The Candle of Hope

This past Sunday was the first Sunday of advent. The first candle is the light of prophecy and hope.
One of the most beautiful words in any language has got to be the word “hope”.

Consider the two phrases:

I have hope
I have no hope

For hope, people have endured great difficulty and unbelievable adversity – they have hung on- or they are continuing to hang on - because of a simple glimmer of light. For the lack of hope, otherwise healthy people have literally given up, withered and died.

I have sat with people who believe they have truly lost all hope. It may have been the end of a relationship, the loss of a business or a diagnosis. The loss of hope can make people do very desperate things. I have been equally desperate trying to find and re-kindle a small glimmer of hope in their lives. In truth, the only hope that I have been able to proffer at times is that God is, Jesus loves and, although this life is temporal, heaven is eternal.

People can certainly have hope that there is hope – and will try to grasp on to it, but it is like trying to hold water in your hands. When this happens hope is confused with wishful thinking. The kind we get when a fairy godmother appears in a movie and says “I grant you three wishes” – I want a million dollars, an in shape body, and --- um all my hair.

When we wish, we generally mean “I want this thing to happen magically without any effort or adverse consequences to me.” I wish had wings and could fly…. I wish he or she liked me…I wish I didn’t have to come to work today… I wish things were different. Christmas is coming, Sear’s tells us to create our wish list!

Certainly, not all wishes are frivolous. In fact many times people’s wishes are deep and frantic. I wish I did not have this condition or disease, I wish this did not happen to me, I wish things were different – in these kinds of wishes there is often a powerlessness, a despairing – a loss of hope.

Hope is different in that even in the midst of these seemly despairing experiences – hope breaks through. Hope’s greatest power is that it is grounded and rooted in something – or rather someone. As we light this candle, it is that someone that changes a wish to a real hope.

Hebrews 11 1 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.  3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible

What is it that you really hope for? The answers can be different than what I wish for?  If you asked me what I wish for I might say, “I wish for a new motorcycle, or I wish that at 50 I could be as fast and as strong as at 25.” Ask me what I hope for, and my answers are different “I hope to be loved, to love. I hope for true friends. I hope that my children will know God. I hope that I remain faithful to my wife. I hope I remain steadfast in my faith to God.” But to have that hope, it must start from someone, and that someone is God who is the very creator of the universe.

I lose my wishes, if fact if they evaporate I’m okay, but if I lose my hope – I have lost everything.  That’s makes Hebrews 11 so remarkable. Here we find the essence of this first candle.  For us as followers of God – faith and hope are infinitely bonded together. You cannot say the one without the expression of the other. As we read through this passage, replace the word faith for the word hope, but think of them inseparably joined together as the trinity itself. One without the other is incomprehensible.

It is the last words of this chapter that I find most difficult and yet hopeful.

:39 These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, 40 since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

Our wishes are often in what we can see, whereas faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. I certainly do not know what it is you are facing at this moment. But I pray for you His hope. I pray that as you enter this season where we reflect on the coming of Christ as a babe into the world, that you experience as never before the incarnation of His presence in your life. May this bring a hope that surpass all wishes.

As I write this, news of our Christian brothers and sisters in Iraq filters in.  These are people who are living the reality of Hebrews 11 like few of us can understand or believe we could endure.  They are truly facing extreme persecution and are threatened with extinction.  Intercede for them, pray that during these dark and difficult days - in the face of death - hope remains

Anyway, I was just thinking

An Advent of Hope

Christmas is one month away. Can you believe it? I'm looking at my schedule and all the places I need to go, thing I need to do, projects that need to get finished – or started. As I'm looking at all the stuff on the 'to do' list, before I know it, December will be gone. I always have such good intentions around Christmas to get focused on the 'Reason for the Season'. When I was a Pastor in a church I attempted to get the heart and minds to slow down and allow the significance of Christmas to penetrate. That we didn't just let the speed, activities and noise of Christmas to drown out the significance. The danger I find in our practice of Christian Holidays is that we get into the routine and 'seen that, heard that, bought the card' cycle of it all. Here in the office, we're focusing on the Advent liturgy. Five Candles over the next five weeks; hope, humility, joy, peace and the final candle of Christ becoming flesh. Maybe you might want to find ways to creatively bring this into your own programs and homes over the next 5 weeks as well. I'd love to get feedback from you to share with others on how you have done this. I encourage you to add comments for others to read so together we can 'find our spiritual edge' of Christmas in our lives.

Candle (Week) One: Hope

What is it that you really hoped for – or perhaps are still hoping for? Something that you want or wanted so deeply that it caused (causes) pain within you? This is different than a wish. I wish for things, a bigger louder motorcycle, a new PS3 so I can play the latest Ratchet and Clank video games, a plasma HD T.V. and other useless stuff. I wish my kids, 19 and 20, would clean up after themselves and help pay the bills. I got lots of wishes, but my wishes are often frivolous, about me and my comfort and wants. We confuse wishes and real hope. Hope is anchored in a reality – which often we might not even see with our eyes.

"Faith is what makes real the things we hope for. It is the proof of what we cannot see" Heb 11:1

As a Pastor over the years, I've had the incredible privilege of walking journey's of real hope with people. Deep anguishing hopes that moved to tears and agonizing prayers. Sometimes it was for a physical healing, or restoration of a family relationship, the concern for a wayward son or daughter. A hope that one would pay almost any price to see come to pass. Many of us have had something sometime that has consumed our mind, our heart our strength that we hoped for that far surpasses the surface of wish.

Hope has been described by some as the one emotion or quality that truly makes us human. The stories that we have heard of people living in unbearable situations and yet have retained hope. Over the years I've read a number of accounts of holocaust survivors that defy description and we wonder 'how people kept hope alive'. Victor Frankel wrote a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" which tells of his own experiences. He essentially says that the guards could take everything from him, except one thing his hope, because he knew if they took that, he was dead. He saw it happen in multitudes around him. Hope is powerful it can enable people to accomplish or endure inconceivable experiences.

The people of the Old Testament hoped for centuries for the coming of their Messiah – it was a part of their prayers, practices and daily life – but although they 'hoped' for it, they totally missed it when it came - I wonder if the 'hope' had become such a part of who they where, how they identified themselves that although they longed for it, it had been so long and they had endured so much that they could not believe it when it happened – or that it would really happen to them. Not because they didn't believe in God or, that they really wanted the Messiah. They were going through the motions and the prayers, telling and re-telling the prophecies, and though they believed it…because it was part of their culture, they heard it and repeated so often, it became something was prayed, preached, sang about – but no longer really 'believed'

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is the tree of life" Proverbs 13:12

We are in a similar state I believe as Christians. We look back and seen the fulfillment of the hope of the Messiah, the death and the resurrection, but our own hope deferred is the return of Christ. We have talked about it for 2,000 years, we sing about it, preach about, and people have proclaimed it. The Church has been hoping in the returning Christ since He left. Yet at the same time we've got so used to hearing it, we almost roll our eyes when the topic comes up, or we repeat the mantra of religious tradition at the appropriate times – believing it….yet, not it at the same time – if that is possible.

It's part of the danger of our repeated liturgies every year. Like with Easter, where every year Christ dies and is raised again- we hear, sing and pray, but perhaps also struggle with the routine of it – it almost has the opposite effect – instead of filling us, inspiring hope, it can leave us empty, because we know that there must be, needs to be more.

We come back to the candle of hope as we finish our thought for the day. Wouldn't it be kinda strange if every time you had a birthday your parents and friends, made you put diapers on, and climb back into a crib? Yet we do that on a yearly bases with Christ I think it's affected our 'hope' factor. Yes Jesus was a baby, born into the world – and that is miracle of grace, but our hope isn't in returning him to the manager every year. Our hope is in a Saviour who is alive, at the right hand of the Father, and is returning. It is our about our life of hope in that intervening period. We must never lose sight of that hope, our hope, together as followers of Christ. It needs to be the focus and reason of all we do and how and why we do it. 2 Peter 3 perhaps isn't consider as a typical Christmas verse. But I want to suggest to you that it is 'the' Christmas verse, for this is our real and living hope for us, - for those that we serve. Follow that up with 1 John 3:1-3. Let that rekindle and focus your hope. May we join the 'all of creation that groan for the revealing of the sons and daughters of God?

If we can see what we are waiting for, that is not really hope. People don't hope for what they already have but we are hoping for something we don't have yet, and we are waiting for – patiently. Rom 8:24-25

Anyway, I was just thinking…

Neil