The opposite of hope is discouragement and despair, and it is so easy for these things to be the predominant factors in our lives. We are discouraged so often because we don’t see what God is doing. We are called to live by faith and not by sight (2 Cor 5:7), but it is very hard at times to believe in the invisible.

Naomi, in the book of Ruth, is how we so often feel when we cannot see God working, when we are waiting for His promises to be fulfilled. Naomi had travelled with her husband and two sons to Moab during a period of famine in Israel. There, she had gained two daughters-in-law, but her husband died shortly after they arrived there and within ten years, both her sons died. (Ruth 1:1-5) Now Naomi was left alone in a foreign land, a widow, and she felt very bitter. She planned to return to Israel, for she heard that the famine was over, but she was totally discouraged. When she got home and people greeted her, this was her response: “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. ²¹ I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.” (Ruth 1:20-21) Naomi meant ‘pleasant’; Mara meant ‘bitter’. Naomi felt that there was nothing good left for her; she was disillusioned and hurt. We can often feel like this when it seems that our plans fall apart and we don’t understand God’s ways. We may well feel the Lord has afflicted us, that He has brought misfortune upon us, and our natural reaction is to ask God ‘why?’ Why has this illness come upon us? Why has this trial come? Why did God let this tragedy happen? When these things happen, we can be like Naomi and can allow discouragement to erode hope, but hope is actually the thing that can keep us going through those times of confusion and hurt.

Paul reminds us of this in Romans 5:1-5, urging us to glory in our sufferings because suffering produces character, and character, hope. Hope is an alert expectancy that God has not finished with us yet. The ‘now’ – with all its suffering and misunderstanding and sheer heaviness – is not the final story. Advent reminds us that what we see is not the whole story. At the beginning of December, we do not see Jesus. We see what everyone else sees around us: a world in darkness, a world struggling with poverty and injustice and fear and despair. We hear the news about Brexit and wonder what 2019 will bring. We read the news about crime and mental health issues and the NHS in crisis and we may feel bewildered. But hope reminds us that this is only part of the story.

. Isaiah prophesied during a time of doom and distress (Is 9:1), but through God’s Spirit spoke out words of hope: ‘The people walking in darkness have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.’ (Is 9:2) At Advent, we proclaim these words again by faith: that we are looking ahead to Christmas, when the Light of the World stepped from heaven to our world, when the Son of God put on human flesh and came to rescue us.

Dave continued our look at hope this evening, basing his sermon on Is 40:25-31. Hope helps us to cope with all the seasons of our lives. No matter what the season, the single most important attitude we can have is hope, for hope offers us a confidence (Biblical hope is not synonymous with ‘I wish’, but is a steadfast confidence in God.)

Hope ultimately rests on the fact that God is in control. Without this hope,we easily become depressed and discouraged. Hope helps us in different ways:

1. I can get started. Hope is like a starter motor, which helps us to be motivated and to get going every morning! Our attitude matters and hope helps us to be plugged in to God’s eternal purposes, adding meaning and purpose to our lives.
2. I can live with whatever burdens are in my life. Paul knew all about pressure and feeling overwhelmed (see 2 Cor 1:8-9), but he also learned how to endure and how to rely not on his own strength but on God’s.
3. I can go on. Florence Chadwick, the Channel swimmer, once failed in a swimming attempt because the fog obscured her vision of the shore. When she attempted the swim again, she succeeded because she did not let the fog distract her. So often, we are derailed by doubts, fears and insecurities (rather like the fog prevented her from completing her swim), but hope ultimately keeps us going, enabling us to persevere.1 Pet 1:6 reminds us that our suffering and trials are only for a little time when viewed in the perspective of eternity.
4. I can slow down. So often, we feel compelled to continue hurrying on, even if we’re not sure of our destinatin! If God is in control, however, we can slow down; we can afford to rest, because we know God doesn’t.  Ps 62:5 tells us to find rest in God alone and to look to Him for hope.
5. I can say ‘no’. Hope is the foundation of integrity and wholeness, being the motivation for purity (1 John 3:3) and the thing that enables us to resist temptation. 1 Pet 1:3 reminds us that we have been given new birth into a living hope.

The word ‘hope’ appears only once in the New Testament before the resurrection (Matt 12:21), but appears 70 times after the resurrection. The cross reminds us that God can turn the darkest place into a place of hope. The resurrection of Jesus Christ testifies to the power and light of God and reminds us that we have an eternal hope, not bound by death or the present age. We can have hope in every situation because of the Lord’s love and mercies (Lam 3:21-22). Is 49:23 and Rom 5:5 remind us that those who hope in the Lord will not be disappointed (or put to shame.) Hope does not disappoint us because Biblical hope is rooted in God’s character, which is constant, faithful and true.

Hope is a fuel that keeps people going. The people of God had been fuelled by God’s many promises in the Old Testament and by His acts of deliverance for them. Abraham had been fuelled by the hope of a son: the promise God had given him – ‘a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir’ (Gen 15:4) – had kept him going through many years of journeying and many challenges. Paul, when commenting on Abraham in the New Testament, says, ‘Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”’ (Rom 4:18) Abraham kept on hoping and believing, reminding us that there can be many years between God’s promises and their fulfiment. Hope is a powerful antidote to unbelief. Even if we cannot yet see what God is doing or how His promises to us can be fulfilled, hope refuses to give up.

Joseph is another Old Testament example who had to wait a long time to see the fulfilment of his dreams and the promises God made to him when he was only a teenager. He was sold into slavery by his brothers, who pretended to their father that he had been killed by wild animals. He worked for a while as a servant to Potiphar, and whatever he did, he did well and prospered, but then he was tricked by Potiphar’s wife and ended up languishing in prison. There must have been times in prison, especially when the cupbearer forgot about all the help Joseph had given him and did not remember him to Pharaoh for another two years, when Joseph could easily have given up hope altogether and felt as though God had forsaken him. In everything he did, however, Joseph showed trust in God and kept going; he served God wherever he was and worked faithfully for Potiphar, in the prison and for Pharaoh. When he finally met up with his brothers again, he could say, ‘do not be distressed and do not be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you…God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance. ⁸ “So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God.’ (Gen 45:5,7-8) Hope in God was the fuel which sustained him through those years of loneliness and confusion, through the long, long years of waiting for God to vindicate him. Sometimes we too need that hope in God as we wait for Him to act, to fulfil and to complete what He has promised to us.

Mark spoke this morning on the first Advent theme of hope, using the acrostic below to explain this:

Heaven

Opened

Please

Enter

The Christian view of hope is not a desperate wish that God would do something, but a sure conviction, a positive action of our mind, that God is already doing something. Ps 33:18-22 reminds us that hope brings down God’s blessings on us. Hope deferred makes the heart sick, leaving us feeling forsaken and abandoned, but God wants to fulfil our longings and heal our brokenness. (Prov 13:12).One of the difficulties we face with hope is not knowing God’s timescales, but there are many examples of God opening heaven in the Bible and each time, it is to reveal His desire to bless.

In Gen 28:12-14, Jacob had a dream of an open heaven, with angels ascending and descending on a ladder. When God opens heaven for us, it becomes a tree of life to us. Jesus said to Nathanael that he would see heaven open and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man (John 1:51), God sends His angels to guard, lead and provide for us. The ultimate opening of heaven is seen at Christmas, when Jesus is given to us as the hope of all mankind.

In Acts 11:5-9, we see another time when God opened heaven for Peter, resulting not only in new dietary laws, but an assurance that what God has called clean should not be called impure or common. This vision, which led to the greater evangelisation of Gentiles, resulted in much blessing and in salvation for many.

God invites us to feast on His many blessings which are poured out for us. Ps 23:5 paints the picture of a table of God’s blessings stretching farther than the eye can see. The picture here is of overflowing blessing, of anointing for service and of unstoppable blessing, even if enemies abound.

We often talk of the heavens opening when we are referring to deluges of rain. God invites us to enter the deluge of blessing he has for us, wanting us to be soaked. Rom 15:13 reminds us that God is the founder of hope (He is the ‘God of hope’) and He wants to fill us with joy and peace as we trust in Him so that we too can overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. This overflowing is an abundance, an excess, and hope is able to motivate us and sustain us through periods of uncertainty and despair.

At James’s baptism last night, Garry asked the question ‘What’s your profession?’ Most of us are often introduced to others by our name and profession (‘This is Garry; he’s an engineer’), and so often our identity is bound up in our jobs (nurse, teacher, shop assistant, lorry driver) or roles (parent, grandparent, husband, wife.)  There is another meaning to the word ‘profession’, however: a profession can tell you about what someone feels, believes or intends to do. As Christians, we are making these kinds of professions all the time and in baptism, we declare (or ‘profess’) that we are followers of Jesus Christ.

In everyday life, we make professions all the time. For many, there is a belief that God does not exist and that science has proved this. Science cannot prove the spiritual, since it only deals with the material world, but one of the proofs of God’s existence is in the transformed lives of people from different times, countries, cultures, backgrounds and circumstances, all declaring that God’s love and life have transformed them. At a baptism, we declare our belief in the transforming power of God to change the direction of our lives entirely.

Another profession is that the Bible is a fairy tale, written by men with no more worth than any other book. Christians believe the Bible is God’s word, that it is historically accurate (corroborated by other sources such as the Papyrus Anastasi 6 which talks of the ‘Semites’ coming for water and grain, just as the Old Testament testifies to the Israelites going to Egypt during a famine or the 1906 archaeological discovery east of Ankara that the Hittites really were an ancient people as described in the Bible.) It contains statements which made no sense at the time of writing (e.g. about the valleys of the deep oceans in Job 38:16 when ancient society believed the ocean bottom was sandy and saucer shaped), but which have since been corroborated by scientific discovery. Statements about the numbers of stars being countless (Gen 22:17) have also been demonstrated through modern astronomy. Christians believe the Bible is God’s inspired word to us and gives us direction and helps us to understand spiritual truths.

At a baptism, we are professing faith in Jesus Christ, the One who came to save us from our sins. As we are immersed in the water, we identify with His death for our sins and wrongdoing and as we rise from the water, we identify with His resurrection from the dead. Many people may believe Jesus was crucified, but to believe in the resurrection is to believe in a God of miracles. The Bible confidently affirms this miracle, reminding us that the Jewish authorities could not produce Jesus’s body to refute this claim and that the lives of fearful disciples were transformed by His appearances to them. We are excited to have the opportunity to tell others that God forgives our sins, that we have decided to follow Jesus and that our obedience to Him is shown in getting soaked through baptism! (see Acts 2:38)

This is our profession. What’s yours?

All the Advent sheep are now out in shops in Bolton-on-Dearne, Thurnscoe and Goldthorpe and all the leaflets have been distributed to local schools (Robert Ogden school leaflets will be given out early next week.) Please do encourage people to get involved in this trail, where the names of the sheep are filled in on the leaflets for the chance to win a wonderful Christmas hamper (kindly sponsored by the Co-op in Bolton-on-Dearne) and a knitted sheep. The prize draw will be made on Saturday 15th December at the ‘Churches Together’ Christmas Sheep Celebration (between 2 and 4 p.m. at the Salvation Army) Come along to that meeting to take part in craft activities, bun decorating and to find out the role of sheep in the Christmas story. We’ll be singing Christmas carols, having a puppet story and learning more about the significance of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Don’t forget also the baptismal service for James, which will be on Saturday 1st December at 6 p.m. Join with us to rejoice with James as we celebrate the new life God has given him and pray for him as he continues his Christian journey. Refreshments will be served after this service.

Advent starts officially on 2nd December, so do join us on Sunday for our services (10.30 a.m. and 6 p.m.) which will focus on the theme of hope.