Ecclesia Princeton
Ecclesia Princeton
Rekindling Hope: Get Down Your Harps- Ian Graham
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Pastor Ian Graham begins the new year with a series focusing on the habits of hope.
New Year, Keep The Feast
SPEAKER_00Morning. It's good to see you all. Alright, how many of you have New Year's resolutions? It's okay. It's a good thing, right? Maybe not so much. Alright. This is a very uh realistic crowd in here. It's really good to be together. I hope you had a beautiful Christmas day. And the beautiful thing is, and something we've been trying to just kind of reinforce subtly throughout our gathering, is that Christmas is not just a day. And this is actually really important. Christmas is a feast that lasts the duration of 12 days. You find yourself smack dab in the middle of the 11th day of Christmas. And so no matter what kind of resolutions you've made, the pastoral call to you is to keep the feast. So if you're if your diet was supposed to start tomorrow, you know, let it start on Tuesday. Right? Well, my name is Ian. It's a joy to be together and uh to be worshiping alongside you. And what an honor it is to worship our King together. As we're here this morning, we're starting a new teaching series as we begin a new year. And I know for me often, New Year's is a time where I take inventory of my life and I try to ask myself, what do I want to see God do over the course of the next calendar year? What do I want to see God form in me? And sometimes that honestly can cause me to try to develop all of these hacks and disciplines that I have been putting off. And sometimes I overwhelm myself with trying to do too much and then end up doing nothing, and then I end up answering the question the same way the next year. What do I want to see God do in me? I want to see all these new disciplines. And so my hope today is that as we begin sort of talking about what's possible in our midst, about what God wants to do in us individually. But anytime we talk about hope, we're not just talking about ourselves as individuals, we're talking about ourselves as a people collectively. My hope is that this will not feel like a list of things that you then need to go home and start plotting out how you could do, but will feel like a gift. We'll feel like receiving something. The nation of Ethiopia in the 20th century, during the course, their land mass was 35% forested. By the early 2000s, that number had dwindled down to 4%. And so there's an old cliche proverb: when's the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago, right? When's the second best time? Right now. And so they took that to heart. They said, our forested land has deteriorated to such a point that it is affecting the arable soil, the ground for cultivation. We need to do something. And so they went big, they went massive. And they endeavored to plant hundreds of millions of tree saplings in a single day. And through an army of volunteers, millions of people of the nation contributing and participating, they planted over 350 million seedlings in a single day. Those numbers are mind-blowing. And it's so beautiful that throughout the scriptural story, when the Bible talks about hope, it often talks about it in this form. Especially to an agricultural people, people that knew the soil and the land well. The scriptures talk about hope as a seed. As something that doesn't necessarily make it obvious what it will become. If you've ever held a seed in your hand, there's nothing that suggests the flower, the fruit that it will become, right? Think about a redwood seed, so small. And yet it becomes something that towers above the geography. And Jesus talks about faith and hope in these ways as small seeds that in the hands of God become something that we could not have previously imagined. And what is planting a seed other than yielding yourself and entrusting yourself to a whole bunch of factors that you cannot control? You can't control the sunlight, you can't control the rainfall, you can't control the pH balance of the soil. You are yielding yourself to processes that are not completely in your hands. One of the questions that I love to ponder in my own life, and one of the questions I like to ask as a way of kind of probing at what's going on in a person's life is where are you looking for hope right now? And I pose that to you. Where are you looking for hope right now? The question is purposefully open-ended. It can have an objective sense. As in what area of life, if you're honest, are you looking for hope? And we do this, we do this subtly without always realizing it. We put our hope in things that are penultimate, that are small. But it also can have a subjective element to it. Not just where are you looking for hope, but where are you experiencing that gnawing ache that things are not as they could be or as they should be. For many of us, that question brings us to a tender place of that thing that if we were honest, if we could change right now, we would do it. If we were given God like powers, and God said, you can change anything in your life, wouldn't take us long to figure out what it was, right? That right there. And it may be something that you've wrestled with for a long time. It may be a relationship that is irreparably broken. It may be that you're watching a loved one going down a path of destruction and despair. Where are you looking for hope right now? As I prayed over where we are to go as a people in the early parts of this year, that this idea, this concept that's not foreign just kept coming back to me. What does it mean to hold on to the hope that God has for us? So that we can welcome God's hope as a gift and that we can be people who dispense God's hope, who walk the world, scattering seeds of hope in every corner of the world that we walk in. And so for us over the first few weeks of this calendar year, as we're in the midst of the Christian calendar year, well on in, as we've celebrated Advent and now we're in the 11th day of Christmas, we want to focus on the hope of Jesus. The hope that God has for us. Where are you looking for hope right now? It's a question that we will come back to. Now, if we just survey where our world looks for hope, we we come to a couple of conclusions. Again, these are not exhaustive. They're not the only places our world looks for hope, but if we're just kind of surveying the narratives that are prominent, where are some places that people look for hope in our culture? Well, one seems kind of obvious and almost dominant. You know, some 40 years ago, Leslie Newbigan, he foretold that people will eventually make the political story their religious story. It's like once the top of the ultimate story has been taken off, and used to be for people, their relatedness to God and what he was up to in the world was at least a part of that conversation. Now, once that lid has been removed, now we have penultimate stories that are taking the place of the ultimate story. And we see this in the American political landscape. I can't speak for other national discourses around the world, but we see this viscerally in our day and age. Is that people have put their hopes in political figures, often political figures that will say one thing and do another, often political figures that will cause faithful people to try to contort themselves into all sorts of different ethical and moral pretzels in order to say that this is our guy? We see that people put their hope in different versions of the American political story. And we see how often that is impoverished and frail. Where are other places people put their hope in our culture? Well, certainly, it's a tale as old as time, not just in America, but throughout cultures, throughout the history of time, that people have put their hopes in riches, right? In wealth. I was watching one of those prestige dramas, and these two gentlemen were sharing a meal, and it was one of those really exquisite fancy meals. And the wait staff kept bringing different courses over. And the one guy had more money, so he's paying for everything. He's always sort of treating this younger guy, his protege, to the meal. And at one point, the guy with money he says, Taste that. He's like, Don't you love being rich? It's like a superpower. I was like, that's pretty brilliant, actually. Like that is the allure of wealth and riches in our culture. It's not just that you'll be comfortable, not just that you'll be able to go on Amazon and buy what you want. It's that you will somehow hover above the rest of the world, that you will be immune to the regular things that cause people pain and sorrow and suffering. It's like a superpower. And certainly we put our hopes in riches and in wealth. Or the absence of them causes us to just think, God, if I just had a couple more zeros here, I promise you I'd be faithful, I'd tithe off that. But also, like, you can trust me. We put our hope in riches. We put our hope in other people seeing us. This is a fundamental need of being human. And it's part of the inherent brilliance and logic of social media. For those of you who knows what an Instagram story is, raise your hand. Okay, right, right, right. Now you know you can you can broadcast these stories and you get to pick what's on there, but you also can go look at who's looking at your story, right? And this is part of the inherent genius of Silicon Valley. They've said, you know, not only do you need to be able to show people what you're up to, you need to see who's looking at you. Now, this taps into, again, a fundamental human need. We have been innately wired by God to be seen. But the problem is when we only express a curated self, we cannot be loved. You were made to be seen with all of your glory, with all of your beauty, with all that makes you so absolutely wonderful, and this is part of the biblical story about who you are. But you were also made to be seen with all of your flaws and your inconsistencies. This is what love is. Love sees all that you are and says, I'm not going anywhere. And for us, so often we put our hopes in whether it be the sort of banal social media notoriety or trying to build a resume within our little world that we walk in. And that world can be a corporation of hundreds of people, that world can be a classroom of 30 people, it doesn't matter. We create these ecosystems and then we say, look at me. Look how much I matter. And the incredible thing about that is you've arrived at a proper and true conclusion, but you've arrived at it the wrong way. You don't matter because you establish some worth for yourself. You don't matter because you have expressed how much you matter. You matter because you were made in the image of the eternal God who made you and delights in you. You absolutely matter. The last place we put our hope is a category I've called hopium. I don't know about you. But I sometimes struggle with optimism. Anybody? No? Okay, just me. And if you talk to somebody who's sort of an optimist just for the sake of being an optimist, my question that I'm sitting there as I'm nodding my head, I'm like, oh, things are gonna get better? Why? Why are they getting better? And where is the evidence of that? You see, optimism for optimism's sake is kind of an empty container. It sounds positive, it sounds, but honestly, it's just the other side of pessimism. And honestly, sometimes I'd prefer a specific pessimism to a vague optimism. That's just a personal preference. That's not that's that's not in the Bible. Unless you're reading Ecclesiastes, maybe it's in there. But we, as a culture, put our hope in just progress for progress's sake. There are philosophies wrapped up in this, Hegel. That the thing that things are gonna get better. Right? And throughout history, we've seen cycles of people just saying things are on this inevitable march towards progress. This was the beginning of the 20th century. There was even a theology that had sort of been constructed around this idea that things were just inevitably moving and gonna get better. It's called post-millennialism. Essentially, that the people of God were going to live in such a way that was so faithful that they were going to usher in the eternal rule and reign of Jesus on earth. It's a beautiful picture. But then the problem was that World War I happened. And then, decades later, World War II. And this eternal march towards progress took a vast and drastic and terrible turn. We put our hope in progress as a vague idea or ideal, and we miss that there is a force behind that idea that there is a hope that has been spoken over you, that is true of you, that all things will be well and all manner of things shall be well. But it's because of what has been revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. There is a relational force behind that truth. Our hope is not built on the universe mechanically getting better, but on the one who made the universe, mending it and setting it right. You could think of other cultural hopes. Those are kind of different quadrants of things that tend to be true in a lot of different cultures, right? But for us today, we want to look at hope as expressed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And to do that, I want to invite you to turn over to Romans chapter four. For this reason, the promise depends on faith in order that it may rest on grace, so that it may be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law, but also to those who share the faith of Abraham, who is the father of all of us, as it is written, I have made you the father of many nations. In the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead, and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become the father of many nations. According to what was said, so shall your descendants be. Paul, when he is talking about hope, and he does this a lot, Paul is actually kind of the apostle of hope. The word for hope is the New Testament, the Greek word elpis, which means welcoming or anticipating. And Paul uses this word more than anybody else uses it. And when Paul thinks about hope, the person that he goes back to is Abraham himself. And when he goes back to Abraham, he's drawing out a couple of really important things for us to observe here today. First of all, what's the opposite of hope? Despair? Thank you. You see, I don't think the opposite of hope is despair. I think despair is the soil of hope. And I don't say that to be poignant or like, ooh, gotcha. I say that because we go back to Abraham. The promise that is given to Abraham is that go from your country, go to a place where I will show you, and I will make you the father of many nations. Now, for those of you who are well versed in the scriptural story, you know that there's one problem with that promise, right? And the problem being that Abraham and his wife Sarah cannot conceive children. The promise is given bold in the face of despair. And this is good news for us, Ecclesia. Because so often, if we ask and sort of interrogate that question, where am I looking for hope right now? We are met with that despair. Yeah, I've hoped for that before. Or yeah, I tried. I tried to hold on in prayer. I tried to say, God, I'm putting all of my last hopes in you. Will you please show up? And it just felt like more silence. And to that experience, to that pain, we have God in the midst of despair saying that hope is born out of the soil of this despair. He is the God of the impossible. He calls that which is not into being. This is what God is up to when it comes to hope. And this, in many ways, is often the first influence. To hope again. In Psalm 137, the people are lamenting. They're saying, How can we sing the songs of our homeland in a foreign land? The people in exile are saying we've hung up our harps. What a powerful image that is. We've walked so far away from hope that we've put away the instruments of hope. And I think so often the first invitation that God is giving to us is to get down your harp again. There is an invitation to hope again. Not because your circumstances have radically changed, but because God is present and he is here. Despair is the soil of hope. It is where God does his most profound work, both in the story itself and in us. And so if you find yourself in a place of desperation here today, I echo what Dallas Willard says to you: that God's address is at the end of your rope. And he is meeting you here today. Hoping against hope, he believed that he would become the father of many nations. Abraham's reasons for not hoping are well established. He's past the years of for him producing children, for his wife of bearing children. And yet God says into the midst of that despair, go. And I will make you the father of many nations. Now, another thing that we do, and I see this so often in my own life, and I see it in the dear people that I have the honor of walking alongside. If you ask my kids what's their favorite thing about Christmas, they're savvy. They know the right answers. Three of the four of them at least will say, Time with family. The gift of Jesus. A parenting book coming out next year. But what's the real answer? What's their favorite thing about Christmas? It's the presence. Is that a problem? Actually, it's not. As Christians, we we twist God into all sorts of lesser pictures. Look at the promise that's given to Abraham. You can turn back to Genesis 12 or you can just surmise it from here from Romans 4. The promise that is given to Abraham is not, go from your country and I will show you, Abraham, how awesome it is to be in relationship with me. How that is the ultimate good, the ultimate well, the best thing for your life. He doesn't say that. Go and I will make you the father of many nations. Go and I will bless you. You know what Abraham sees in this brief interaction with God? There's something in it for him. You know what he finds out on the way as he's walking? That there is nothing that ever could compare to the greatness of knowing the Maker of heaven and earth. But so often we try to start where people who have walked with Jesus and have found everything stripped away and have spent years of accumulated faithfulness getting to know Jesus, we try to start there. And I am just trying to tell you that if all you have to bring to the Lord here this morning is that place you're looking for hope, you can begin a journey with God. You can get back on the road with Him. Even if you feel like you're kind of in it for yourself right now. I don't know. Because the story that we see in Abraham is not that he has a fully fleshed out theology, that he knows that to taste and to see that the Lord is good is the highest good. The story that we see from Abraham is he spent decades living with the curse of not having an heir. And here is this God telling him to go, to obey. And there'll be something along the way for him. You can take that how you will. And I say this to you often. We may find out that our desires are desires for the wrong thing. We may find out that our hopes are hopes for the wrong thing. But we only find out about those things. Our desires are only cultivated and refined by the Lord in relationship to Him. Jesus didn't die for your sins and then say, figure the rest out. Justified by faith, sanctified by the power of His Spirit. This is an ongoing covenant walk with you. This is an invitation, again, to see it all and just for God to say yes to it all. And for so many of us, we stay in these places of despair because we think the thing that we're asking for is not holy or not right. I trust that God will show you that. Through the scriptural story, through community, through the accumulated wisdom of people that are around you following him. I trust that he's that good. But I think so often we never get on the path, never heed the call to go because we're too busy interrogating. Is this the right thing? Is this the wrong thing? And I think if we read Abraham's story closely, we see something quite different. That God shows Abraham his hope through the course of a relationship. And Abraham will have a lot to learn. If you've read Genesis. God didn't say, hey, get me the guy who's got it all together. And he starts that pattern and he keeps repeating that pattern, actually, with the successive people that he chooses. I want to turn over to Romans chapter 5. Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand. And we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. When the New Testament talks about hope, it is more often than not inextricably intertwined with the idea of faith. Hope is a confidence that God, because of what Jesus Christ has revealed to us about God and what he has done in the past, is present with us in every circumstance. So the highs and the lows, we don't just endure on our own and then come back and check in with God. He is there with us. He is present with us. And we know that because Jesus has poured out the Holy Spirit into everybody that says yes to him. Paul talks about that Holy Spirit as an arrowbone, a down payment, a first expression of that which will be fulfilled in the end. We have the Holy Spirit testifying with our spirit that we are children of God in Romans 8. And it's that spirit that calls us to remember what Jesus Christ did in the past, what that means for our present, and the glorious future that awaits us. That not only are we secure and safe in God's hands, but no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived. What God has prepared for those who love Him. In short, that heaven is so much better than you could even begin to fathom. This is the hope that we are somehow immersing ourselves in. This is what 1 Peter talks about as a living hope. We've been giving new birth and to a living hope, not made of perishable seed, but of imperishable seed, everlasting, eternal. This is the storied world of hope that we become a part of when we say yes to Jesus' vision of hope and no to our culture's impoverished visions of hope. And so often hope, that hope, is intertwined with faith. When you think of faith, what do you think of? You think of believing, right? Right? That's certainly part of it. You think of doing the next right thing, right? This is what we see in Abraham's call. There's a sort of a command and a promise that are wrapped up together. Go to a place where I will show you and I'll make you a blessing to all people, right? Those two things are inextricably linked. And Paul foresees this in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. He's just reminiscing about love and what it is. He says, faith and hope and love. These three are the greatest. And love will remain. And so for us, when we talk about hope, so often we're talking about faith. We're talking about action. We're talking about participation. And what we see is when we're talking about hope, two things are revealing themselves at the same time. First, God is able. Again, if despair is the soil of hope, if God is the creator, if God calls that which is not into being, if he is the God of the living, not the God of the dead, then he is the God of the impossible. And he can stare our despair in the face and bring newness out of it. But at the same time, he could have done that as sovereign God. He could have done that in any way that he wanted to. But from the very beginning, he has been exhibiting those qualities and those powers through the force of relationship. When God makes the world, he doesn't remove himself and recuse himself to Mount Olympus. He doesn't stay far away. He plants a garden and he walks in the garden in the cool of the evening. When the world falls apart in the early chapters of Genesis, God doesn't remove himself and stay far away. Abraham and his family and says, Through your family, I will heal and mend the world. We see that hope is not just about God's power, it is about God's face. And when we see the face of God, we are called to obedience. We are called to being conformed to the image of Christ. And Paul traces out a, I don't know if it's a dirt path, I don't know what it is. I have a little depiction of where we're going just to really give you a sense of, yes, okay. This is not the scrawlings of a child. But even in those short verses in Romans, the beginning of Romans 5, Paul says, these are the things that are true. You've been justified by faith. This is the ground upon now which you now stand. You're inheritors of the promise through Christ Jesus. And then he has this succession, and I can't quite figure out if it's linear or it's cyclical. But he says that affliction creates endurance, endurance creates character, and character creates hope. And all of this is from a place of security, of glory, and grace. When we talk about hope, we're talking about an invitation to be with God. And so often the lies that our despair tells us is that God has left us. And yet, this is exactly inverse of the good news about Jesus. The good news about Jesus is that he takes our afflictions, he takes our despair onto his very shoulders. And he does it joyfully, willingly, because of the hope that God is expressing in his very actions. And that testifies to us that there is nothing, as Paul will say in Romans 8, that could ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. This is where we're going, a proper framework for hope. But today, I simply want to invite you to maybe interrogate that question again. Where are you looking for hope? What lies has it told you? About who God is? About the consequences of your actions, about what God is capable of, about how he feels about you, about what he's done for you, about your future. You see, when we start talking about our hope, we start talking about the story that we live out of. If you are hopeless and abandoned in the world, then yes, you have to scratch together some meager existence. And whether that be just subsistence, the things that you need, eat, drink, or whether that be some sense of meaning in a world where oftentimes those baseline needs are met for us, then we try to say, I matter. This world has to matter. Where are you looking for hope? And how are those places of despair revealing to you the face of God? Where is God calling you to get down your harp again? To try hope again. Not because it didn't work the first time, but because God has never left you, not for a moment. Let us pray together. We pray, come, Holy Spirit. God, we ask for your presence, Lord, to be manifest here in a profound way. God, I want to speak to those who are in the throes of despair, Lord. Not because our life is only defined by peaks and valleys, Lord. But God, you long to show us yourself. And God, so often that clear vision has to break through our illusions. Lord, I think for many of us, if we're honest, Lord, we thought signing up for life with you was signing up for a holiday at sea, Lord. Just flowing from glory to glory. Good things coming our way always. And if we've lived any measure of life, we have found that that is a lie. God, for some of us, the circumstances of our lives, we have trouble reconciling with what that says about who we are as your children. But Lord, when we talk about hope, Lord, we are talking about you, your character, Lord, your actions, your gospel. It all starts with you. We celebrate the gift of the manger God, the incarnation of our Lord, and the way that He lived in this world in such a wondrous way. And we fast forward through the life of Jesus. And we see that this gift is ultimately given. On a cross full of our cursing, God, full of our rejection, Lord. And yet your prayer in the midst of that moment is a prayer that stands for all of time. Forgive them, Father. They don't know what they're doing. We don't know what you're up to as you go to the depths, God. To take on our despair, to overcome sin and death. To overcome our loneliness, Lord. Lord, you took sin and death on your shoulders, Lord. You became alone. So that we could know not just the power of your hands, but the glory of your face, Jesus. So God, tell us the truth here in this place. God, for others of us, we've been hoping in smaller things. They're not inherently bad, Lord. You have categories for all of it under your reign and rule. But if we're honest, we have made things that are penultimate, secondarily ultimate, into things that are ultimate. So God, heal us, Lord. Lord, heal us of our blindness, heal us of our longing for control when we just don't have much. And help us to yield ourselves to you again. To find that you are the vine, that we are the branches, God, and in the soil of your goodness. Lord, we find freedom and trust. And we find, yes, Lord, hope. God, give us hope for the things that you hope for. Lord, a hope to be saints, a hope to be holy, a hope to be like you, to be loving, to be just, to be an embassy of your goodness and grace here in this place, Lord Jesus. That our homes would be altars of your presence, God. That our lives would be defined by that which is held in secret in the inner sanctuary of our souls, Lord, because you meet us there. God help us to encounter this living hope and the power of your spirit here today. We pray these things in your name, in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen. Ekosia, as we're here this morning, I'm going to invite you to stand. The worship team is going to lead us in a time of response. Yu-Kyang, Alexa, Jean, would you guys be willing to just convene in the back of the room? Friends, if anybody would like to receive prayer, there's going to be some of the best folks you could ever have pray for you standing back there. And if you'd like prayer, you can just slip out of your seat and go to that back corner. We'll try to make that as discreet as possible in a room this size. Let's allow the Holy Spirit to minister to us as we respond and worship, as the team leads us. Let's worship together.