Hope

From Romans chapter 15, verses 4, 5, and 6, and then skipping down to verse 13. For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may, with one voice, glorify God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. Sometimes we get to the place where it seems as though we lost our zeal for God. Our soul is frothed, and we just feel as if we can't face anything else.

We just don't have the strength to face another thing. When we get like this, it's not necessarily because of some gross secret sin, nor is it necessarily because we are physically exhausted. But often this inner flatness of soul comes to us because we have neglected one of the basic gifts which God gave us when He brought us into His kingdom.

Now, whenever God brings a person to His Son Jesus, causes that person to be born again of His Spirit, He gives to that person three gifts which are basic to every other gift that is ever mentioned in Scripture. First of all, He gives that person faith, the ability to see the unseen, and the power to hold on to that vision of the unseen, no matter what happens. For instance, there's not a person in this room who has ever seen Jesus with his eye aflesh.

Yet there are people in this gathering right now who are going to willingly die for Jesus in a few years, because they have faith. Now understand, this gift of faith has to be exercised. You have to do something with it.

If you don't exercise it, you'll lose it. It dies. It dries up.

The second, of course, is from God, the power to love others with God's love. Love is of God, the Scripture, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Now, what you do with this power to love, of course, determines whether you indeed grow up into the likeness of Jesus, or whether you become a hypocrite, an empty shell, a branch that bears no fruit and has to be cut off and thrown into the fire.

But there is a third gift, which is extremely important and very often neglected by us, and it's about this one we want to think about today. The gift of hope, the power to look ahead and see the goal toward which we travel, to get that vision of the destination toward which God is calling us, and to hold on to that vision even when we have to walk through absolute darkness. Now this gift of hope, like the other two, has to be nurtured and cultivated and exercised.

If the gift of hope dies in your heart, then faith and love very quickly also go down the drain. The condition of many of us in this gathering right now is that our faith is shaky and our love is dubious, obviously from the way we treat each other, because our hope has been allowed to become dull. This vision is allowed to become tarnished and vague.

In Pilgrim's Progress by Bunyan, perhaps you remember the time Pilgrim, a Christian, finally found his way to the cross, and at the cross his tremendous burden rolled off his back and fell into that grave in front of the cross, and immediately after this he's given a little scroll with writing on it, which he is to take with him all the way on his journey and to read what's on that scroll constantly. That scroll is his hope. He's going up the hill of difficulty, and it becomes more and more arduous for him as he travels.

After he gets halfway up the hill, he sits down in an arbor to rest and goes to sleep. And while he sleeps, the scroll falls out of his hand. He wakes with a start to discover the day is almost over, so he hurries up the hill.

When he gets to the top, two men come racing toward him and say, don't go any further, don't go any further, there are lions up there that are going to tear you piece by piece. With this, Christian reaches into his coat and discovers that the scroll is missing. And he knows that without that scroll, without his hope, he can't face those lions.

So he turns around and goes back down the hill, looking for the scroll, searching around that place where he fell asleep, and finally he finds it again. Many of us need to do just that. Somewhere along the road we fell asleep, and our scroll, our hope, fell out of our hands.

And we have to go back and find it. We're not going to make any progress at all until we do. Don't underestimate the gift of hope which God gave you.

It's not like hope in some vague dream that's going to vanish away like smoke eventually. But it's a vision and a hope that's set on a glory that will still be shining when heaven and earth have passed away. Christ in you, the hope of glory.

When you have this hope in you, it keeps you from settling down in this world. Once you've seen that glory, you can't be content with this world anymore. You know that you're an alien in an exile.

You just can't settle for these things anymore, even the things which seem very permanent and solid to you. You now know are passing, your house, your job, your family even, even your body. And when your friends beckon you to come on and settle down with them and get comfortable, you just have no heart for it.

Once you've seen that vision, you can't be lingering down here in the shadows. So you press on, you're seeking a better country, a city whose builder and maker is God. It has foundations.

This gift of hope also keeps you from becoming discouraged. How can you be discouraged when you see glory up ahead? People think that they get discouraged by their circumstances. That's not true.

People become discouraged because they have lost their hope. When you don't have your scroll in your hand, you're going to be discouraged by a puff of wind. When you have that scroll of hope in your hand, tragedy after tragedy can come pounding down on your life and somehow you keep going.

Many of us have been careless with this gift. We've allowed it to tarnish. We have allowed our hearts to come off that vision of glory and roam around down here in the shadows.

We have lost our scroll. But how good God is. He helps us to find it the instant, the minute we start looking for it.

And so it was in Pilgrim's progress that when Pilgrim went back and looked for it, it was God who helped him find it so quickly and he knew it and he praised God for it. How quickly our Lord revived the hope of desolate Peter. Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me? Feed my sheep.

By the time this little episode is over, Peter's ready to go again. And when Stephen is about to be stoned to death for his faithfulness to the Lord, the Spirit pulls back the veil and allows him to see a vision of glory to hold him to what's ahead. Behold, I see the heavens open, he said, and the Son of God standing at the right hand of God.

And that vision of glory that he had enabled him to stay true and hold on as that whole mad crowd presses in upon him, gnashing their teeth and pounding rocks on him until they killed him. God again and again revived our hope when we led him by enabling us to taste glory. Now, tasting glory is not a matter of feeling.

It's not a matter of something you see or touch. But rather it's a matter of beholding with your spirit, in the blazing light of God's Spirit, the glory of His Son, who is your hope of glory and who is in you. And the first place where God enables us, when we listen to taste glory, is in Scripture.

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction that by steadfastness and the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope. And how many of us have never even begun to experience the renewal of our hope, the tasting of glory in the Scriptures. We never approach it this way.

You know, we miss the primary reason why God has permitted these Scriptures to be preserved to us all down through these centuries. The Scriptures, what are they? They're the testimony of ordinary people like you and me, sinners, selfish people, weak people, who were nevertheless visited by glory. And by that glory were changed.

And it doesn't matter whether you read the testimony of Moses, or Elijah, or Isaiah, or the Virgin Mary, or Peter, or Mark, or John. In every case, you're listening to the words of somebody who was visited from outside by a glory that came from beyond this world. Into whose life there came this glory, which is the only begotten Son of God.

And it broke through their darkness. And it spoke to them. And when you read their testimony, you enter into their world.

And the same light that shone down on them begins to shine on you. You're looking across a timeless skull, and beholding the only begotten Son of God, and the blazing light of the Father coming down on Him, and just coming right out to you, and warming your heart, and quickening your very body, when you go to the Scriptures daily. And I seriously doubt that a person is really interested in walking with Jesus, who doesn't go to the Scriptures daily.

Don't be satisfied until in them you taste glory. Until you, as you read this, begin to breathe the atmosphere of heaven itself, as you read the words of these apostles and prophets of God. And you'll experience encouragement and the quickening of your heart.

Now the second place where we taste glory is by living in harmony with each other. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with each other, in accord with Christ Jesus. When we are in harmony with each other, in accord with Christ Jesus, not because we all like ping pong, but in accord with Christ Jesus, we're getting a foretaste of heaven.

And when there is discord between one another, this is a warning of hell. How few Christian homes, how few fellowships of believers actually live in harmony with each other around Jesus. Got a half an hour of harmony, sandwiched in between days and weeks and sometimes even months of tension, resentment, discord, gossip, belittling of one another, hurt feelings, grudges.

And then we wonder why we lost our vision. Do you doubt that God will give us the power to live together in harmony if we make the slightest effort to get down off our high horse and yield these stubborn hearts to Him? Do you doubt that God will enable us to work together as brothers and sisters, in fact, around the cross, not just these brothers over here, but not those over there. Not all these sisters except this one over here.

But all of us together, if we make the slightest effort to conform our hearts to the mind of Christ, if we are not willing to pay the price of living together in harmony, we're going to give up our vision whether we like it or not. We're going to lose our hope. That's just the way it works.

Now suppose your brother is hard-headed. You know, he's just giving you a hard time. Well, that's his problem.

You know, he's going to have to answer for that. But no matter how hard a time he's giving you, or how hard-headed he may be, he can't take away your hope from you. If you start losing your hope, this is a sign that you're hard-headed, and that you have a jarring spirit, and that you have an evil attitude.

And it's not just a matter of forever making a new pact with each other. From now on, we're going to be brothers and sisters. You know, or, you know, once a week carrying all our dirty linen with each other, or trying some new technique at probing into one another's hearts.

Or you can try, you know, transactional analysis, or you can try sensitivity training. You know, it matters not what you try. It begins when I decide, under God, that no matter how my brothers and sisters really treat me, or what kind of attitude they have toward me, I am going to line up my heart with the heart of my Lord, and I'm going to deal with my brothers and sisters.

The minute I decide that, glory comes right down on me. And a stream of glory not only comes to me, but begins to flood right into the body, and bring healing to all people around me. The third place where we taste glory and have our hope renewed is in singleness of praise.

You know, praising God, worshiping God in unity, that together you may, with one voice, glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Understand, it's impossible to do that if we're at each other's throats all the time. It's impossible, you know, to be living in discord all week and then praise God together in unity.

We can go through the motions of it, but it's not real. But once we're making a serious effort to really be one in our hearts with each other, then it's tremendously helpful to join together in fact and in truth, in unity of praise and worship of God. And we see this all through Scripture.

In Acts 4, when Peter and John are released from prison, they come back to their friends, and the believers raise up their voices and pray a prayer together. And the prayer is written in Acts chapter 4, and it's a beautiful prayer. And you wonder, well, how did they do this? Did they pray in unison? Did one man say this sentence and somebody else say that sentence? Did one person do all the praying and everybody say Amen? How did they do it? It doesn't matter how they did it.

Maybe they did it all five ways. What matters is that their hearts were one. They came out of their little private self-conscious compartment and joined around Jesus and really began to pray whether it was an Amen or whatever it was.

And God heard it coming to Him as one voice. And suddenly that whole place was filled with glory, so full of glory that the building shook. The place where they were gathered was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and spoke the Word of God with boldness.

Well, the night before, or the night just before, Jesus and the eleven disciples went out into the Garden of Gethsemane. We are told in Scripture that they sang a hymn. Eleven men around their Lord, singing a hymn.

And as they sing this hymn, heaven descends upon them. They get a taste of glory to help them as they go out into the most terrible night of their lives. And we need to come out of our little private compartments and really worship God.

Then we taste glory. Our hope is renewed. Our vision is restored.

The believers and the fellowships across the earth who are going to make it through the days that lie ahead of us will be those whose faith in God and whose love for one another are held together by blazing hope. It will be those who have the scroll in their hands and don't let go of it and read it constantly. The Word of the Spirit says this, fellowship, is that we need to have our hope renewed by continuously tasting glory.

We need to begin to taste glory in the Scriptures. We need to taste glory by living in harmony with each other. And we need to taste glory even as we sing these hymns and have this liturgy or praise God on a Wednesday night or a Monday night or in somebody's home or somebody's basement or meetings in Northland, Warren, all around the city, Grosse Pointe, wherever, that we really praise God in unity.

Somebody says, well, how do you do it? Where do I start? The answer is, the minute we start looking for that scroll, God will help us to find it. He'll show you. We're asking that, Father, you'll confirm the truth of every word that was true, that was just spoken to the heart of everyone who seeks and even those that may not be seeking consciously.

Father, you know the needs of our hearts. You know the shape we're in. You know what's going on behind our front.

You know our need of this revival of hope. And we pray, Father, that this very day, the circumstances of our lives, will help us under you and in you to adjust our hearts and our wills, our tongues, our very bodies to your promises and to your commands. Revive us, O God, with the light of heaven, even this day.

We ask it in Jesus' name.