Hope is a word we toss around a lot, isn't it? We hope this or that will happen. We hope a new
president will bring about change and the economy will improve. We live lives of hope in many
different ways.
When you hear the word "hope" what comes to your mind? For some it may mean the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. For others, it might be security - physical, job, financial. For some, it is the knowledge that a job might be forthcoming. For some it might be seeing gasoline prices drop by a dollar. For others, the possibility that someone will help them and they will not lose their house or have the electricity cut off. Still others may be holding the hope that healing from the sickness with which they or a loved one have struggled will be forthcoming.
But, those are basically individual hopes. So now, think about what you hope for your church. As you prepare for changes as a result of my retirement, there will be many different things for which you may hope. Some of you may hope for a new pastor to be found and called very quickly. My hope for you is that you will all be in regular prayer for God to lead you to the person He is already preparing to serve here.
Hope sometimes leads us into scary situations. I know with my eye surgeries, I had hope that I would have great vision once again. While that has not happened, I have hope that the doctors will find a solution that will work for me. As a matter of fact, I recently had an idea that I suggested to my doctor. He e-mailed me back saying it was an interesting idea, but he saw some drawbacks to it. I am anxious to see him this summer to discuss those things and maybe refine the idea.
Augustine of Hippo summed it up quite well. He said, "There is no love without hope, no hope without love, and neither hope nor love without faith." Paul sees these as what I would call "The Big Three." He writes about all three in the opening of this letter to the Colossians. He also closes his famous "Love Chapter" with these three: Faith, hope and love.
Someone has said, "You can go forty days without food and three days without water and you can go eight minutes without air. But you can't go a single second without hope. Hope is one of the essentials of life. When hope is gone, life is over. You need hope to cope."
Today, I want to explore where to find hope. Because without hope, nothing else makes any sense. Without hope, none of the other things we will talk about in these next several weeks will matter. You need hope in your life to carry on. You have to have hope to believe that God will work in your life. You have to have hope to believe that God can change your situation, that God can meet your needs. You've got to have hope. As a church, as Gulf Prairie Presbyterian Church, you need to have hope. God will lead you, if you let Him, if you rely on Him and not your own devices.
My friends, you will find hope in God and God alone. The Bible says, "May God, the source of hope, fill you with joy and peace through your faith in Him." In other words as you put your faith in God, He gives you peace, joy and hope. Then he continues saying, ".. Then you will overflow with hope…" (Romans 15:13 GW)
One of the things we must realize is that God is always present with us. The Psalmist put it this way: "I can never escape from your spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the place of the dead, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell by the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me." (Psalm 139:7-10 NLT) That promise, you see, is one thing you can count on. You can "take it to the bank," as they say.
Now, as I explore hope, I will do so more on a personal level, but I want you to remember that it also applies to you collectively as a congregation.
The first thing you need to understand about God is He is always watching over you. Over the years, I have discovered that I have very little control over the future. For the most part, I don't even know what's coming in the future. But the Bible says, "'Don't worry because I am with you,' says God. 'Don't be afraid, because I am your God. I will make you strong and I will help you. I will support you.'" (Isaiah 41:10 NCV) The good news is regardless of what happens, we don't have to go through it alone. God says He will be there with us. That is one of those certainties of life, and that gives us hope.
There are a lot of uncertainties in life. People you love and care about leave you. Some will die, some will move away, some will hurt you by walking out on you. There is no certainty that a given person will be there for you throughout your life. Someone you know and trust may become ill and no longer be the person mentally or emotionally that you counted on before. Nothing about the future is certain.
But the one certainty of life is that God will be there for you. He will never leave you. That reassurance answers one of the basic questions we have about the future: "What if....?" We may find ourselves asking that question more and more as we hear of the increased likelihood of terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. The truth is not even terrorists can drive God away. He will always be there. Now I know that these Islamic terrorists think they are serving their God, but their God is a false God. The God of love, revealed in His Holy Word, would neither condone nor approve their attitude toward taking human lives just for the shock value it will produce.
Not only is God with us, but the Bible says He watches over us. Not just watches us, but watches over us and cares for us. The Bible says, "I will guide you along the best pathway for your life. I will advise you and will watch over you." (Psalm 32:8 NLT) You and I, we don't know the future. We can't control the future. But, God does know the future and God can control the future. That God, who knows and can control the future, is willing to guide and advise us. He's willing to show us the way. There's great hope in that.
In Lamentations 3, we read, "I have hope when I think of this: the Lord's love never ends. His mercies never stop. They are new every morning." (Lamentations 3:22-23 NCV) That one verse has enough hope to get me at least through to the next week. It's all about hope. Nothing can ever make God stop loving me once I put my hand in His hand. Many of us look back on our lives and say "I really blew it there. I wish I hadn't done that." We feel hopeless because we feel like we've already messed things up. The Bible says that God gives us a new, fresh start every morning. I need that. I need the hope of that. It helps to know that God gives me a new start and a new day to live the way He wants me to, instead of the way I want to.
As you move into the future and begin the task of searching for a new pastor, you may feel at times that you blew it. You may feel that you should have pursued this person or that one. You may feel that the process is taking too long or that no one wants to come to Jones Creek. Be assured that God is watching over the whole process and is at work preparing the person He wants to serve here. Bear in mind the strange process by which He brought me here.
The second source of hope is His purpose working in us. One of the most difficult questions of life is, "Why is this happening to me?" We often voice that question when some weird thing happens to us that has no rhyme or reason. A year or two ago, there was a strange accident where two brothers were washing windows high up on a skyscraper. Their scaffolding broke and they fell something like 20 or 30 stories to the ground. One brother died, the other lived. Don't you know that one who lived is still asking, "Why me?"
When we can see a purpose behind a problem, it gives us hope. We can better understand it and it helps us endure it. And God says I am working in your life and I have a purpose and meaning for the things that happen. When I come to understand what the Bible teaches, I realize that even when the situation seems bad, God is still doing good things in my life. Even when things don't make sense, even when I don't understand, God is working in my life and will make a good thing of what is happening.
The Bible says, "We know that God causes all things to work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose." (Romans 8:28 NAS) This is such a significant verse I want to look more closely at it today. First, notice what it does not say. It doesn't say, "All thing will work out the way I want them to." We might want it to say that, but it doesn't. Neither does it say, "All things will work out with a happy ending on earth." We'd like it to say that, but it doesn't.
First it does say, "We know that God causes all things to work together for good." In other words, we don't wish, we don't imagine, we don't desire. It just says, "We know." It is a certainty. We are confident of whatever comes after this. Someone has said, "Hope is not the same as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well. But hope is the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. "What do we know?
We know that "...God causes..." In other words, there is a grand master plan, a master design of the universe. There is no such thing as fate or chance or luck. Everything has a purpose. We know that "...God causes all thing to work together for good...." You see, it doesn't say God causes all things good and bad to happen. It says, that He causes all things to work together for good. There's a huge difference in that. God doesn't sit around thinking up bad things to try out on people. He is a God of love. But when bad things happen - freak accidents, divorce, death, sickness, terrorist attacks, etc. - He causes those things to work together for good. He works them into His master plan, so that the end result fits what He intended.
I think you could liken this process to baking a cake. If you take all of the ingredients, and taste them one by one, most of them don't taste very good. But combined together, mixed up thoroughly and baked, it brings forth a wonderful taste. There are lots of things in our lives that leave a bad taste in our mouth, are hard to swallow, things we don't like and wish we didn't have to deal with. But God takes those things and works them together to form a beautiful life of service and ministry. Many of those things that we don't understand and wish we didn't have to deal with, are things that He can use in us to minister to others.
Now, you may be wondering how God can bring something good out of something terrible, something devastating, something so painful that you would not wish it on your worst enemy, as the saying goes. But consider the crucifixion, the murder of God's own Son. God brought good out of that and all of us can be very thankful for that.
Now, there's one more thing to notice about that verse from Romans we have been looking at. It says, "We know that God causes all things to work together for good for those who love God and are called according to His purpose." There's that qualifier at the end: "Those who love God." All things do not work together for good for everybody. In fact, if you are thumbing your nose at God, walking out the back door and saying, "Forget You, God!" all things are not working for good in your life. In fact, all things are working for bad in your life. This is not a promise to everybody. It's a promise for those who love God and want to have a relationship with Him and who are trying to live according to His purpose.
This morning if you are here and you're facing an impossible situation, the next verse is for you. God says, "I have good plans for you, not plans to hurt you. I will give you hope and a good future." (Jeremiah 29:11 NCV) You may think that what God is doing in your life right now is painful and is to no avail, but God says, "My plan is good. You just don't see it. You need to trust Me. You need to have hope because it's a plan to give you a hope and a future." As a congregation, you need to cling to that verse, as well. God does have a good plan for Gulf Prairie Church. You will need to cling to that truth in the coming months - possibly a year or two. I would urge you to not give up on the Presbyterian process and start looking for another church. Let God work in His own time.
If you have walked away from God, and you think, "I was close to God at one time but I can't get back to Him," then I want you to listen closely to this next verse. The Bible says, "God began doing a good work in you and I am sure He will continue it until it is finished when Jesus Christ comes again." (Philippians 1:6 NCV) When God starts something in your life, He finishes it. You may say you're too far beyond hope, you've done things He could never forgive. That's wrong. You may have walked away from it, but when you come back and say, "God, I'm going to give You the mess, the pieces and I beg Your forgiveness. Give me Your peace." Then, that which He started, He will finish in your life.
How do I learn about God's plan for my life? Through the Bible. The Bible tells us in Romans 15 that everything that was written in this book was written for our encouragement and our hope. The more you get into this book - God's word, the Bible - the more hopeful a person you're going to be. The more you, as a congregation, study God's word individually, as well as together in worship and in Bible Studies, the more hopeful you will become that God is working out His will for you as a church.
The third source of hope is the fact that God has a place waiting for you and for me. When things get unbearable in your life, remember that our ultimate hope is Heaven. Paul says it like this. If all our hope is just on this earth, we should be pitied. But there's more to life than just here and now.
Jesus said. "Don't be troubled. You trust in God, now trust in Me. I am going to prepare a place for you." (John 14:1-2 NLT) Jesus Christ says that heaven is a place, not a state of mind. It's not some kind of figment of our imagination. It is a real place and God says "I am going to prepare a place for you."
You know, the Bible tells us a lot about that place called Heaven. We know that there will be no fear, no sorrow, no pain, no suffering. Here's one quote from the Bible that tells us some of these things, "He will wipe away all tears from their eyes and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor pain. All of that has gone forever." (Revelation 21:4 LB) That gives us a reason for hope. Anyone can have great hope when things are going well. But when they begin to fall apart, then you have a real test of your faith.
Linda and I have had a real test of faith as we wrestled with this decision. We have no idea where we will be living in a few months. We have no idea if we will be able to live on my pension and social security. Linda hopes to get a job. But, we are excited about seeing where God is leading us and what He wants us to do in serving Him. It is my hope that you will be excited about the future of Gulf Prairie Presbyterian Church, as well. I hope that you will be looking to God's leading, as you seek His will for your future ministry here in this place.
If you're struggling with things in your life, if you feel like there is no reason to hope, there are a couple of things you need to do. First, you need to remember the presence of God. Remember that He will always be with you, that you will never be without Him. You may not feel it, but He is there. He is aware. He does care. He can help.
Second, receive from God's people. Let the members of the church help you through that difficult time. Call on them to support you when you feel like there is no hope left. That's the reason you need to be a participator rather than a spectator. That's why participation in a small group is so important.
There are a lot of uncertainties in life. But there are three things that you can count on and from which you can gain hope: God will always be with you. His purpose will be working out in your life, and He has a place for you to live with Him forever. The Bible says, "Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint." (Isaiah 41:31 NIV) No situation is hopeless.
Prayer:
Gracious God, as we move into the future, may we always hope in Your love, forgiveness and
watch care. Guide each of us as individuals and as a congregation to know and do Your will.
Give us signs along the way of Your presence with us and help us to know that "All things will
work together for good." In Jesus name. Amen.
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Sermon November 18, 2007
Sermon November 25, 2007
Sermon December 2, 2007
Sermon December 9, 2007
Sermon December 16, 2007
Sermon December 23, 2007
Sermon December 24, 2007
December 30, 2007 - Guest speaker, transcript not available
Sermon January 6, 2008
Sermon January 13, 2008
Sermon January 20, 2008
Sermon January 27, 2008
Sermon February 3, 2008
Sermon February 10, 2008
Sermon February 17, 2008
Sermon February 24, 2008
Sermon March 2, 2008
Sermon March 9, 2009
Sermon March 16, 2008
Sermon March 23, 2008
March 30, 2008 - Transcript not available
April 6, 2008 - Guest speaker, transcript not available
Sermon April 13, 2008
April 20, 2008 - Guest speaker, transcript not available
April 27, 2008 - Guest speaker, transcript not available
Sermon May 4, 2008
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If you have questions about this message or wish to contact Dr. Kile for further information, feel free to e-mail him at pastor@gulf-prairie.org