Paul tells us what is the greatest gift. He says, "'Now abide faith, hope, and love, these three. But the greatest of these is love.' Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest is love." Again, well-known. You find that inscribed on a lot of plaques and places where people will have that prominently displayed to remind them of this very, very important verse. When you look at the three, faith, hope, and love, they are all essential. They are all important. Paul says, "'The greatest, of course, is love.' We focus on that, and love can be developed and maintained in many different ways. So can faith. Prayer, study of the Word often helps to revive us when we may lack love, when we might be lagging in faith. To read an example of Scripture, to read certain Psalms, to be admonished to certain acts of love can help us to rekindle those two parts of it. How do you rekindle hope? How do you maintain hope? How do you keep hope alive, as a famous personality often says? You know, I read somewhere recently that when there is no hope for a person, there is only Prozac. There's a lot of truth to that. There's a lot of truth to that. When you lose hope and you feel you have nothing, you have no one, and you have no future, it's pretty bleak. Sometimes just reading the Bible, sometimes just prayer by itself doesn't always rekindle that. Now, it can be a part of it, but hope is a pretty deep matter, as I have thought about this, not only for this sermon, but just in thinking about it in terms of life.

Paul spends his time on love here in charity and says love is the greatest, but hope. Without that, hope is just a continual existence, kind of like today, kind of bleak, gray skies, kind of not so cold, but not so warm either.

And day after day and week after week and month after month of that can be quite a challenge for any of us to be able to maintain an inner hope. Hope is a lot of things, but one of the things that I hope we will come to understand by the conclusion of the sermon is that hope is what you buy into when you believe.

Hope is what you buy into when you believe. When you believe God, when you believe the truth, when you believe His Word, when you believe, as we do and as we profess as the church of God, when you have that hope to that degree, hope is when you buy into what you believe. How do we then nurture that? How do we maintain it? How do we act with it? How do we keep it? And what do we come to with hope? Let's turn back, if you will, to Romans 5. We'll begin our discussion here this morning in nurturing hope by looking at a part of a chapter in Romans 5, where hope is talked about. Hope is mentioned in many different locations within the Scripture. This is not a concordance sermon. Hopefully we'll dig a little deeper into the subject. We'll begin right here in Romans 5, beginning in verse 1, where hope is mentioned in this passage. What flows before it and what flows after it will help us, I think, come to an understanding of how we come to hope and some keys to begin to nurture hope.

It begins in verse 1 of chapter 5 of Romans. Paul writes this, Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. He has spent chapter 4 talking about justification, how we are made right before God through faith. It uses the example of Abraham. But to be made just before God takes faith, we must believe and we must accept that. And through the sacrifice of Christ, when that is accepted in faith, we are baptized. We receive a justification. We're made right in God's eyes. And sin is forgiven, wiped clean.

And we're justified by faith, by belief, by confidence, by our acceptance of that and our demonstration of that, by how we are living, by the act of baptism, all of that as part of how we come to that and in faith. And Paul says then, because of that, when that justification takes place, when we know that our sins have been forgiven, we have been made right through that sacrifice of Christ through His blood. And whatever our lives have been, whatever our sins have been to have made us what we are in our life.

And some sins can have some dramatic impact on our life. We have all sinned, all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God, Paul says. Sometimes sin becomes such a deeply ingrained part of life and a lifestyle that it works its deep engravings upon the heart, but deeper than perhaps for others who perhaps don't plumb the depths of certain sins. But sometimes the greater the sin, the greater the forgiveness, or the greater awareness of it for those who understand it fully.

But no doubt, no wonder how small or how large it is when we have come to that, then we have peace with God through Christ. Now, the peace is made with the Father. It is, as such, within the plan of God that sin would exact one price, one price alone, and that was the death of God in the flesh, sacrificed without blemish, a perfect life, the shedding of the blood of God, the Son of God, who was God in the flesh.

Then, as God deemed it, is what makes it possible to have peace with God. And tell them there is no peace with God. There is a separation. And in one sense, that's a way to understand what happened with the first sin by Adam. And he has talked about that in chapter 4, and he will later on here in chapter 5 as well, by that sin that entered through the death of Adam.

And that decision that was made. And when that happened, there was only one way back, and that was through the blood of Jesus Christ, made possible by His life and His death. And when that takes place, then we have peace with God. And that's big, to come to a peace with God in a relationship, a reconciliation, justification. These are big, sometimes theological words. But as I said, the bigger the sin, the bigger the grace, or in one sense, we have a bigger awareness of just what we do have when we really do plumb the depths of this.

But this is where it begins, and we have a peace with God through Jesus Christ. Through whom, verse 2, as a result, we also have access by faith into this grace in which we stand and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

On two short verses, Paul has taken several steps from justification to peace through grace to grace. And he uses grace here, and he makes a statement that is very important to understand. Because it is, as he says, we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand. It's a standing position, and it is more than just being upright, being vertical, as we say.

You know, we say every morning, sometimes, that we get to a certain age, it's always good to be vertical. Rather than horizontal at our ages. But this standing is not just that we are standing upright and we kind of stand before God in one sense. It speaks to the relationship that we have with God by grace.

And if God is the king, if God is the creator, there may be something we might learn about what this means to have this favor and relationship with God in which we stand, called grace or favor, by something that we could learn from the way a human king has been known to our queen to conduct their court. Think back, if you will, to late medieval times, or the England of France.

But England, in particular, is what I'm thinking about, a king or a queen of England. And I'm thinking more in terms of a story that was made into a movie a few years ago about Queen Elizabeth I of England, who reigned in the 1500s, the daughter of Henry VIII and Boleyn. Elizabeth I was a great queen of England.

And the movie that was made, Elizabeth, a few years ago, was a very well-done movie to show many things about her reign, her life. But one of the things that they showed in one of the parts of the movie is, in those days, a king or a queen held court. They had a palace, but they usually had several palaces, and especially in England, in those days, a king or queen would move their court, from city to city, from region to region, within England and even in France, because those early kings of England even had lands in France.

But they would move their court through the year to conduct the business, to show the power of the king, and the whole entourage would move with them. And when the king would be, as it was called, at court, or in the case of the story I'm thinking about with Elizabeth, they showed a scene of her at her primary court. And she was in the inner sanctum of the room where she was with her closest counselors in conducting the business, but there were doors that were flung open into a larger room and hall, through which everyone had to pass to get to where she was. And when the queen would be at court, that larger room would be full of lords and nobles and ladies and waiting.

These were the ones who had standing at court with the queen, and it would happen with any monarch in that way. These people had access to the monarch, and that's why they were in that room. And in the way that it was presented, which I'm sure is correct in Elizabeth, they were all standing around, in a sense kind of waiting for what was happening behind the doors of the king or the queen to walk through. And if she walked through on her way into her daily audience there, they were all there dressed in their finest. They were at court. They had standing to be there. They were favored by Queen Elizabeth. And that was a big thing. In essence, they stood in grace, the grace of the monarch in a physical sense. They had her favor, that they were invited and that they were allowed to be that close to her, and if necessarily summoned in to give counsel or at least just to be there and to be a part of a banquet, to be a part of the entire scene, that was called the court of the monarch, the king or the queen. In that movie, there was one scene where one of the nobles, the one that she was closest to, had the romantic interest in at that time. He falls out of favor, and she basically casts him out of her presence.

She makes a big scene, embarrasses him in front of everybody, and banishes him from her court. Such was the precarious life at times within the presence of a monarch. But looking at that, it can help us at least to understand something about, I think, what Paul is talking about, where he says here in verse 2 that we have access by faith into, through Christ, we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand and rejoice.

We stand in God's presence through this justification, through faith. We have grace with God. We have His favor. We're in His temple, if you will, spiritually speaking. We're always there, and we don't need to worry about being thrown out at the whim of God if we displease Him.

Because this whole relationship of favor, of acceptance that we have with God, called here grace, typified by, at least on a human level, by a monarch, can help us to understand that we have an access with God. We stand in His court, in His temple in this case. And we don't need to fear that we're going to be cast out. We have access to Him. That can be carried on further as you consider the role of Christ as our High Priest, Mediator, making access for us. But verse 2 is a comforting passage to tell us that it is by faith in this grace in which we stand. And therefore, we can rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. That relationship gives us hope. That is the anchor of our relationship with God. This is what Paul is saying. Now he moves in verse 3 and 2 and verse 4, the difficult part of this passage. And one that has always been a challenge to read and to consider and say, What do you mean? And not only that, he says, but we glory in tribulations. What? When do you glory in tribulations? When do you glory in a setback? When do you glory in a difficult time and say, Thank you, God? What do you mean, we might say? But that's what Paul says. We glory in trial. We glory in a difficult, challenging, bleak period that can rob us of hope. He says, we glory in that knowing that tribulation produces perseverance. The trial will produce the ability to stay in with something, to persevere, to endure, to stay with it, to stay in the temple, looking for, hoping for, understanding the relationship we have with our king, our savior. We stay there. We persevere. We're not going to leave. The trial is meant to do that. And if we persevere, that perseverance then leads to character. Because in time, a trial will do its work. It will make us wiser. It will make us humbler.

It will perhaps help carve off and slice off some of the pride that we have, some of the arrogance that we might have. It will sharpen our focus about what's really important in life. It will sharpen our understanding of God. All of that is part of what is character. And the end result of that character, then, is hope.

Patience, experience, and they all work to produce hope. Now, it begins with faith because we are justified. We have that relationship and peace with God through Christ. And he goes on and he says, Hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. That love of God, through the Holy Spirit, one of the fruits of the Spirit, is in our lives and works with that hope. The hope will not disappoint us. If we stay, if we endure, if we persevere, if we learn the character that God is showing us we need, and we maintain that hope, then it is not going to disappoint when the trial passes, when we look at that. He goes on and he says in verse 6, For when we were still without strength in due time, Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We stand in that grace, not because of our goodness and anything we have ever done. We stand there solely and totally by the grace and the mercy of God who sent His Son to die for us while we were still sinners. Much more then, verse 9, Having been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from wrath through Him. There is a wrath that is spoken of in the Bible. Paul says here that because of that relationship that we have, we will be saved from a wrath. There is an event in the future called the Day of the Lord that is prophesied to be poured out upon the world just prior to the actual appearance of Jesus Christ.

There is also a time of judgment. There is a judgment of God that is reserved for sinners, the incorrigibly sinned without remorse and no desire to repent. There is a certain judgment left for them, and that is one of the rather awful, and I use the word awful in a sense of just a powerful reality. Paul is saying here that we are saved from that wrath because of the justification we have, because of His grace. That is one of the encouraging things that shows the future aspect of hope.

We have a hope that we are not going to be caught in that. Just as we have a hope as we look back that our past sins are forgiven, forgotten, the slate is wiped clean with God. That gives us hope too. That gives us hope too. In our own human relationships where we may have transgressed against someone else, a mate, a good friend, another church member, to know that that has been forgiven, to know that that is no longer held against us, is a wonderful thing.

If we apologize, if we seek forgiveness, and if we show the fruits of it, boy, nothing is worse than to be on the outs with someone because of a transgression, but nothing is greater than to know that it has been forgotten and it gives us hope. It kind of brightens the day.

When I say something stupid, which I've been known to do, when I do something dumb, when I make a mistake, and I realize, oh, I shouldn't have said that, I should have done that, and I can't wait to make amends, sometimes if it's just saying, hey, I shouldn't have said that, I'm sorry. Those two words can go a long way, and then you know as you work out a relationship there with your mate or with another person, that it can be restored.

That's hope, too. That brightens your life. That gives you hope. Hey, there's hope for me. Maybe I won't do that again. So the hope here that Paul is talking about is past and it's future. Here in what he says that we are saved from the wrath that is going through him.

In verse 10, for when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his son, much more having been reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. We will be saved by his life. That life of God, through the resurrection, that he does live, that he is our high priest, is what saves us. Our hope of salvation, our ultimate hope of the glory of God, which verse 2 mentions, that we rejoice in hope of the glory of God, will be made possible for us ultimately because of his life.

That he was resurrected, that he was accepted, and that he is at the right hand of the Father. We're saved by his... Our salvation is guaranteed because he was saved and he was resurrected. And that is our hope that we will be saved as well. And that is our future. And that is what, again, frames the arc of our life. And not only that in verse 11, but we shall rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received the reconciliation. So here in 11 verses in Romans 5, Paul talks about hope.

And he shows what it means to us, how central it is to our life. A part of the Scripture that shows us why he would later write what he did about faith, hope, and love, these three. Hope is a very, very important thing. We hope in the Second Coming. We hope in salvation, our glory. There are so many aspects of this matter of hope. But sometimes, you know, hope is kind of a big word, and it can be rather vague.

And we need a concrete example, rather practical examples for anything, really, when it comes to spiritual matters, to show us exactly what it is that we are talking about as we deal with this. As we understand the patience and experience, it brings us to hope as a result of the trials that we have.

Because all of us understand the different trials that we have, large and small. Every week there are prayer requests that come out, sometimes for situations that are new, sometimes for ongoing matters of life, illness, other matters that people have. We tend to announce, certainly, about an illness or a death or an injury, and ask for prayers. Sometimes it's an emergency situation.

Sometimes it may be rather ongoing, and we will have multiple requests. There are things that we may not announce, because there are other aspects and types of trials that are going on in our own lives that we may not choose to share with the pastor or someone else for a public dissemination asking people's prayers. We may just take that to your friend and say, well, you pray for me.

We share that with a close inner circle of individuals. Sometimes we may not even go that far. We may just take it to God in prayer and fasting and study to seek to work it out. There are many different types of trials and problems that we know, but everyone fall into this pattern that they work patience, that they give us ultimately experience, and they work toward hope. We get to the hope if we don't give up. We get to the hope if we don't let go of God. We get to the hope if we remain faithful.

But what does that mean? There's a wonderful example that I think can help us to put some practical concrete flesh to this idea. It's back in Jeremiah 32. Let's go back there and look at an episode in the life of Jeremiah, the great prophet of God, who, for some of you will realize, he's my favorite.

If I have a favorite prophet, it's Jeremiah. I tend to go to him a lot. The episodes of his life and the arc of his life is one that I've been able to relate to through the years, and I find to be fascinating.

But in Jeremiah 32, it's a very interesting episode. The setting is the very end of the life of the nation of Judah, Jeremiah's home state, home nation. Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian monarch, has come and besieged the city. And within a short time, the city is going to fall.

And Jeremiah has been God's prophet. He has been denouncing the sins of the people, urging them to repentance throughout various passages in the story of his life, and he labored at that for multiple decades to do that. And Jeremiah was a patriot. He's been called the weeping prophet, very emotional.

But he loved his people. He loved his country. And all he got for it was a slap of the back of their hand. And when the scene opens here in verse 32, Jeremiah is in prison because of what he said, because of his message, because all he did was to take the word of God to the people and to show them a way out of their particular problems and how to avoid this very issue that was in front of them, the Babylonians at the gate, the barbarians at the gate, and ultimate captivity. And we find him as it opens here in the 18th year of Nebuchadnezzar, the siege of Babylon's army around Jerusalem, verse 2, that Jeremiah was shut up in the court of the prison, which is in the king's house, because they had said to him, Why do you prophesy?

And say, Thus says the Lord, Behold, I will give this city to the hand of the king of Babylon, and he shall take it. And the Zedekiah, king of Judah, shall not escape from the hand of the Chaldeans, but will surely be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon, and speak with him face to face, and see him eye to eye.

And Zedekiah led to Babylon until God sees fit to change that. And he said, Why do you do this? That's what he was doing. He was doing his work. He was preaching a very strong message of repentance, and he was showing the people their sins. And all he got for it was prison. He got thrown into Gitmo, the king's prison, not some, you know, outlying mayor or lower official, you know, some little encampment right there in the palace itself, so that he could be closely watched.

And he's thrown in prison. Now, as we look at the story here, we find that God comes to him in verse 6 and tells him something. He says, Your cousin is going to come visit you. Jeremiah had visitation privileges in between waterboarding.

But he said, Your cousin, Hanamil, is going to come and visit you. And he's going to say to you this, By my field, which is in Anathoth, for the right of redemption is yours to buy it. The restrict laws as to the passage and the transfer of property within Israel. And the closest kin had the right of first refusal.

And so, his cousin is going to come with a plot of land to buy. And verse 8 says, Hanamil, my uncle's son, came to me in the court of the prison, according to the word of the Lord, and said, Please buy my field. Just as God said, it did happen.

By the field in Anathoth, which was in the country of Benjamin, for the right of inheritance is yours and redemption is yours. Buy it for yourself. And then, as Jeremiah says, I knew that this was the word of God. So I bought the field from Hanamil, the son of my uncle, who was in Anathoth. I weighed out seventeen shekels of silver. I signed the deed, sealed it, took witnesses, weighed the money on the scales, took the purchased deed, both of that which was sealed according to the law and custom, and that which was open.

There were two deeds. And the seal, it was all written down on parchment, sealed up with a wax, and filed accordingly. And all of this was done. He gave the purchase of his deed to his faithful servant, Baruch, and it was duly witnessed, the presence of witnesses as to what was being done. Now stop and think about this action here for a moment. The Babylonian armies are besieging, and they're far more powerful than the armies of Judah.

The people are beginning to probably show the effects of sanctions, in this case starvation. Jeremiah is in prison. What's the future of the country? How much hope do you think the average person Israelite in the street of Jerusalem had? When an army of that size in that day came against a city the size of Jerusalem, it was shock and awe times ten. The ground literally shook. The siege cannons and the work, the embankments and all that would have surrounded the city were designed to strike fear.

We read in other locations where they would taunt Hezekiah at another time. It was not a pleasant experience. How much hope was there for an Israelite at this moment? In the future. Knowing what the Babylonians would do, they would destroy the city and take everyone captive and remove them from the land, which was the way the Babylonians worked. Now think about it, Jeremiah. He's in prison. You ever been to prison? Don't raise your hand. How many of you have ever visited a prison? I'll raise my hand. I've visited many, many prisons many, many times through the years. You don't find much hope in prison.

You don't find much hope. I remember one time an administrator telling me we were in a prison situation at a particular social function at that particular time, one of the few bright spots in a year for this particular prison. It was a women's prison. And the administrator, who happened to be himself a Protestant minister, said, These people don't have much hope. And you see that when you go through prison. I would have to go through – by the time I would get into most of my prison visits and you go through the security and the way you were treated as a visitor, your hope begins to be stripped away.

I always have had to get myself up mentally to go in to visit someone incarcerated. Because of just what you have to go through. You think going through the TSA screening at CVG is tough? Go through the screening that you get in a prison. They don't like you. They don't like the people that are behind the bars, and they don't necessarily like you either.

And they think you're coming in with contraband. They think you're a do-gooder. They think you don't know who you are. And the authority and the structure – it's a corrupt system in many ways. I always felt that the prisoners – many of the guards – should be incarcerated too, of the places that I would visit. And with the things that I've been told, they should be incarcerated. It's a corrupt system, but such as it is. There's not much hope there. Jeremiah was shut up in his prison.

How much hope did he have? And what does he do? He engages in an act of hope by buying a field, engaging in a real estate transaction. And he does it because God told him to do it. And he does it because it is an action of hope. It is an action of hope. If you look in verse 15, because as he files the deeds, he says to Baruch, "...Thus says the Lord of hosts, houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land." That's hope.

That's hope. In the midst of a trial, in the midst of impending doom and calamity, and even in the midst of Jeremiah himself being in prison, he had the presence of mind to execute legal documents. You ever been depressed? Don't raise your hand. You ever skirted the edges of depression?

I'll raise mine. I've never been on Prozac. I've counseled people who have been, and I understand at times there's a need for something to help people get through a period of time.

I've counseled a lot of people with it and seen the effects of it. When you're even mildly discouraged, skirting the edges of depression, sometimes you don't even want to get out of bed in the morning. Much less do something as exacting as execute a legal document like this. Weigh out your money. Make sure everything is correct.

You can't focus. You don't want to focus. You don't have any hope. You're at that point of discouragement or clinical depression for whatever reason, but you don't want to focus. You can't focus, and you don't care about the future when it gets to the depths of it. And yet Jeremiah bought a piece of land and tells Baruch, houses and vineyards will once again be planted in this land.

That's hope. That's hope. That's what Jeremiah did. And he went through it. And the remainder of the chapter shows the result of that. Down in verse 24, he says here in a prayer, Look the siege mounds. They've come to the city to take it. The city has been given to the hand of the Chaldeans. What you have spoken has happened, and there you see it. This is as he's talking to God.

He said to me, O Lord, buy the field for money and take witnesses? Exclamation point. What? Really? Yet the city has been given into the hand of the Chaldeans. And yet he did it anyway. He did what God told him to do. Jeremiah was in a trial. The city and the nation was in a trial, a deep trial. And quite frankly, as I read Jeremiah, I'm not saying he was depressed and he needed Prozac. But being in prison, being rejected by his own countrymen because he was doing the work of God, it can begin to work interesting thoughts in one's mind.

And I don't think he was immune from that. And he did what God said, and one of the reasons I liked Jeremiah is, he talked straight to God. Not disrespectful, but he talked straight to him. And I think prayer and the type of prayer that times will have to get us through at trial will be not a real soft prayer, but a real hard prayer that speaks direct to God from the depths of your heart about the situation and in a sense can challenge God in a right way.

The city is under siege, and you want me to buy a piece of land? Jeremiah kind of goes right up against the face of God, this monolithic God, but he does it. He follows through. He buys the land. And God comes back and He shows Him in time what's going to happen. In verse 42, men will buy fields for money, sign deeds, and seal them, and take witnesses in the land of Benjamin and the places around Jerusalem, in the cities of Judah, in the cities in the mountains, the cities of the lowland, the south, and I will cause their captives to return.

That's the message of hope God gave through Jeremiah. I didn't probably get out to the people to that detail at that point, but at least Jeremiah knew, okay. This action that I've taken is a measure, a demonstration of faith in God's Word, God's promise. I don't understand it all. Buying a piece of land when a conquering nation is going to come in, what type of an investment counselor are you, God? What kind of a real estate agent are you?

It's like buying swamp land someplace, or land that's, you know, contaminated. But He did it. He did it. And He learned faith as a result. A very practical step. Jeremiah bought into what he believed, and he put his money on the line. He put down silver to buy a piece of land because he believed in God. He believed in the promise that God had made, not just to Judah, but to all of Israel, the covenant that had been made at Sinai.

He believed in that. What do we believe in? We believe in God. We believe in His promise. We believe in the hope of glory. We believe in the hope of eternal life. We believe in all of those things. And we have to do some very practical things as well to demonstrate that at various times in order to maintain our hope, because we have to buy into what we believe.

We have to buy into it. And that takes action. That takes commitment. That takes perseverance. That takes patience. That takes patience. To build that experience. To know that it will work out. To hang around to find out. To not just leave the king's court, the temple of God, and to walk away because a bump in the road comes.

Because a prayer is not answered the way we think that it should be answered. Because our life just doesn't go the way that we think it should go. How many of us, again, don't raise your hand? At times, look around at our ears and say, It wasn't supposed to be this way. I'll raise mine. It wasn't supposed to be this way. I was told if I did this and this and this, connected this dot and this dot, this would happen. This blessing. This is what I expected as I read the Word of God, as I was taught, as I believed.

My life didn't always take that turn. How many times have I talked with others who have had trials and situations arise? How many of us face those and have the opportunity to say, Hmm, I didn't think it was going to turn out this way? But we're still here. God is still God. We haven't left His presence.

We still stand in His grace. It's not over yet. We have our terms like that, and I console myself, and I console others with that. You can say it's not going to be over until the fat lady sings, but you have to be careful who you say that to today. But it's not over yet. It wasn't over for Jeremiah. It wasn't over for even the people of Judah. But Jeremiah had to do something very, very practical.

What can we do with hope when we have that hope? When it is active, when we have hope, we can meet each trial. We can meet each trial with determination and get through that trial. Because God, we know, uses those trials to fulfill His promise, to get us to that hope of glory, to perform salvation. That's the way it works out. Just as there was the means of a sacrifice so that we could find peace with God, so there is that trial, tribulation, difficult period, is the way by which God is going to get us to salvation.

It's just the way it's rolled out there. So with hope, we can meet each trial. With hope, we can see each trial to its end. With hope, we can see it to its end so we will then have built the experience. We will be able to put it all together and understand what we were to have learned and how we could do it better next time or why it went the way that it did. I have things that I'm still looking for that answer to, but I still have it in hope. But I will know, because I've seen God answer the other parts of my prayers or situations in my life and other people's lives.

I know that He will, even in those matters that are still unanswered in my own life, in my own mind and my own satisfaction personally. I know God will do that. He has the ability, when we do with hope, to see a trial through to His end.

And if the end is tragic, hope will allow us to pick ourselves up and get on with life and to accept. Hope will allow us to do that, because that too is part of God's purpose. And as a result of that hope, we can also encourage others and be there to encourage others. We have not left God's temple.

We have not left God's presence. We still stand in this grace, and we can help others who are going through theirs. And we can say, I understand. And we can say it with words that mean deeply that we understand because we've lived it. And it will come through that way. And we can help others because we have the experience. And with hope, we can honor God. That He is the true God.

That His way is just. And we won't run and deny Him. We won't run in anger away from us. Because hope keeps us from anger, and hope keeps us from denial. How do we come to hope? How do we come to this hope, then? How do we maintain it? Without needing Prozac? Or whatever else it might be. Drugs? Alcohol? There are many different ways by which people cope with a world or a life without hope.

How do we come to that? First of all, we must do. Simply, we must do. It takes action. Justice Jeremiah bought a field, executed the legal documents, opened up his purse and put out the money. Focused. We must do. We must take action. There are times we may arrive at in our life. Where we are going to lose ourselves in action. Understanding that if we don't, we are going to wither in despair. It's actually a quote I read many, many years ago from some famous person.

I must lose myself in action lest I wither in despair. Action. We must do. Secondly, we come to hope by fear. A fear of God. Respect. We honor and we respect what God has done before. Jeremiah bought the field. He bought it according to a time-honored custom that was a part of the land. He didn't say, no, never. It's no use. He didn't say, I don't believe anymore. I don't believe in this custom, this tradition, this heritage that we have in Judah of having to write a first refusal.

And, cousin, I don't believe anymore. Go. Believe. No, he didn't do that because he respected and he feared God and what God had put within the land there. Even when the future doesn't look too bright and looks bleak, belief goes a long, long way and we must act upon that. And we must look to the future. Thirdly, we must look to the future because God's promises hold the answer. In Romans 8, Romans 8 is the passage that gives us really, again, a summation of the true hope that we do have and the only source of hope in a sometimes chaotic universe that looks to be just kind of spiraling onto some bleak, dark end.

If you look at just what can be known about the observable universe, scientists basically say, that's all going to end someday, and then reform and start all over again. Oh, great! Study science and what they purely know, that's what they conclude. And they are just looking at data, they're just looking at information, and they conclude, it's all going to expand and then come back on itself and start all over again, and life won't exist as we know it. Read God's Word and you see that the seeming futility of life and the universe is there for a reason, and that ultimately God has a way of even bringing that around to pass.

Here in Romans 8, chapter 19, He says, For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. Creation expects something of faith, not science. Creation is looking for something beyond what science can observe and knows.

Creation is looking for the sons of God, the children of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope. From the Big Bang to whatever can transpire in the vacuums and the desolation of space as we observe it and what is taking place. No other life, no other future, from what I've read, unless we try to travel out to it and that gets into the realm of science fiction. It was all subjected to futility, but because God did it in hope, because the creation, verse 21, itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

That's the answer. That's where the hope lies.

For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together till now. Not only that, but we also, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, have even within ourselves grown within ourselves eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body. For we were saved in this hope, but hope that is seen is not hope.

For why does one still hope for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance.

Our ultimate hope, as Paul said earlier in Romans, is to be a part of the glory of God in the children of God. He shows here all the reasons for this futility. Faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these is love. But don't lose your hope. Keep hope alive.