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Imagine it is the year A.D. 60 in Jerusalem, a group of Jesus followers gathered together in an upper room of a neighbour’s house, waiting, watching, breaking bread, baptizing people, telling and retelling the stories and teachings of Jesus and reminding each other of his promised return.
They were convinced it would happen in their generation. The earliest followers of Jesus were advancing in age, some were far away in a distant land, bringing the Gospel message to the ends of the earth. Several of the first disciples had been killed for their faith as they urged people to turn to Jesus as the one true God and Messiah.
Rome was becoming more and more oppressive to this small sect of Judaism call Christianity. But, daily life continued. Week after week, year after year, they met together and prayed to and worshipped this God-man called Jesus. Many from the Jewish community couldn’t believe these Jesus followers had carried on this long. 30 years and he still hadn’t returned! Didn’t he say he would come back soon?
How much longer would they wait? If Jesus was truly the Messiah, why is nothing happening? Why are the Romans still ruling over the Jews? What is taking so long for him to return? What are you all waiting for? Just get on with your lives and forget about Jesus. He’s gone and he’s not coming back.
What are we waiting for?
The Jesus followers might have replied with something like this, “Be always on the watch, the Son of Man will return just as he left, from the heavens with great power and glory. Be careful, do not get caught up with the pleasures of this world as though they will give you hope. There is only one hope. Heaven and earth will pass away but the promises of God will not pass away.”
They truly believed that Jesus was God’s word made flesh, God’s promises fulfilled. As the beloved disciple, John, claimed in his gospel, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Many of the believers in Jerusalem saw and heard about the miracles of Jesus, how he raised people from the dead, multiplied loaves of bread and fish to feed thousands, caused the blind to see and the lame to walk.
But, most miraculous of all, an event all of them, even the doubters heard about, was that Jesus, after he was crucified, came back to life and appeared to hundreds of people, most of them still alive and could give testimony to his resurrection.
The hope of Jesus the Messiah kept them going all this time, 30 years, an entire generation, after Jesus left. And, this same hope of Jesus is what we have today, 2000 years, over 70 generations later.
What are we waiting for? What hope has kept the Christian faith alive and growing from a few hundred to billions of people?
The Psalmist writes in Psalm 130, multiple times, that hope is found in the Lord. Verse 7 says, for with the Lord is unfailing love and full redemption.
There is an assumption made when we read statements like this. The assumption is that what the Lord has to offer is better than what we currently have. That the reader, or listener, of this Psalm agrees that being loved and redeemed by the Lord is better than this life.
These words claim that we are waiting for something that will bring flourishing to our lives in a way that is impossible currently.
For the Israelites, and for much of the ancient world, it was easy to imagine anything better than their current state of being. Flourishing based on material wealth or status was only for the very elite.
Today, in Canada, flourishing can come for most of us if we define flourishing in the sense of having a home, a job, social support, and those who will advocate for us.
There is still much to be desired, as our system isn’t perfect, but for the most part, we live in a soceity where most people have the opportunity to flourish to some degree.
And so, it’s hard to imagine what the Lord could give us that we cannot get ourselves. We have everything we need.
We read in Luke 18 about a rich man who wanted to inherit eternal life.
A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”
“All these I have kept since I was a boy,” he said. When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. Jesus looked at him and said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
He didn’t understand what he was asking for. He thought eternal life was something he could add to his life that would make his empire and achievements complete.
That’s not how eternal life with God works.
We exchange our achievements, our seeking after our own empire, for eternal life. Not as payment, but because the two are not compatible. We cannot earn eternal life and it cannot be added onto anything. It is complete on its own, lacking nothing that we can bring into it.
C.S. Lewis said in his sermon The Weight of Glory,
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
He goes on to confess that he is not all that interested in the pictures of heaven given to us in Scripture:
Salvation is constantly associated with palms, crowns, white robes, thrones, and splendour like the sun and stars… Either glory means to me fame, or it means luminosity. As for the first, since to be famous means to be better known than other people, the desire for fame appears to me as a competitive passion and therefore of hell rather than heaven. As for the second, who wishes to become a kind of living electric light bulb?
The images given to us in Scripture about the promises offered to us through salvation in Christ are symbolic and meant to point us to something. It requires the use of our imagination. It requires us to listen, to pray, to reflect on this question:
What is the longing of my heart?
Ask yourself, what are you chasing? What is it you most hope for?
For me, it is contentment. I want to live each day happy with what I have. In a strange way, I want to stop wanting.
What I am waiting for in the return of Jesus is for him to bring a fullness of contentment to my soul. I believe it is something he does promise, not only when he returns, but in the meantime. But, I will not get contentment by searching or fighting for it.
I will have it when I surrender. I can get glimpses of this glory as I constantly seek him and place my hope in his promises.
How are we waiting?
Psalm 130:5 says, my whole being waits.
In our hearts, we are to long for God to save us.
In our minds, we are to meditate on his promises.
In our words, we are to speak the truth of God’s salvation.
In our actions, we are to behave according to God’s good character.
We wait, aware that the lures of the world and the sinful desires of our hearts tempt us to put our hope in acquiring and achieving, in setting up a world for ourselves in which we are protected from the pain and struggle that comes from living in the waiting.
We live in a world where the avoidance or relief from suffering is a human right. And we ask, where is God in all the suffering?
If there is anything to hope for, surely it is in the removal of suffering from the world. We want justice and wholeness. We want to trouble of this world to end. We all know that things are not right in the world.
For some, this brings us to deep trust and hope in God’s restoration. For others, we fill our lives with distractions and ways to reduce the pain.
But, we won’t be fully satisfied until God sets every last thing right. We are not there yet. We live in the meantime. And in the meantime, we are told, there will be suffering.
Romans 8:15-17 says that, being children of God and joint heirs with Jesus Christ, we will suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him.
Tish Harrison Warren, in her book Prayer in the Night, reflects on this dilemma:
“How can we live in a world where children suffer, where marriages disintegrate, where injustice rages, where tyrants succeed, where we face frustration and futility, where we get sick, where we all eventually die? How do we trust a God who does not stop all this from happening?
“We cannot hold together human vulnerability and God’s trustworthiness at the same time unless there is some certain sign that God loves us, that he isn’t an absentee landlord or, worse, a monster. But we cannot divine such a sign from the circumstances of our lives or of the world. We have to decide what we believe about who God is and what he is like. We have to decide if anyone keeps watch with us. It is unavoidably—even irritatingly—a decision based on what we decide to believe is true, the principles we return to again and again, the story we define our lives by.”
We come to the Advent season and we are reminded of this story, the story we define our lives by.
Where do we find hope?
It is important that we name our hope and not fall into the trap of hoping in some vague idea of a spiritual force that some people call God.
Our hope is not in a force, or an idea, or our obedience to religious instruction, but in a person.
It is not an empty hope. It is hope based on promises made by someone who has the power and the reputation for keeping his promises. In the midst of suffering and struggle, hope in the Lord comes like a glimmer of light in the dark.
The book of Lamentations is almost completely an expression of pain and distress. In the middle of the book we find a familiar and hopeful passage:
Lamentations 3:21–26
Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.
This passage shines so brightly because of the darkness that surrounds it.
If you are experiencing a season of suffering now, or when you next experience a time of hopelessness, ask yourself, in what am I placing my hope?
However you answer that question, turn it toward God in prayer and trust that your hope will be found most completely in the Lord.
Psalm 130 says, in his word I put my hope. What it his word?
His word is his promise. Unlike human promises, the promises of the Lord are dependable. Our promises are linked to our character. When we break a promise, it affects how we are seen. It is hard to trust someone who has broken promises.
God’s promises are trustworthy because he is trustworthy. His character is flawless. He only makes promises he intends on keeping.
This call to put our hope in God’s promises is a call to be immersed in Scripture. To read it, listen to it, meditate on it. Get it in your mind and your heart. Allow it to transform your thoughts, desires, and behaviour.
We often talk about applying Scripture. We read a passage and we ask, how does this apply to my life?
It is not the best question to ask when encountering God’s word because in asking that question, we tend to use Scripture as a toolbox or guidebook for getting what we want.
We force Scripture to bend to us. The problem with the question is that we limit Scripture to our own understanding of the world and how God works.
As we prepare to take Communion, I want to share a story from nearly 300 years ago in London, which illustrates this.
There was a small group of Anglican men who met together in the apartment of William Bray. They would get together and discuss religion and sometimes pray together. John and Charles Wesley were two of the men who met there. Charles wrote often in his journal, as he was struggling with illness, that he would wake with little desire to pray, enter the day with no purpose.
He wrote on May 18, “Thought myself willing to die the next moment.”
On May 19, he wrote, “I received the sacrament; but not Christ.”
Up until this point, both John and Charles Wesley were active in the church, Christian by heritage. But the faith was empty, lifeless, a tool for social, political, and relational benefit.
That was, until May 21, 1738. Charles wrote in his journal: “I woke in hope and expectation of Christ’s coming. At nine my brother and some friends came, and sang a hymn.” After the men left, Charles spent time in prayer and proclaimed, “I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ.”
Charles was taking communion regularly prior to this, hearing the gospel preached week after week most of his life. His father was a leader in the church. He knew the gospel and he read it in anticipation that it would have answers to his struggles.
But, the gospel had not yet taken a hold of him, leaving him hopeless and without purpose. You see, without transformation, the Bible offers no helpful answers. It is full of confusing and conflicting statements and stories:
Blessed are the poor. Take up your cross. Let the dead bury the dead. You must hate your parents. Honour your parents. You must be perfect.
For Charles Wesley on that Spring morning, something changed. The gospel get a hold of him. I would suggest it had something to do with his confession, “I received the communion, but not Christ.” He saw the lifelessness of his faith and he wanted more. He surrendered.
Like Charles Wesley, we can come to God’s word, communion, worship, and we wonder why it dosn’t have the power we think it should have. We obey, we apply, we come to church and do Christian things. But, it isn’t until we surrender our hopes to the Lord that we will encounter his power to bring transformation.
As we prepare to take communion together, take a moment and examine where your hope comes from. If it is anything but Christ, it will fail. Perhaps not today, or this week. But, you will continue to chase hope until you find it in Christ.