In 1927 an American submarine collided with a Coast Guard vessel off the coast of Provincetown and began to sink. The Coast Guard and Navy sent divers to assess the damage and begin a rescue operation. As the divers got close to the submarine, they heard a sailor tapping on the hull in Morse code. He asked, “Is there hope?”
That’s a fundamental question of life. It’s asked every day by countless people in countless ways. You can survive 40 days without food, three days without water. But you can’t last a single second without hope. It’s an essential part of life. When hope is gone, life is over.
People everywhere are looking for hope in all the wrong places. They look for it in their relationships, in self-help books, in religion.
But there is only one place to find real hope. The Bible says real hope is found by turning to God: “May God, the source of hope, fill you with joy and peace through your faith in him. Then you will overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).
You and I, need that kind of hope. And it’s only available through a relationship with Jesus Christ. When you trust in him, the Holy Spirit works in you to fill you with hope that God is in control, he loves you, and he is working for your good.
That kind of hope will lift you from despair and give you room to breathe.
Let us begin our time together by sing: Since The Lord Redeemed Us.
The 3rd verse says
HOPE will give us courage in the darkest night,
Faith and love will make the heavy burden light;
Let us then be cheerful and our hearts assure
That the gracious promises of God are sure.
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Scripture Reading: Isaiah 40:28-31
Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. 29 He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. 30 Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; 31 but those who HOPE in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
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Let us sing
My HOPE is built on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness
What a powerful verse is verse 3
When He shall come with trumpet sound
Oh may I then in Him be found
Dressed in His righteousness alone
Faultless stand before the throne
Let us go into a time of prayer in the sure HOPE that we are His children
and eternity will be with him in Glory.
Christ In You The Hope Of Glory
Let us listen or sing Lord Of all hopefulness
Time Of Prayer
Lord, help me to hear you saying, "I am your hope" over all the other voices. Lord, your word says, you are the hope for hopeless so I'm running to you with both hands stretched out and grabbing on to you. Fill me up with hope and give me a tangible reminder today that hope is an unbreakable spiritual lifeline. God, you know those things in my heart that I barely dare to hope for, today I give them to you, I trust them to you, and ask that you because I know that you can do more than I could ever guess, imagine or request in wildest dreams. God, you are my hope and I trust you. Amen.
Please remember to take time to pray for your family, loved one's and friends. For our country. Continue to pray for Ukraine. Pray that Russia will see their error and brig peace not war. Pray for the mass shooting that took place in America yesterday. Pray and pray again.
Let us share together in the Lords Prayer
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Before we go to the word let us sing : I Serve A Risen Saviour
The HOPE of all who seek Him
The help of all who find
None other is so loving
so good and kind
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HOPE
life without hope is, well it’s hopeless, it’s desolate. Hope is about looking forward to something in the future. Hope is about looking forward to a life worth living and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but people full of hope are fantastic people to be around.
We get one crack at this life and most of us, really all of us, we want to leave a good mark, a positive mark on planet earth and in the lives of the people who are dear to us. The problem is though, sometimes the way we’re living our lives, we obliterate any chance we might have of leaving that positive mark.
For instance, those who look out for us rather than criticise us, that person is a real blessing – someone who speaks well of us behind our backs; someone who doesn’t rise up quickly to argue with people; someone who encourages people rather than pulling them down; someone who’s prepared to go out of their way to serve other people. All those attributes are more of a blessing than a burden, more of an asset than a liability, more of a problem solver than part of the problem. If each one of us in our own family, community, Church was a little bit more of a blessing to others, just imagine what a different world we’ll be living in.
If we look in the dictionary it defines hope as being a feeling or an expectation for a particular thing to happen. And I guess by definition that thing that we’re hoping is going to happen is a good thing, I mean none of us sits there and hopes for bad things, we’re always hoping for a good thing, that this will get better, that that will get better, we hope that it won’t rain tomorrow.
If we run into someone who is hopeful about tomorrow, by and large that person is a great person to be around. Their hope is infectious and there are a lot worse things that you can catch from someone else than their hope – an expectation of good for tomorrow.
Listen to Proverbs chapter 12, verse 12:
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”
A scary thing I’ve noticed about myself is that if I lose hope in a particular situation, if I give up believing that something good is going to happen then what I do is that I start behaving as though it’s not going to happen and by behaving as though it’s not going to happen, you know what, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I go about thinking and saying and doing things that will stop the good thing that I’m hoping for from happening, I don’t do the things that I have to do to get that good thing to happen.
Just listen to the Proverb again very carefully, Proverbs chapter 12, verse 12:
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”
The one thing that makes your heart sick is deferring hope, another way of saying it is giving up hope. Of course, not everything we hope for in life is going to happen. Things don’t always work out the way we want them to work out, but when we give up hope our heart gets sick and let me tell you, a person gripped by hopelessness which is the opposite of hope, is a very sad and sick and sorry person indeed and that person is simply not going to be able to be a blessing to other people.
On the other hand, the one whose heart is filled with hope, someone who lives their life, who thinks, who says and does the things that demonstrate the hope that’s within them, that person is much more like a tree of life. It’s as though they give strength and hope and encouragement to the rest of us, it’s as though we can go and pick the fruit off their branches and eat that fruit and taste their hope.
Proverbs chapter 23, verse 18: “Surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.”
Instead of imagining all the things that can go wrong and imagining that they will all happen at the same time we can choose to hope in good, we can choose to hope in the future, we can believe that good is just around the corner, that blessing is coming, that a solution to our problem is coming, that things will be okay. Of course, that’s easy to say, I know it’s much harder to live out and to do when we’re confronted with some devastating news.
There are so many times in my life when the things that I’d hoped for didn’t come to pass. Sometimes things went from bad to worse, but you know what, I still refused to give up hope because when I defer my hope, when I set it aside, I become lost.
Given the choice between hoping and not hoping, I will go with hoping each and every time, it’s the only way I can live my life. It’s the only way to be a blessing to those around me and it’s the only way to make it through the dark days, days we all have in our lives.
A person filled with hope is an incredible blessing to those around them, but of course any talk of hope without talking about who or what we put our hope in is futile. If there’s no God then life is just a series of coincidences and a whole bunch of hard work and coincidence is nothing to hope in.
For me, hope only makes sense when it’s coupled with another thing called faith. The two go hand in hand, a psalmist once wrote, Psalm 39, verse 7:
“And now O Lord for what do I wait for my hope is in you.”
And that sums it up for me. My hope isn’t in chance, my hope isn’t in coincidence, my hope isn’t in my own skills and abilities and other people, my hope is in God, that’s why I pray, because when I do, my trust in God grows.
As the Apostle Paul wrote more than a thousand years after Solomon wrote all those Proverbs, Romans chapter 13, verse 12:
“Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation and be constant in prayer.”
Isn’t that awesome? I’m able to rejoice in hope because my hope is in God. The word that Paul uses for hope, the original Greek word, doesn’t mean a chancy kind of hope. It literally means a certain hope and that certain hope is what keeps my heart patient in all hardships. And I know for a fact that it’s only through constant prayer, that I’m able to lay hold of that hope and that patience. And the truly awesome thing about all of this is God is worthy of our trust, God is worthy of us hoping in Him, He is faithful.
“Great is your faithfulness Lord unto me. Morning by morning new mercies I see. All I have needed thy hand has provided. Great is thy faithfulness Lord unto me.” (Lamentations chapter 3)
This was written by a man looking over the devastation of Jerusalem when Gods judgement had fallen on Jerusalem and still in the ashes he was able to talk about the faithfulness of God.
My prayer for all of you is that we will put our faith, our complete trust in the God who loves us and cares more for us than words can say, the God who sent Jesus, His Son to die and rise again for you, that God is worthy of your trust and your HOPE. Amen.
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As we come to the end of our time of worship for this hour,
let us join together and sing
In Christ Alone my HOPE is found
The Lord bless thee and keep thee
The Lord make His face to shine upon thee
And be gracious unto thee
The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee
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