Hope Through the Scriptures
Key Passage: Romans 15:4,13
Date: June 7, 2024
I always like preaching after my wife’s scenes, because it doesn’t matter what I say, at least something went right, so that’s good. But I am glad to have her back. Got to ask you, for Christmas, let me think about this. How many are turkey people? If you’re a turkey person, let me see your hand. All right, let me have the ham. All right, specifically honey-baked ham, all right, with the drizzle on top, brown sugar coming off from the crust. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. Hopefully he didn’t eat any turkey for breakfast. We’ll be preaching today. And if you got your Bible, just go ahead and turn to Romans chapter 15. Romans chapter 15. And we’ll stand and we’ll read just two verses. And then we’ll get started with a message here. I got just a quick joke for you. This is to help me calm my nerves down. But with everything going the way it has, there’s been a lot of substitutes, a lot of people filling in spaces, and praise the Lord for it.
But this is about the substitute pianist, all right? The minister was preoccupied with thoughts of how he was going to, after the worship service, ask the congregation to come up with more money than they were expecting for the repairs on the roof. Therefore, he was annoyed to find the regular pianist was sick, and a substitute had been brought in at the last minute. The substitute wanted to know what to play.
“Here’s a copy of the service,” he said impatiently, “but you’ll have to think of something to play when I start talking about the finances.” During the service, the minister paused and said, “Dear brothers and sisters, we are in great difficulty. The roof repairs cost twice as much as we expected, and we need $4,000 more. Any of you who can pledge $100 or more, would you please stand up?” At that moment, the substitute pianist played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and that’s how the substitute became the full-time pianist.
Amen for that. But let’s go ahead. Romans chapter 15, let’s stand, and we’ll read these two verses here, starting in verse number four. Verse number four, Romans 15. We’ll read these two verses out. We’ll read verse number four and verse number 14. We’ll read them out loud together. We’ll pause at any punctuation. But Romans chapter 15, verse number four, we’ll read together. Begin: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” What about that phrase right there? Might have hope. Through the scriptures, we might have hope. I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Let’s look at verse number 13. We’ll read that verse together. Begin: “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope through the power of the Holy Ghost.”
I love that verse number four. I was studying, and I like to cook sometimes. Sometimes, you know, Coutre, she just had the baby, and so I’ll go in there and put on my chef hat. Things are going to happen here. I’m going to open up that box of mac and cheese, and we’re going to have mac and cheese and hot dogs. That’s the way it’s going to be. But I like cooking every now and then. But I can’t imagine having to cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the rest of your life. For the rest of your life, you’re cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I give hands to my wife; I just give her applause for doing that. That’s amazing.
And it’s the same thing with preaching. I like to preach. But I’m preaching this morning. I’m preaching this evening. I cannot imagine a preacher having to prepare a Wednesday night service, a Sunday school lesson, a Sunday morning, and a Sunday night service. Preparing all that, that’s just a lot of work to do. So I’ll stick with just every now and then. That’ll be okay with me.
But as I was studying, this word “hope” just kept coming up. I’m reading through my Bible, and I’m not going to tell you that I’m a little bit behind in my New Testament, so I’m catching up. But this word hope is in the Bible a lot, especially towards the New Testament. And when we think of hope, if I were to ask everybody, just take a survey: What does hope mean to you? We would get as many opinions as there are people in here. Hope means different things to different people. But I want to show you what the Bible talks about when the Bible mentions hope. What God wants us to know when he uses the word hope in the Bible.
Hope is not just something that we wish for. I wished for a 2020 Toyota Tacoma to be in my driveway for Christmas. I wished for that, but it didn’t happen.
But it’s different. Hope has meaning to it. It has backing to it. We’ll look at that here. We’ll read verse number four again, and then I’ll give you an introduction. I need you to stay with me during the introduction, just kind of laying the foundation, laying the groundwork, and then we’ll get into the message. But look at verse number four again: “For whatsoever things were written aforetime, were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” That’s just encouraging to me. We can have hope. God says that we can have hope. Where? Through patience and through the comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope. God wants us as Christians to have hope. Why? Because God is the God of hope. He is hope. Everything that hope is, that’s what God is. God is hope. That’s what verse number 13 tells us. So God tells us here through the scriptures, we can have hope, that we might have hope.
As we approach the end of the year, we just naturally, when we’re looking at the next year coming around, we just have these expectations that come. The expectations of, “Next year is going to be even better.” Next year, I’m going to lose 50 pounds. Next year, I’m going to finish our house. Next year, I’m going to do this project that’s been sitting in our garage. Next year, I’m going to fix the car. Next year I’m going to do this, and we just have such high expectations when it comes to the next year. We’re very hopeful. The word hope is brought up, and there is good reason for it, because hope is powerful. Hope is a very powerful thing. If we don’t have hope, we’ll see here in the scriptures, we’re very powerless. We’re helpless. If we don’t have hope, we don’t have hope.
Hope is defined by Webster’s in the 1828 dictionary. It is defined as: “Confidence in a future event, the highest degree of well-founded expectation of good.” It is confidence in a future event. When I hope for something, I am confident that this is happening. It may not happen, but I’m hoping; I’m confident that it will happen.
The second definition is: “An opinion or belief, not amounting to certainty, but grounded on substantial evidence.” Grounded on substantial evidence. I can hope that I’m going to have lunch later today. There’s some substantial evidence because there’s some food in the refrigerator, right? That’s the evidence that I have, and it’s something I can look forward to; it’s something I can hope for. But I could get home, and my wife could throw all the food out in the trash can and say, “You make your own stuff. Go to the store.” And my hope would be crushed. It would be hurt.
Hope is both positive and restraining at the same time. Your hope is affected by your past experiences. When I use the word hope, some of you remember back when you were a kid and you hoped for Christmas that you were probably going to get a bicycle, right? And then your parents took you through the nice neighborhoods, and they were throwing out their old bicycles. That’s the one you got to take home. But you have this hope. Based on your past experiences, you have maybe a negative or a restraining view of hope. You may see hope as, “Well, I hoped that we were going to have a great marriage, but it didn’t happen,” and you were hurt because of that. I hoped maybe that my finances would have been better in 2020, and guess what? It didn’t happen, and you were hurt because of that. I hoped that I was going to make better grades in school, and it didn’t happen, and you were hurt because of that. So based on your past experiences is the view that you have towards hope. Everybody has hope, but the view that we have is based off our past experiences.
Here’s a big question: How do I deal with the despair of not getting what I hope for?
Hope is both an emotion and a position. Paranoia is an emotion, yes, but it’s also a position. If you hear noises all over your house, you are paranoid about it. It’s not only an emotion that you feel, but it’s also a position; it’s a state of mind that you have. Hope identifies a place of importance and moves you towards that goal. Hope recognizes the goal, and what hope does is it moves us to that goal.
When we hope for something, two things happen. When I hoped for that bicycle when I was a little kid, I had to realize that it was important to me. That bicycle was important to me to get for Christmas. That marriage—maybe when you got married and you had high hopes for your marriage—you didn’t go into that marriage thinking, “Well, let’s just see what happens.” No, you go in that marriage with high hopes. A good marriage, strong communication in marriage—that is something that is important to you.
So, number one thing, when we hope for something, we recognize its importance, but also we realize that we lack it. We lack it. I wish I was better at communicating to people. I feel like I’m bored sometimes when I walk up to people. I have a hard time communicating with people. For me, I hope to get better at that. I have to realize that that’s something that’s important to me. I want to be able to communicate with people, with my wife, and with friends and family. But then I also have to realize that I lack that communication. I lack that thing. So when we hope for something, we are setting ourselves up for maybe failure, but also for success. We are hoping that we get better.
Hope moves us through uncertainty to a goal. This is what hope is. Hope is not just, “Oh, I hope things go great.” That’s optimism. Optimism is, “Everything is just going to be dandy.” But hope says, “Well, I don’t know if everything’s going to be great, but I’m going to use hope as the vehicle to drive me to that place of greatness, to that end goal of everything being happy, everything being great.” It moves us through uncertainty. Some things in our lives we’re just uncertain about.
Maybe you’re engaged. You’re about to be married. I remember being there. My brother just got married last week. I remember talking to him; it was the day before he was going to ask his wife to marry him. He sat with me and said, “I don’t know if she’s the one.” I was like, “Well, it’s kind of late, buddy. You got the ring already.” He said, “I just don’t know if she’s the one or not.” We battle through uncertainty, but he went through that. We used hope as that vehicle to get us through those uncertain times towards a goal.
I’ll read you this story here. A man was sentenced to death, but he attained a reprieve by assuring the king that he would teach his majesty’s horse how to fly within a year. He was condemned to death; that was his payment. He told the king, “If you let me out for a year, I’m going to teach your horse how to fly.” That seems pretty crazy, but this was the condition: If he didn’t succeed, he would just be put to death later at the end of the year. Within a year, the man explained later, “The king may die. I may die, or the horse may die. Furthermore, in a year, who knows, maybe the horse will fly.”
That’s hope. Hope is looking at something in uncertainty, not knowing what’s going to happen, not knowing the challenges that you’re going to face. And hope is saying, “Look, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m going to push towards that goal.” This is what hope is. Hope is a belief or a faith in something. It is an ability to find alternate pathways.
When my daughter Charity, if something’s not going her way, she’ll stand on the chair. She’s able to get on the chair, but she can’t get off of the chair. So she just stands at the table and cries, “Mommy!” She cries and cries and cries. All she needs to do is just get off the chair. But that is what wishful thinking is: “I want to get off, but I don’t know how to get off, and I’m just going to put up with it.” But hopeful thinking is finding an alternate pathway, finding something different to get around the challenges that we face.
We become afraid of hope when we are constantly met with disappointment. Everybody has been disappointed. You’ve been discouraged about something. Something that you hoped for, something you thought, “This is it. I’m going to make this. This is going to be a different day.” And we get disappointed. Setbacks come. Challenges come. And we become afraid of hope when we are constantly met with disappointment. The Bible says in Proverbs 13:12, “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.” That’s what happens. When we hope for something and it’s deflected or it’s turned away, it makes our heart sick. It makes us just disappointed. There’s a discouragement that comes.
Despair is the same as helplessness. When we get to a point in our life where we’re disappointed and we get to this despair, we get to a place of helplessness where nobody can help us. We just don’t want to be helped because we have this despair, this disappointment that sets in, because we’ve lost our hope.
Claire Booth says this: “There are no hopeless situations; there are only people who have grown hopeless about them.” They’ve lost that spark of hope.
Hope is all about risk. If you are going to hope for something, there is a risk involved. If you’re going to hope to raise godly children, there’s a risk that comes with that. If you’re going to hope to increase your finances or get a better job, there’s a risk that comes with that. If you’re going to hope to increase your friendships and your fellowship, there’s a risk that comes with that. This is where the gospel hits the pedal to the metal, if you will. This is where the gospel makes sense, because we go out on the hope that God is going to save us. We go out on the hope of salvation, and God has backed that up, and we can be certain in that.
But without hope, we become stagnant. Nobody’s ever grown by just staying the same. If we were not to feed our son any more meals, guess what? He would stay the same, and eventually, he wouldn’t be here. But if we are to grow, we have to have that hope. We have to have a stretching, a time of stretch, of being stretched. And that’s what hope is. Hope is that we’re not stagnant; we’re reaching forward towards a goal. We are going through something.
What are you hoping in? What have you put your hope in? Is it a good marriage? Does your whole life depend on whether you have a good marriage or not? Does your life depend on if your finances are up to a certain neighbor that you have? That’s what hope is. Hope is something that pushes us towards a goal. When we have hope, we can push towards challenges. We can push through difficulties that come into our lives.
I’m just going to give you a couple things here. This is the sermon part of it. Number one is how to hope. You have to know how to hope in order to hope. When I was going to college, I didn’t go just because everybody else was doing it and I just wanted to have fun. I went to college because I wanted to graduate. I had hopes of graduating college. Some of you went to college, got your doctorate degree, or maybe high school, and you were brought with some challenges in your life. You were brought with circumstances that you could have just said, “I’m done, I’m over with this.” But you had a hope that you were going to graduate. You had a hope that things were going to turn out right, and you were able to use that hope to get you through those circumstances, to get you through those hard times. In college, I was faced with financial difficulties. I tried to date six different times, and I got dumped all six times. Finally, Ms. Gatoris said yes. No, I’m just kidding. But you were faced with challenges. We’re faced with challenges emotionally. We’re faced with challenges spiritually. And it’s easy just to give up. But where hope comes in is where we see that end goal, and we keep pushing towards that. So how do we hope? Here’s the first thing: Have something to hope for. Turn your Bibles to 1 Peter chapter 3, verse number 15.
So how do we hope? We have to have something in which to hope for. The Bible says in 1 Peter 3:15, “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” Do you have a reason for your hope? If you just walk through life lackadaisically, just letting things happen, you don’t have a hope. You have to have something to hope for. This is how you have hope: you have to have something that you’re hoping for.
Let me read you a story here. A number of years ago, researchers were in a lab and they took two sets of lab rats. They put one set of lab rats in a tub and just left them alone. Eventually, those rats swam for a little bit, but within an hour they were all dead. But the second set of lab rats, they put them in a tub, and every now and then they would take those rats up, pick them up, and then put them back in. They would pick them up, and they’d put them back in, periodically. But after 24 hours, those rats were still alive. What was the difference? Those one set of rats, when they were left alone, died within an hour. But these other rats that they were picked up periodically lasted for more than 24 hours. Was it because they were given a rest when they were picked up? No, it’s because they had hope. They knew if they just swam a little bit longer, somebody’s going to come in and pick them up. Somebody’s going to come to their rescue and pick them up out of this mess. They had a hope, and that kept them going. It wasn’t a rest that they got, but it was a hope that they had.
What is keeping you afloat in your life? What is that thing that you’re holding on to that you wake up in the morning and charge towards? What is that that’s keeping you alive? Is it just to make money? Let me tell you, that’s not really an end goal to be proud of. “Oh man, I made a lot of money.” Well, that’s great. What else did you do? “I made a lot of money.” That’s good. But what is keeping you afloat? What is keeping you moving? What is driving you to your goal?
Here’s the thing: There are eternal things, which is God, that we can put our trust in and they never fail us. But then there are the temporal things: there’s money, there’s man, and then there are material things that we have here on earth. If that is your hope, you will be disappointed. I’ll say that again. If your hope is in man, if your hope is in money, if your hope is in getting things and material things here on earth, you will be disappointed. That new toy that you get will break. That car that you bought right off the lot will have issues. The kids that you thought, “This is it, I’m going to raise my kids right; they’re not going to be wrong at all”—they will throw a fit in Walmart. They will get you kicked out of places.
When those difficulties come, it’s because we put our hope in temporal things. We put our hope in things on this earth, and we will be disappointed. Because we are imperfect, trying to put hope in imperfect things, imperfect results will happen.
For me, I had a very close leader in my church that I put hope in. I loved going to the youth group. I loved being around him, and I loved the things that he taught me. But then something happened. I had a choice. That was a hard blow to me, and I could have just let it go, thinking, “I’m done with this. If this is what church is all about, then I’m done with it.” But I had to have a hope not in a man, but in God. I had to have a hope that God was going to lead me through that. We have to have a hope. We have to have something that we’re hoping for.
The second thing is we have to have a hope in the right things. The Bible says in Galatians 5:5, “For we through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith.” We are made righteous by God’s goodness to us, by God dying on the cross and giving us a gift of salvation. So we can hope in salvation. These are three things that are perfect, that we can hope in; they never will fail us.
We can hope in salvation. We don’t have to worry every day, “Am I doing good enough to get me to heaven?” Where is your hope lying? Is it lying in God’s salvation, or is it lying in your works? Is it lying in the church that you attend, or is it lying in God’s faithfulness? Where is your hope lying? When we put our faith and our hope in salvation, we can rest assured that it’s not going to fail. It’s not going to disappoint us. I’ve never been disappointed for getting saved. I’ve never been disappointed because God saved my soul from hell. I have been nothing but excited. And that’s what hope is.
We can put our hope in salvation. We can put our hope in our King James Bible. This is God’s word to us. I don’t have to worry if it’s the right version, or if I need to change versions every month. The girls got a little Christmas book about the nativity. Every page had a different version of the Bible. That’s just confusing to me. God is not a God of confusion; God is the God of peace. God doesn’t confuse us. So we can rest assured knowing that God, in the King James Bible, has given us a Bible we can trust in. We can have hope in it. I’ve never been ashamed of my King James Bible. There will never be a professor, a Dr. Messamup, that will come up to me and say, “Hey, that King James Bible you’re using, it’s just not right. There are a lot of errors in there.” Well, go ahead and show them to me, buddy, because this Bible is perfect. God gave us his perfect, preserved word for us. That’s what we can hope in. We can hope in our salvation, we can hope in the King James Bible, and we can hope in God.
The Bible says in Psalm 42:11, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God.” Do you hope in God? Do we have hope in God? Sometimes I’ve been guilty of this, especially this last election coming around. I’ve been guilty in a man that’s going to solve our problems. I’ve been guilty in a system that’s going to solve our problems. And guess what? They fail. They fail; they disappoint us. But if my trust and my hope is in God, he will never fail me. He will never let me down. I can trust in God. I can go to bed at night saying, “Lord, you’re in control. You are God. I can trust in you. You know what’s going on. I’ve prayed to you. I’ve made my request. I’m just going to leave it in your hands.” And God never has let us down.
There are things that are perfect, and they are guaranteed to be true. We don’t have to worry about these things. We don’t have to worry about our salvation. When I talk to people soul winning, you knock on the door, and you ask, “Do you know for sure you’re going to heaven when you die?” And they say, “Well, let me think about that for a second. Yeah, I think I’m good. Yeah, I’ve been baptized. We’re good. I haven’t been too bad here lately, so we’re okay. Yeah, I’m safe.” No, it’s not about you. It’s not about your salvation. We hope in God’s salvation.
I talked to a man from Louisiana earlier this year. I knocked on his door and said, “Do you know for sure you’re going to heaven when you die?” He said, “Just give me a second.” He closed the door, and I waited out there for about five or six minutes. He came back and said, “Now I know for sure. I know for sure I’m going to heaven. I just confessed everything I did.” I was like, “Well, what about the things you didn’t confess? What about things that you forgot?” Here, let me show you about a God and a salvation that you can trust, a God that you can hope into.
The devil went to Eve in the Garden of Eden. What did he tell her? He didn’t say, “Hey, look, I’m just trying to get you to do wrong, so if you just go ahead and eat this fruit, we’ll be okay.” No, what did he do? He said, “Look, God’s lying to you.” We know, according to the Bible, God doesn’t lie, but he said, “God’s lying to you. That fruit’s not going to kill you. God’s trying to hide something from you. If you ate that fruit, you would be as gods; you would know right and wrong.” God’s just trying to lie to you, trying to hide things from you. Just go ahead and get the fruit. Eve made that decision based off the devil telling her that God was not true and that God was trying to hide things from her.
That’s what we have today. When the devil gets through, he’s not going to tell us, “Hey, look, your husband’s not perfect.” I know that. “But your kids aren’t perfect.” I know that for sure. But the devil is not going to attack those things. He’s going to come for your faith in God. He’s going to come for your trust and your hope in God. Do you hope in your salvation? The devil is trying to make you lose hope in what God said—that’s the Bible—and trying to make you lose hope from God, trying to keep things from you. That’s what the world, that’s what the devil tries to do: shake up our hope and our faith in Jesus Christ. So the first thing is have something to hope for.
Hope in good things. Here’s the second thing: How to have hope. Have hope along with patience. The Bible says in Romans 8:24 and 25, “For we are saved by hope. But hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that which we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” Hope and patience work hand in hand, like barbecue sauce and pulled pork. They go hand in hand. You can have hope and you can have patience separately, but when they are together, that is where God really can use and increase our hope.
The verse that we read earlier today: “Now the God of hope shall fill you with all joy and peace in believing,” and then verse number four, “For whatsoever things were written aforetime are written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” Patience is key. We are to have patience.
Our little daughter, Charity, she loves marshmallow cereal—Lucky Charms, okay? So we pour her cereal, and Charity will run, “I need that Lucky Charms! I need my marshmallow cereal!” She has a high chair, and if we were to leave her alone and just put the marshmallow on the high chair, she probably would jump over the high chair and get in there herself. But sometimes we’ll give the bowl of cereal, and it’ll have the marshmallow pieces, and it’ll also have the regular boring pieces. If you want more marshmallows, you got to eat this stuff.
For us, God has things for us, and if we hope for them is one thing, but we have to have patience, knowing that God’s got it under control. God knows what we need. Patience works hand in hand to deliver such a powerful punch, both of those things together. Romans 12:10 and 12 says, “Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honor preferring one another; Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulations.” They go hand in hand. If we are to have hope, we need our patience. Patience will be a key for us to learn to have hope.
So how to have hope? That’s a good thing. But what do we do when we’re disappointed? What do we do when we’re discouraged? It’s going to happen. If I’m trusting in me trying to be a better Bible reader or a better student of the Bible, I’m going to fail myself. If I’m trusting in me to quit smoking, I’m going to fail myself. If I’m trusting in maybe a program to help me overcome addiction, it’s going to fail me. God never fails. So what do I do when that disappointment comes? What do I do when discouragement comes?
Number one: Keep hoping. Keep hoping. The Bible says in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.” When we lose our hope as Christians, we’re just worthless; we’re helpless. God wants us to have hope to push forward. He says, don’t be as others that don’t have any hope. You have hope. God is going to take us to heaven one day in the rapture. We have a home awaiting for us in heaven if we’ve asked Jesus as our Savior. We have hope in that salvation. We have hope in God. But you have to keep hoping. When discouragement comes and when those battles come, you have to find that alternate pathway. You have to overcome those challenges.
There was a school system in a large city that had a program to help children keep up with their schoolwork while they were in the hospital for a long time. They assigned a teacher to visit one particular child. She took the child’s name and room number and talked briefly with the child’s regular class teacher. The regular teacher said, “We’re studying nouns and pronouns and adverbs in his class now. I’d be grateful if you could just help him understand so he doesn’t fall too far behind.”
The hospital program teacher went into the room to see the boy that afternoon. No one had mentioned to her that the boy had been badly burned and was in great pain. Upset at the sight of the boy, she stammered as she told him, “I’ve been sent by your school to help you with your nouns and adverbs.” When she left, she felt that she didn’t accomplish anything.
But the very next day, the nurse asked her, “What did you do to that boy?” The program teacher got nervous. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” “No, no, no,” said the nurse, “you don’t know what I mean. We’ve been worried about that little boy; he doesn’t have a hope to live. But ever since yesterday, his whole attitude has changed. He’s fighting back. He’s responding to the treatment as though he has decided to live.”
Two weeks later, the boy explained that he had completely given up hope until the teacher arrived. Everything changed when he came to that simple realization. He expressed it this way: “They wouldn’t send a teacher to work on nouns and adverbs with a dying boy, would they?” He had hope. He said, “I feel like I’m in the burn unit. I feel like I’m in the hospital. I’m falling behind in school. This trial has come into my life. I’m just going to give up.” The Bible talks about Jeremiah, who told the people, “Don’t give up. Don’t lose your hope.” But this boy said, “Look, they wouldn’t send a teacher to work on this if they didn’t think that I wasn’t going to die.” He was given hope. When trials come, we are supposed to use hope to persevere through them.
The Bible says in Proverbs 19:18, “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” If you want obedient children, it’s going to take a lot of work. It’s going to take a lot of overcoming trials. We’ve been teaching our children to stay in bed during nap time. Charity has her own bed now; she’s in a toddler bed. Those first couple of days, she would wait, and then when she didn’t hear footsteps anymore, she thought we went downstairs. You’d see those two feet jump off the end of the bed, and then she’d be playing in something. It’s like, “No, no, no, come on, get back in bed.” But it’s going to take some work. The Bible says, “Chasten thy son while there is hope.”
If you’re wanting to be healthy, it’s going to take a lot of self-control. If you’re wanting to change a habit, maybe a bad habit, it’s going to take some self-control. If you want to keep your family in church, it’s going to take a lot of love, and it’s going to take a lot of discipline. If you want your family raised in church, you are going to be faced with some challenges. You’re going to be faced with some authority that maybe is not going to do things the way that you think they should. There will be a challenge and difficulty that will come through your life, but you have to have that hope to keep persevering. Keep pushing through. Remember what the goal is.
If your goal is just to have money, well, great. You can go get a dollar off the floor. But if your goal is, “I’m going to be a servant for God. My goal is I want to see somebody saved,” you push through those adversities to see that goal met. You push through because you remember what the goal is.
First thing is you have to keep hoping. Don’t ever stop hoping. Just keep hoping. The second thing is realize it is never too late to turn to God. God knows what you’re going through. He is there for you. He wants you to turn to him to get that hope when discouragement comes.
And the third thing: when discouragement comes, praise God. Praise God. The Bible says in Psalm 71:14, “But I will hope continually, and will yet praise thee more and more.” You notice the similarities there? You’re hoping, and while you’re hoping, guess what? “I’m going to praise thee more and more.” Because when we get discouraged, the last thing we want to do is praise God. The last thing we want to do is give God praise for what’s happened in our lives. But when that discouragement comes, we are supposed to praise him more and more.
When we sit around on Christmas and we go over what the Lord has done for us this year, and we praise God for what he’s done and how he’s brought us through, we’re happy. We may have gone through some heartaches. We may have lost some loved ones. We may have had financial ruin. But at the end of the year, we know God is still in control, and we know that we can hope in God. Praise God. Praise God. When we are feeling our hope waiver, that is the point that we need to praise him the most. When you’re feeling like, “Man, it’s not even worth it. There’s no hope.” That’s when you need to praise God even more. That’s when you need to get into God and praise God. Find the good and praise God for it.
Here’s the last thing: Are you hoping in Jesus for your eternal life? The Bible says in Titus 1:2, “In hope of eternal life, which God that cannot lie, promised before the world began.” God has eternal life for us, and he wants us to hope in it. It’s not about our church. It’s not about the things that you have to do to get saved. There is nothing that you have to do; it’s already been done. God wants us to hope in that eternal life because it doesn’t fail. God is never going to say, “Well, you didn’t really hope enough.” No, you just have to hope in the hope of eternal life. God has made us a foolproof way for us to receive his perfect gift of salvation through hope.
Romans chapter 8, verse number 24 says, “For we are saved by hope.” It’s that hope in Jesus Christ. That’s what we have. Christians, when we’re stripped of everything that we own, when things are taken away from us, guess what we still have? We can still have hope because it’s not about us. It’s not about the material things that we have here on earth. It’s about our hope in Jesus. It’s about our hope in God.
Hope is an attitude of perseverance and tenacity that will give you the spark to keep going. Are you hoping in the right things? What are you doing when the disappointment comes? Are you struggling with the disappointment? Make the decision that no matter the setbacks, no matter the struggles, no matter the challenges, you will have hope. That’s what we need. We can share hope because it’s not about us. I can go to a brother or I can go to somebody off the street and I can share hope with them because it’s not about me; it’s about the hope that God has set before us.
Original File: Hope - Brother Anthony Aaron - Sunday AM 12272020