During advent, the four weeks that lead up to Christmas, we’ve been thinking about hope.
They say that the greatest amount of false hope is generated in the first four hours of a diet. Fortunately the hope that comes through the story of the birth of Jesus generates not false hope, but real hope.
Hope for the whole world
In John 3 we read one of the greatest definitions of why Jesus was born.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
What could have been just another conversation between theological heavy-weights–in the blue corner, the well-taught, highly educated Pharisee and in the red corner the carpenter’s son from lowly Nazareth–became so much more. Instead of being drawn into a debate about the law, a discussion about the place of sacrifices or an exploration of who is the greater teacher, Jesus takes his visitor deep into the heart of God’s unfolding mystery.
For God so loved the world shifts the perspective away from a single nation with a single pattern of worship and religious practice. As Max Lucado might have put it:
Aren’t you glad that it doesn’t say: For God so loved the wealthy or the middle-class, the healthy or the beautiful, the intelligent or the Europeans...
He gave his one and only son tells us that it is no longer about us, about what we must do, but about God and how he reached down into our world.
That whoever believes means that it’s no longer about being born in the right time with the right heritage, but anyone can access the resources of heaven. And it reminds us too that it isn’t about what we do but about what we believe, who we trust to solve our biggest problem to meet our deepest need.
Hope in the darkness
It’s one thing to talk about a hope that reaches out into the whole world, but does this hope truly penetrate my world, your world? How does this great hope reach into the darkness of the world in which we live. More than that, how does it reach down into the darkness of your life. Can this light truly truly penetrate those hidden places in your heart, the places where you keep all those secret fears and secret thoughts, the ones you’d never want anyone to know you have?
The thing about light and darkness is that darkness is not the opposite of light, it’s the absence of light. When you turn a light on, darkness doesn’t stand their defiantly demanding, “Is that the best you can do?” It is immediately driven back. It is forced to retreat to the shadowy corners, the places where the light doesn’t reach.
The truth is this, if you will let the light of the hope of Jesus flood your life, then it will push our the darkness.
Darkness can never overcome light, but light will always defeat the darkness.
Hope for the future
The night Jesus came may have been just an ordinary night. Ordinary sheep, ordinary shepherds. Ordinary people in an ordinary town in an ordinary province of an ordinary empire. But where God is concerned, nothing is every ordinary. He takes the ordinary and invests it with the extraordinary. And do that night became a history making, history changing night. Angels sang to sheep and shepherds, calendars would change, kings would worry, wise men would make epic journeys. And the future was going to be different. It would no longer be defined by what might be, but would be defined by what God said it would be.
And that’s your future too, if you want it.
You don’t have to face the future with uncertainty and fear, you can face the future with hope and faith. Even as Jesus faced death he promised this: I am going to prepare a place for you, and if I go, I will come back.
In the ancient near east, when a man got married, he would return to his father’s house and build a house or a room for himself and his new wife. When the father saw that it was ready, he would send the son to get his wife and he would bring her back to the new home that would be theirs.
This is what Jesus is promising, to prepare a place, to build you a home in heaven, if you want it. It’s there, waiting for you.
All you have to do is say “yes”. Will you say yes? Or will you wait, will you dither? The offer won’t always be there. A day is coming when it might be too late. Wouldn’t it be the greatest tragedy to arrive at the gates of heaven only to discover that there’s a card waiting for you that says, “I called, but you didn’t answer.”
In the end it's a choice only you can make. Only you can decide if you want to face the future with or without the hope that God offers you through his son Jesus Christ. He came to bring you hope, will you accept his offer?
