Sermon Tone Analysis

You can’t live without hope.

There are things you know with your mind that are not operating at the very center of your being.

Paul in his prayer is asking the Holy Spirit to take what we know with our mind and use it to dominate our thinking and imagination to such a degree that our behavior would be changed.

Paul asks the Holy Spirit in verse 18 to saturate and smite your heart with hope?

It’s there in verse 18. “I pray that you will know the hope to which he has called you.”

The hope.

Now what’s hope?

The biblical concept of hope is very poorly served by our English word hope.

The Greek word hope appears 80 times in the New Testament.

However, our English hope is a very poor vehicle for it.

Our English word connotes uncertainty.

Right?

If someone says, “Do you know that’s true?” what are you going to say? You’re going to say, “No, I don’t know it’s true, but I hope it’s true.”

See, the word hope means uncertainty, but the biblical definition of hope is a life-shaping certainty of something that hasn’t happened yet but you know will.

2013 Auburn vs. Georgia game

Our believed-in future determines how we live now.

Human beings are hope-based beings.

We are ultimately and unavoidably shaped now by our believed-in future.

What we believe about our future is the main determinate of how we process and how we experience and how we handle circumstances now.

Let me just give you proof of that.

Imagine two guys, and they both have the same job.

The job is a terrible job.

It’s a menial job.

It’s a boring job.

Long hours, no vacation, for one year.

It’s all the same.

The circumstances are the same.

It’s boring, menial work.

It’s terrible lighting and terrible working conditions.

It’s 80 hours a week.

It’s no vacation for one year.

So they’re having the very same circumstances.

Oh, but one thing.

One guy is told, “You’re going to be paid $15,000 for this year of work,” and the other guy is told, “You’re going to be paid $15 million for this year of work.”

It’s funny, because they’re in the very same circumstances, but it’s not the circumstances.

They are experiencing their circumstances in totally different ways because of that future.

The guy who knows he’s going to get $15,000 is bored, is unhappy, he’s grumpy, he can’t stand it, and maybe a quarter of the way through the year he quits.

The other guy whistles while he works.

He goes to work, always gets there on time, is very happy.

He works all day and he goes through his whole year.

Why? It’s not the circumstances that actually make you feel the way you feel.

It’s not the circumstances that actually affect the way you live.

Your believed-in future completely determines how you process and how you respond to the circumstances now.

You literally can’t live without hope.

Viktor Frankl, a Jewish doctor who survived the death camps in Germany during World War II wrote about his experiences and in particular the effect of hope.

He noticed that some prisoners just withered up and died while other prisoners stayed strong.

He tried to figure out why, and this was his conclusion.

“If a prisoner lost faith in his future, he was doomed.”

He gave this example.

“One of my friends in the camp had a dream that the war would end March 30.

He was convinced the dream was a revelation, but as the date drew nearer, it became clear from the news reports the war was not ending.

On March 29 he began running a temperature.

On March 30 he lost consciousness.

On March 31 he was dead.

His loss of hope had lowered his body’s resistance to all of the diseases in the camp.”

You literally can’t live without hope.

You can’t stay healthy without something to look forward to.

Depression is linked to hopelessness.

Your believed-in future, the hope of your heart, is the real thing that forms the way in which you live now, but we just don’t see it.

Let me go even further.

Your ultimate hope in your ultimate future is the most formative force in you.

Let’s look at one more example from Viktor Frankl.

He observed that some prisoners withered up and died while some prisoners went bad.

They informed by collaborating with the enemy.

Some prisoners stayed not only strong, but also true to their fellow inmates.

He tried to figure out what it was in the ones who stayed strong.

“Life in a concentration camp exposes your soul’s foundation.

Only a few of the prisoners were able to keep their full inner liberty and inner strength.

Life only has meaning in any circumstances if you have a hope that suffering, circumstances, and even death cannot destroy.

One of the prisoners who achieved this was once asked, ‘Why are you being so nice to people and so kind to people in a death camp?

Why even try?’ ”He replied “I always remember my wife …” (Who was dead, by the way, and he believed was in heaven.)

“I always remember that at any time my wife might be looking down on me, or God might be looking down on me, and I don’t want to disappoint them.”

Frankl said that’s not just a sentimental little interesting psychological trick.

If you put your ultimate hope into anything in this life, into your job, into money, into your family, into your health, into your status, then suffering and circumstances can take it away, and your life will always be characterized by a ground note of anxiety.

You’ll always be anxious.

The only way you’re going to be able to face life under any circumstances is to put your ultimate hope into something suffering and even death can’t take away, something eternal.

Paul here says there’s another way.

There is a hope God calls you to.

God has an incredibly bright future for you.

If you connect your heart to that future, you will live a life of greatness.

Let’s continue to seek wisdom concerning our hope.

First of all, he says, “I want you to know the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.”

Paul wants you to know the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.

How does that land on you?

You may say; “that sounds great because it sounds spiritual but I’m not sure what it mean”

First of all, the word saints means all Christians.

The second word to look at is this word inheritance.

Inheritance is an interesting word.

Inheritance means your worth.

It means the essence of what you’re worth.

It means the substance of your wealth.

Whose inheritance are we talking about here?

It doesn’t talk about your inheritance and my inheritance.

Paul is talking about God’s inheritance.

To even use the term inheritance with God is astonishing.

Here’s what I mean.

Imagine trying to buy something for Bill Gates.

What do you get the man who has everything?

In fact, let me go a step further.

Imagine trying to give Bill Gates something so great that once he got it he said, “Oh my gosh, this is worth more than almost everything else I have put together.