Finding Hope in Our Uncertainties
Notes
Transcript
NOTE:
This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely, that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.
Engagement
Where were you? That’s a question that we often ask about key moments in history. Depending on your age, you might remember where you were when President Kennedy was assassinated or when the first man walked on the moon or where you were on 9/11. I have a feeling that all of us are going to add the entire year of 2020 to that list.
Tension
About a year ago when reports of a new virus in China began to appear, I don’t think any of us could have imagined what this year would be like. It’s been a challenging year for all of us, that’s for sure. On top of the virus, we’ve dealt with a record number of tropical storms (although fortunately that doesn’t have much impact here in Arizona), wildfires, social unrest, an economic downturn and a contentious political season that seems like it will never end. So to say that it’s been a year that has brought a lot of uncertainty to our lives would actually be understating the situation.
So perhaps there is a sense in which we need Christmas this year more than we have in quite some time. That is because Christmas is a season of hope. And boy do we all need some hope right now.
Truth
Today, we begin our observance of Advent. Although we often associate that season with an Advent wreath and the lighting of candles, those aren’t really required. The word “advent” simply means “coming” or “arrival”. It is a season of expectation, waiting, anticipation, and longing for the coming of Jesus. It is a season that bridges past and present as we look back on and celebrate the birth of Jesus and look forward to the future as we eagerly await His return.
So in the craziness and uncertainty of 2020, wherever you might be right now in your spiritual journey, I want to invite you to experience this season of Advent in a fresh way. Who knows, you might even discover that we’ve all been given a gift - the opportunity to rediscover Christmas.
This morning we’ll begin that journey in an unexpected place. But before we do that I think it’s important for us to put the birth of Jesus into its proper historical background. We think we have it bad today, but the Jews in Judah at the time of Jesus’ birth didn’t exactly have it easy, either.
Although, as we saw in our “How to Neighbor” series, God had made a promise to bless to Abraham the entire world through his descendents, and particularly through one particular descendent, the Messiah, it is now roughly 1800 years later and he still hasn’t appeared. And during those 18 centuries the Israelites had suffered greatly.
The northern ten tribes had been conquered in 722 BC by the Assyrians and then scattered throughout the surrounding nations. Around 600 BC, the Babylonians attacked the southern kingdom of Judah and eventually took many of the people into exile in Babylon. After that, the Jews were subject to the rule of the Medes and Persians, then the Greeks, and they were now under the oppressive rule of the Roman Empire.
Life was not easy for the Jews who lived in that culture. So it is not surprising that many of the Jews had placed their hope in a Messiah who would come and overthrow the Roman government and install a new government that was ruled by its own people. Unfortunately, for some Christians things haven’t changed all that much in the last 2,000 years or so and they are still basing their hope having the right government in place. But just like the Jews in the first century discovered, basing our hope on any humans will ultimately leave us disappointed.
But in the midst of that prevalent way of thinking, there was also another group known as “the Quiet in the Land”. Instead of dreaming of a violent overthrow of the Roman government, they watched and waited for God to bring comfort and hope to His people through a life of constant worship and prayer. This morning we will look at the account of two such people.
Most of us are familiar with the account of Jesus’ birth, and in the next couple of weeks, we’ll return to it again. But this morning, we’re going to skip ahead to some events that occurred shortly after Jesus’ birth that give us some great insight into how we can rediscover our hope in a time of uncertainty.
And when the time came for their purification according to the Law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the Law of the Lord, “Every male who first opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord”) and to offer a sacrifice according to what is said in the Law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.” Now there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon, and this man was righteous and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit was upon him. And it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Christ. And he came in the Spirit into the temple, and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him according to the custom of the Law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said,
“Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace,
according to your word;
for my eyes have seen your salvation
that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and for glory to your people Israel.”
And his father and his mother marveled at what was said about him. And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed (and a sword will pierce through your own soul also), so that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.”
And there was a prophetess, Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years, having lived with her husband seven years from when she was a virgin, and then as a widow until she was eighty-four. She did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day. And coming up at that very hour she began to give thanks to God and to speak of him to all who were waiting for the redemption of Jerusalem.
We are introduced here to two people we don’t see mentioned anywhere else in the Bible - Simeon and Anna. So all we know about them is what we read here. They both share some common characteristics:
They are both elderly. Anna, in particular, is either 84 years old or has been a widow for 84 years. The underlying Greek is a little ambiguous there, but in either case, she is old.
Both have experienced the hardship and uncertainty of living as a Jew under the Roman government.
Both have remained faithfully devoted to God.
The thing that strikes me most about both of them is that neither of them seem particularly surprised or uncertain that Jesus is the long-promised and long-awaited Messiah. Everyone else in the Christmas story so far has taken a lot more convincing - Mary, Joseph, the shepherds. Even after a visit by an angel or, in the case of the shepherds, an entire angel army, all of those people were still a bit uncertain. Even in this passage we see that Joseph and Mary marvel at what Simeon says about Jesus. So I think there is much that we can learn from Simeon and Anna this morning about hope and here is the main idea we’re going to develop:
Hope is the confident expectation in the person and work of Jesus
Hope is the confident expectation in the person and work of Jesus
We tend to use the word “hope” a lot differently than that, don’t we? We usually use it in a way that it means “wishful thinking” like “I hope that I win the lottery” or “I hope that the University of Arizona football team will win a game this season”. Or right now “I hope that things will get back to normal”. But frankly that kind of hope doesn’t really cut it, does it? In fact, that kind of hope usually just makes things worse because it just leads to more uncertainty.
But the kind of hope that the Bible describes is something much different. It is the confident expectation that is rooted in the one who is 100% dependable - Jesus - and not in ourselves or our circumstances. And that kind of hope does help us to persevere through trials and uncertainty.
This morning, I want us to learn two important things about that kind of hope:
First I want to help us understand the nature of that kind of hope - what it looks like.
Second, I want to talk about some steps we can take to help us develop that kind of hope.
CHARACTERISTICS OF BIBLICAL HOPE
CHARACTERISTICS OF BIBLICAL HOPE
It is rooted 100% in who Jesus is
It is easy for us to look back and criticize the Jews for not understanding the kind of Messiah Jesus would be. But we have a tendency to do exactly the same thing. We encounter trials in our lives and the first thing we want God to do is to remove us from those trials or make us comfortable. But often God has something much better and more important in mind. Sometimes He is using those trials to help develop us as individuals and as a body into the kind of people He wants us to be and to make us more like Jesus.
What separated Simeon and Anna from many of their Jewish brothers and sisters was that they didn’t try to fit God into a box of their own making. They didn’t try to impose their own preconceived ideas about the Messiah on God. So when Jesus appeared on the scene in a way that was so different than the expectations of many of their fellow Jews, they were able to recognize Him when so many others didn’t.
The COVID pandemic has obviously forced us as individuals and as a church into making a lot of changes we don’t particularly like. We can either spend all our time complaining about those changes or fighting against them or we can trust in the fact that Jesus is still in control and that He not caught off guard at all by any of this. When we remember that, we are much more likely to look at this situation with the confident expectation that Jesus will bring good out of this.
It sees beyond our current circumstances
If we look at the circumstances around us today, there frankly aren’t a lot of reasons to have hope. Even when we have a vaccine for this virus it will undoubtedly mutate or another new one will come along. And the economic impact is likely to be felt for a long time. And here in the U.S. and around the world, we see Biblical principles being openly mocked and Christians increasingly ridiculed and even persecuted.
As we’ve already discussed, Simeon and Anna both lived in some very difficult circumstances, too. But they had learned to look beyond those circumstances. They trusted that even though things might not look good on the surface, God was still at work and that He would be faithful to His promises.
The words of the Apostle Paul to the churches in Rome are relevant here:
For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees?
Hope that is based on only what we can see is really not hope at all, is it? Simeon and Anna could not observe anything in their culture that indicated that the Messiah was about to be born. Things were getting tougher, not easier, for Jews living under the oppression of the Roman government. There were no signs that God was raising up an army to overthrow that government.
Unlike many others in the Christmas story they hadn’t been visited by an angel who revealed that the Messiah had been born. There was nothing they could see in the circumstances around them that gave them hope. But because they were able to look beyond what they could see, they maintained their confident expectation in what God would do. And if we follow their lead, we can have that kind of hope in spite of what we see when we look around us in this world.
It is patient
I don’t know about you, but when I first heard about the COVID virus, I figured it wasn’t going to be any big deal. And even this spring when we saw restrictions and shutdowns being put into place, I figured that by now things would be pretty much back to “normal”. But it’s pretty obvious now that was nothing more than wordly hope or wishful thinking. In fact, I’ve seen more people that I know personally become infected with the virus in the last few weeks than I have for the entire time up until then. None of us really know how long we’re going to be impacted by this. So in the face of that uncertainty, having real hope requires patience.
As I pointed out earlier, both Simeon and Anna were getting up in years. I think God chose them specifically because of that. They had been waiting patiently their entire lives for the Messiah. And even when they didn’t see any evidence that was going to happen any time soon, they continued to wait patiently. As we’re going to see more fully in a moment, the kind of patience they exercised didn’t mean they just sat around doing nothing. It was an active kind of waiting.
Once again, Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome confirms the importance of patience:
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
None of us know how our when this pandemic will play out. And that is almost always true of every trial and uncertainty we face in life.So what do we do while we patiently await Jesus to work? Let’s look at three specific steps we can take to develop the kind of hope that Simeon and Anna demonstrated.
Application
HOW TO DEVELOP BIBLICAL HOPE
HOW TO DEVELOP BIBLICAL HOPE
Depend on the Holy Spirit
We see this especially with Simeon:
In verse 25, we read that “...the Holy Spirit was upon him”.
In verse 26, we learn that it was the Holy Spirit who revealed to him that he would not die before seeing the Messiah.
In verse 27, we see that when he entered the temple he came “in the Spirit”.
Prior to the day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit first came to dwell permanently in the life of every disciple of Jesus, the Holy Spirit would come upon people for a period of time to equip them for a specific task and then depart when He was no longer needed. That is what happens to Simeon here. He was able to recognize Jesus as the Messiah not because he had some special knowledge or education, but rather because of the work of the Holy Spirit. That is why many of the Jewish religious leaders, who were much more educated, never recognized Jesus as the Messiah, even later in life when He fulfilled so many of the Old Testament prophecies about the Messiah.
Today, if you are a disciple of Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit dwelling within you. He is there all the time. But He won’t force you to listen to His voice or do what He says. You have to actively listen for Him to speak and then choose to respond to what he reveals.
Once again, Paul gives us some more insight:
Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
When you face uncertainty and trials, the Holy Spirit will give you hope if you let Him. Sometimes, like we see here, all we can do is just pray and ask the Holy Spirit to intercede on our behalf and trust that He will do whatever is necessary for us to have that confident expectation that Jesus will do His work in our lives.
Devote myself to worship and prayer
Over the past several months I’ve watched a lot of Christians pin their hopes on the political process and on politicians. They have devoted much thought, time, and effort into supporting the candidates that they believed would best support their views, which in many cases are formed by their Biblical world view.
In some cases, that has taken the form of spreading information on various conspiracy theories about how some candidates and political parties are part of an elaborate plan to undermine our values and institute a new world order, complete with the mark of the beast that is going to be administered through the COVID vaccine. I can’t help but think that in many ways that is not all that different than the kind of thinking that was present among some of the Jewish zealots at the time Jesus was born.
But instead of complaining about their plight or trying to install a government that would be more favorable to them and their fellow Jews, Simeon and Anna both took a completely different approach. Instead of looking for their hope in changing the politics of the day, they focused all their time and attention on God.
Simeon is called “righteous and devout” and we get the idea here that he was consistently spending time in the temple worshiping God. And as we’ve already talked about, He was open to the leading of the Holy Spirit and was obedient to that guidance.
Anna was constantly spending time in the temple worshiping God and was fasting and praying on a consistent basis.
Let’s assume for the moment that some or all of the theories being tossed around are 100% true. After all we should expect to see these kinds of things before the return of Jesus because they are predicted in the Bible. Which do you think breeds more hope - spending my time obsessing over these ideas and posting about them on social media and arguing with other people about them, or spending my time reading the Bible and praying and serving people in the name of Jesus and telling others how He can give them hope even in the midst of difficult circumstances? The answer is pretty obvious, right?
Wait expectantly
As I mentioned earlier, Biblical patience is not passive. As we just talked about Simeon and Anna were actively worshiping and seeking God on a daily basis.
Today, over 2,000 years later, we are to do the same thing as we await the second coming of Jesus. We are to live every day with the expectation that He could return at any moment and usher in His physical kingdom. Both Peter and Paul write about having that kind of confident expectation about Jesus’ return:
Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
For those of us who have placed our faith in Jesus, His second coming will bring an even deeper fulfillment of His grace in our lives as we get to live physically in His presence for eternity. And as we focus our thoughts on that, it naturally develops the kind of hope we’ve been talking about today. But hope takes more than just engaging our minds. It also involves action, as Paul points out:
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works.
Out of gratitude for the tremendous price that Jesus paid to make salvation possible for all people, we are to live godly lives as we await His return. As we wait expectantly for that day, we are to be zealous for good works, not because they will earn favor with God, but because when we do that we bring Him glory. This is such an important idea that next year, we’re going to develop an entire sermon series devoted to helping us live Biblically in light of the current state of our world.
Action
Do you want to experience hope in your life? Then what are you going to do about it? Are you just going to engage in wishful thinking or are you going to take one or more of these steps we’ve discussed this morning? I want to encourage every one of you to write down one concrete thing you’ll do this week to apply this message.
Inspiration
We have seen this morning that...
Hope is the confident expectation in the person and work of Jesus
Hope is the confident expectation in the person and work of Jesus
That is the gift that Jesus wants to give to every single one of us this Christmas. And He has gone to great lengths and paid a tremendous price to make that possible. I pray that you will receive and cherish that gift.