The Holy Tension of Hope.

Welcome everyone. Happy Sunday. Today is Advent, which I'm excited about because I've never really done Advent before, but it seems pretty cool. I did a good amount of research about it and I feel like it's a really good thing to step into as a church. There's a lot of life in it for us, so I'm very excited.

It was probably about a month ago that you texted me to ask if I wanted to preach this day or the next week. In my mind, I was like, neither. I felt like the holidays are too busy and I didn't want to add anything to my plate, but I'm so glad I felt the Spirit nudge me to do it anyway, because it would be worth it. I'm so glad I did because the beauty of Advent is that it's not just a cute religious thing we do because we have nothing else going on. It's a season where we can have our hearts tethered to Jesus, to the Spirit, and to the Father. Today we get to talk about hope together. I think it's hope this week, peace next week, joy the week after, and then love.

How many of you have done an Advent calendar at church before? A fair bit of you. But some of you have not. So I'm going to share a little bit about the background of Advent, because it was helpful for me.

Advent arose originally not as a festive preparation for Christmas, but as a season of disciplined longing. In the 4th and 5th centuries, particularly in regions like Gaul, which is modern France, and Hispania, which is Spain, believers would observe several weeks of fasting, repentance, and prayer in anticipation of Epiphany. Epiphany was a feast that would celebrate and remember Christ coming, and specifically his baptism. The moment he was baptized is when people saw this is the Son of God. It was his revelation to the world, to Israel, that he was here.

These were very humble, small Christian communities. A lot of them still under persecution, meeting in secret. But they had this deep, deep sense of hope. We have some dark times now, but those were dark, dark times. They were really longing for Christ to return. They were really hungry for him to come again.

Over time, as the church's liturgical rhythms developed, Advent's focus shifted and expanded. By the sixth century, the church in Rome began associating the season not only with Christ's second coming and his baptism, but in preparation to celebrate his birth as well. Now we have this beautiful double vision of looking back because he came, hope came down, and we also look forward because clearly the work is not completely done yet. There's more to do and he's going to come again. That's very exciting.

If you're taking notes, a decent title could be the holy tension of hope. It's because we live between two great hopes: the one who came so many years ago and the one who's coming. The beautiful thing is that we're not left alone between those hopes. We have a present hope too. So we're going to talk about that today.

Advent is a lot more than really cute wreaths and calendars, although those are great. The wreaths and calendars and candles, those are all great. I love Christmas. I'm a huge Christmas guy. Christmas is the best. But this is an amazing season for us to really tether our hearts to the King, to Jesus, and also join in the most ancient prayer of the church, which is, come Lord Jesus.

Hope came down

The text today is Isaiah 7.14. We're going to have a fair bit of scriptures today, but none of them will be on the screen because we need the exercise to just get there ourselves. Isaiah 7.14 is a very short verse, a prophetic word from many years ago.

Therefore, the Lord himself will give you a sign. A virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel, which means God with us.

Isaiah 7:14

I'm so thankful that prophecy came to pass. That hope came down. The God who is outside of space and time confined himself to a little newborn at one point, which is insane. Have you held a newborn before? It's terrifying. It's terrifying. I won't hold my own baby for a few months yet. Babies are scary to me. If it's your kid it's different, but they feel so fragile. And Almighty God let himself be one and be nursed by someone who he technically molded out of clay, which is wild.

Why did hope have to come down? I feel like that's a good place to start today. To understand that, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, which we do a lot here. We like to look at what I call the original blueprint.

Genesis 1, verse 1 is the first good news we have in the Bible, I think. The first mention of the gospel to me starts here.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1

I think that's the first bit of good news because we have a God who created all of this, all the beautiful things you see in life and us. We are all just reflections of his beauty and his goodness.

Then it says in verse 26:

Let us make mankind in our image and our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

Genesis 1:26

And verse 27:

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female, he created them.

Genesis 1:27

He created us in his image, which is amazing. He created us to be able to walk with him, to rule with him, to cultivate creation with him, to live in unbroken communion with his presence. That's such a better origin story than so many other religions. So many religions believe in a God who created a bunch of slaves to go die in battle for him. That is not the God that we serve and that we read about here. I'm so thankful for that.

So the blueprint is: instead of brokenness, there's glory. There's no shame, just reflection. No separation, just communion. We are designed. Our natural state is to be God's family, God's partners, God's image bearers. That's our natural state.

The fracture

But we still don't know why that needed to happen. So we have to look at what happens next, which is the tragic fall, the fracture. In Genesis 3, we read about a moment in time where man decides to choose what we thought would be independence. We chose independence over intimacy, essentially. The lie was that it would even be independence in itself, because true independence is still being in union with God.

But we trusted the serpent's lie over the Father's love. The image cracked and for the first time in human history, shame set in and we no longer believed that we could be seen by God. What did they do in the garden after they believed the lie? They hid. They hid. Darkness entered the human story.

Sin spreads like a disease, like a cancer, throughout humanity, throughout the human heart, throughout the world. We give the enemy so much more power as it does. There's a quote I read about sin: to live in sin is to live out of step with the blueprint that we're talking about. It's to live disconnected from the harmony of how you're designed.

But the gospel appears right after the fall. Right when the Lord just said, all right, I'm going to start over. Instead of doing that, he offers a redemptive plan. Genesis 3.15:

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.

Genesis 3:15

That's what he tells the serpent. Someone is going to come and he's going to crush the serpent's head. He's going to conquer death. The seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.

And then they waited for so long. How many years was it? Five thousand, six thousand? Who knows? A lot of years. For centuries, Israel waited for this promise to come. Prophets spoke, kings rose and fell, exile came, many years of silence. And all the while hope never died.

Then, just at the right time, I believe, just at the right time, love came down. John 1.14:

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

John 1:14

The Word became flesh. I still think that's just amazing. The Almighty God made himself subject to aches and pains, like I have at twenty-seven. My body aches and I'm like, this is crazy. Jesus was subject to that, like Almighty God, just so that he could understand every single thing we feel and experience and every doubt we have, every stress, every anxiety. That way it would actually be true that he took everything we have on himself. When he died and when he rose, that's how it liberated us from sin's power. Only he could do it. Only him. That's why he's worthy. There's no one else that could have done it, just him.

He liberated us from sin's power. He broke death's grip. He destroyed the works of the devil. He restored God's image in us and he brings us back into communion. Perfect communion with God. Salvation is that one-time moment where it starts and then it just continues. You're being saved from yourself and heaven is starting to pour out. It's just this beautiful, beautiful wholeness that happens. So we thank you, Jesus, for coming. We thank you for coming.

Hope is coming

And yet at the same time, Jesus said that he would come again. So we also look to the future. Hope is coming.

In Romans 8.22, Paul speaks of the universal agony and groaning of creation as if it were in the contractions of labor for childbirth. That's pretty intense. I haven't experienced it, but I've seen it and it seems really intense. We can feel that groaning, right? I was talking about how my body is going through minor aches and pains, but there are people I know whose bodies are being wrecked by disease and some of them are young too. We can each individually feel the groaning for something beyond what we have now.

We can see it in relationships. Relationships are so messy and even beautiful people can get so hurt from relationships. There's a groaning in that. And the news. There's a reason I got off social media. There's so much groaning. The world is so sick and so desperate. But there is one who will come and redeem and restore and will wield judgment out of love and it'll be so perfect and just.

Like he was the only one that could come and live the way he lived and die and then rise again, he's the only one that can come again. There's no political party. There's no technology advancement. There's no amount of self-help that will really restore and save us from the disease, from the sickness that we see. Only Jesus will.

Acts 1.10-11:

The same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.

Acts 1:10-11

The same God who came will come again.

And what will we be like in that time? That's a good question. 1 John 3.2:

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

1 John 3:2

That's amazing. Aren't you curious? Have you thought about the fact that we're going to meet the Trinity fully? If you know Jesus and you're filled with the Spirit, then you've already met all of them. But it's crazy to think about how clearly we'll be able to see them. When he returns we'll be like him. We'll be fully healed, fully alive, fully free, fully restored to God's image and radiant with his glory.

In John 17.3, we get Jesus' take on eternal life, and it's always good to hear from Jesus himself.

Eternal life means to know and experience you as the only true God, and to experience Jesus Christ as the Son you have sent.

John 17:3

Eternal life means to know and experience.

And in John 14.1-7, Jesus tells his disciples not to let their hearts be troubled. He asks them if they know the way to the place where he is going. Thomas says to him, Lord, we don't know where you're going, so how can we know the way? Jesus answered, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him.

That's why I say that we all know the Father, because if you know Jesus, you know the Father. Jesus is the perfect image of who the Father is.

I think that's also why Jesus had to say repent so much. In the Old Testament, people had little glimpses of who the Father was because different prophets and people had seen little pieces of him. But they had never met Jesus. They didn't really know the character of the Father that well. That's why we get the prodigal son story where you have two sons, neither of them knows the character of the Father. So Jesus has to say what kind of father that he is. And then he lives it out, which is so beautiful.

He is coming again. Jesus said it himself. That means it's true. Hope is coming.

Hope is here

And what I love about eternal life and the promise of heaven is that it is coming and it is also here, which is the classic paradox of the kingdom of God. Hope is here. We're not just waiting in darkness, thinking everything else is hopeless until then. That's not how it is at all.

Dallas Willard has a great definition of eternal life. He says, eternal life is not just unending life in heaven. It is interactive relationship with God and Jesus now and forever, which is quoting John 17.3. Life in general is self-initiating, self-sustaining, self-directing, active in power. Eternal life is interactive relationship with God and Jesus. So that does indeed start right now. Heaven is in session.

How do we experience Jesus now? Well, he sent us someone. A person. Not an experience, not an energy, not an emotion. It's a person. And his name is the Holy Spirit. And he's here all the time. We don't need to be in the midst of singing together for the Spirit to be present. That just opens up our awareness to him. We get to experience him in that because he is beautiful and he is good. When we make beauty and when we make goodness, we experience him more.

Jesus said in John 14.16-17:

I will ask the Father and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever, the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.

John 14:16-17

God is not only the God of then or someday. He's the God of right now. The Spirit is God's presence, the one who points us constantly to Jesus. He's guiding us. He's healing us. He's empowering us. He's restoring us. That's how we get to live out the hope. We get to live it out in him, with him. That's the kingdom of God. It's that partnership, that collaboration with God. But now he's in us empowering us to do it, which makes it all the better.

We can live attentive. We can live surrendered, expectant. We can be compassionate. We can be generous. We can be Spirit-led because he's our faithful leader. If we're just following him, that's what eternal life will be anyway. There's no ending to that. We're essentially getting to practice for free, which is great.

The veil is torn

One of the main themes for me as I was preparing was something that really hit me. In the moment where Abbie asked if I wanted to preach, I was not in a space where I felt like I should be up here preaching or giving a teaching. A lot of that comes from old beliefs I had way back growing up about who the preacher is and what he's supposed to be like. It's like you have to put on this sort of covering if you get up here. But that's the exact opposite of the truth.

The veil tore for a reason. You used to have to go through all these rituals and you used to have to be someone first and then go through all these cleansing rituals just to enter into this little room where the presence of God was. He tore that thing for a reason. Because there is no veil anymore. We don't pretend with God.

If you're not in the best place you've ever been with the Lord, that's okay. That's where he wants you to be right now because that's where he'll meet you. I'm so thankful that he's a God of the heart and I don't have to try to play poker with him or put on some fake mask. It's so great.

2 Corinthians 3.18 speaks of a life where nothing stands between us and his presence. There's no veil. There's no hiding anymore like we did when we first fell. There's no pretending. We come honestly, where we are, what we're feeling, what we're experiencing, and that's where the Spirit will meet us. That's where he transforms us from glory to glory.

Hope and thanksgiving

Hope is not like a passive, wishy-washy hope. There's a movement in it. There's like a rushing. We're being carried in it somewhere. We're being rushed along in hope. I feel like the posture of hope is thanksgiving. It's probably one of the reasons why it feels so good to praise God with your voice and your breath. Thanksgiving just opens up the gate and reminds you where your hope is in. It empowers us to move forward and continue.

So there are three questions today that I'd like for you to ask the Holy Spirit. If you have a journal, write it down. If you don't have a journal, pull out your phone. I want you to go back to these questions with him. It's homework, but the good kind.

The first question is: What or who am I truly hoping in this morning? Just sit with the Lord for a moment and let him wash over you. Some sort of answer will come up from somewhere. We're just going to give some space for him to answer that question.

The second question is: Holy Spirit, where in my life do you want to meet with me? Where do you want to meet with me? He met us thousands of years ago exactly in the time where he needed to meet with us. It was in the mess, it was in the darkness, and that's where he meets us today. So maybe there's a place of stress, a place of joy, a habit, a fear, a relationship, a wound, a desire. Where does he want to meet with you today?

The last question is probably the one that's more active and involves somebody else. Holy Spirit, who do you want me to meet with this week? It could just be someone that he wants you to bless or encourage. It could be someone just to listen to, to pray with. I don't know. That's why you're asking him. So who do you want me to meet with this week?

Closing

This week I encourage you to go back to those notes. If you feel like you didn't get an answer, just keep asking. Keep asking. It's really good practice. I really believe God is speaking to each of us all the time. He just speaks in a lot of different ways. So many different ways. There's not like a one-size-fits-all thing, but your heart being open and you trusting that he wants to speak to you is like the key. That's the key.

Just keep asking this week and if he gave you specific initiatives, do those. When we're worshiping him, remember that he is the only one that we should be worshiping. He's the only one where our trust and our hope is truly found, where there's any sort of real foundation. It's just in him.

As you go out this week, just remember where your hope is. It's here, right now, living in you. It's coming. And it already came.