Rekindling Hope: The Ecosystem of Hope - Romans 5 - Ian Graham

Transcript

Warm Welcome And Framing Hope

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, how are we doing? Good to see you. If you're new here with us, uh it's such a joy to welcome you. I pray that you have been uh welcomed with a warmth uh that is uncommon. And I pray that you got a donut and some coffee and just uh felt the welcome of God that we we sincerely believe he extends to you in the presence of his people here. We've been talking about the concept and the idea of hope as we begin this new calendar year. And there's a story from Greek mythology that I find uh kind of interesting as it talks about the idea of hope. Zeus, the highest of the pantheon of the Greek gods, was angry with humans, Prometheus and his lot, for stealing fire from the heavens. So, in order to punish humanity, he created Pandora, who was beautiful, charming, and curious, and he sent her to Earth to be married. Pandora was the first woman, and if you read the story closely, there are several parallels, we could call them, to lesser readings of the Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 story, especially as it regards interpretation regarded towards women. But he sent Pandora to Earth to be married, and she carried with her a box, Pandora's box, of which you are no doubt familiar. And he instructed her never to open the box. But Pandora was curious, right? If you tell somebody, don't push the button, what are they gonna do? They're gonna push the button, right? At least my children. And after the wedding, she opened the box. Within it was not treasures of gold or pearls of wisdom, but the box gave way to all the evils, poverty, plagues, famine, flood, storm that plague humanity. Pandora saw that which she had unleashed upon the world and tried quickly to seal up the box. But by the time she closed the box, the only thing left in the box was hope. Now, there are a couple of interpretations of this story. Because the thing that Pandora does next is she realizes all that she has unleashed upon the world, and then she opens the box again and hope makes its way out. And some people say that Pandora unleashes hope so that there can be some remedy to all the ills of the world. Other people, a little more cynical, say that hope is the last evil that's unleashed upon the world. I will lead you to posit which one it is. It's a brilliant story. And many of the stories that are grounded in Greek and Roman mythology have a lot of brilliance to them. The myth has many implications, but it suggests in some way that hope is a gift that comes in a very precarious package, or that hope might not be a gift at all. And I wonder for you, last week we asked the question, where are you looking for hope? And I know from talking to so many of you that the places that you're looking for hope, hope almost feels foolish. It feels too painful to revisit that. You've long ago given up hope, and the idea of hoping again feels like the worst kind of fatalism or feels almost too painful. And today what I want to do is talk about the hope that we see in Jesus. The hope that he has for us that in many ways kind of takes place over our heads, within processes, within things that play out, narratives that are not including us. And I want to look in Romans chapter 5, and what we'll do today, this is kind of a part one. Next week we'll talk about some habits, the ways we participate and sort of co-cultivate the hope that God has for us. But what I want to do today is just look at the framing of the hope that God has for us, that He gives to us. I want to invite you to turn over to Romans 5. The words will be on the screen behind me as well. We're gonna read it together. 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. Now, one of the most profound points that this passage, this brief little encapsulation makes about hope, is that all of the things that we kind of naturally toil and strain for in our culture, that supposedly are the products of either self-actualization, the sovereign self, or long journeys of discovery, all of these things we receive as a gift in Christ Jesus. Now think about it. We strive for justification. Now we don't call it that, but the thing that we are after is the endorsement that the direction of our lives is being lived rightly. That we are living along what Martin Luther King called the arc of the universe, right? Nobody wants to be told, especially at an advanced age, hey, you've been doing it wrong. Right? That doesn't feel good. We want to be justified in the way that we are living. And we often offer lots of self-justifications for why we do things. And if you're a theologian, you get really good at self-justification. You're like, God, I'm doing these things for all of these really holy reasons. It's a very precarious place to be in. But we want the endorsement, whether it be from God or whether it be from the cosmos, that we are living rightly. We strive for peace. Sure, we call it all sorts of different things, but ultimately what we are after is just that sense that everything is going to be okay. We try comfort, we try pleasure, we try notoriety and success, we try achievement, all striving to establish or to maintain some level of peace. We tell ourselves, when I get this much money, I'll have peace, or when I achieve this position at work, I will have peace when I get that fellowship, or when I have that friendship or that relationship, then I will finally be at peace. We strive for access. My children have been playing incessantly on loop the soundtrack to Hamilton. And again, I'm not a Broadway person. It's not something I default towards. And as far as I'm concerned, Hamilton is kind of at least a little higher on the hierarchy of Broadways. It's a little different. But man, I am tired of hearing about the room where it happens. Just my son, my five-year-old son, walks around in a tricorn hat with a pistol, like he has become, he's taken on the personality of an American revolutionary. And I don't know what that means. But we have heard all of the songs many times. But I think Aaron Burr taps into something quite poignant. We all want to be in the room where it happens. We want to be at the center place. C.S. Lewis calls this the inner ring. That we spend our lives toiling and striving to get on the inside of this inner ring. He says this. He says, I believe that all of men's lives at certain periods and in many men's lives at all periods, between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local ring and the terror of being left outside. And what Lewis so brilliantly captures here is it doesn't matter the scale of the inner ring. All that matters is that we're on the inside of it. Charles Dickens captures this masterfully with Pipp's quest and great expectations to be accepted by this society. F. Scott Fitzgerald gives us the perspective of Nick Caraway, the quest to be on the inn. It begins for most of us in the middle school lunchroom. And how many of us can go back to that tender place? All the posturing, all the striving, all the hormones, all the smell. But we want to be seen, we want to be welcomed, we want there to be a place for us. But for most of us, that which begins in the middle school lunchroom never stops. And again, we put it all sorts of different names. I want to be a part of that community. I want to be with those kinds of people. People choose churches on this kind of basis. To be on the inside. And all of this can be encapsulated by the notion of glory. Glory is that inner monologue that tells us that one day we will be seen for the wonder that we are. Glory is what we look to receive from others. It takes the form, sure, of riches, success, comfort being known. It has many names. But ultimately, we just want to be seen and to be celebrated. And if you look here closely at the beginning of Romans 5, you see that Paul is proclaiming to each one of us that none of this is given as a reward to be attained by striving or seeking. None of this is about your own skill or discipline, the ability to build a life for yourself. All of this, every inch of it is offered as a gift. It's given to you. You don't have to attain it. Paul says, Therefore you are justified. Therefore you have peace. Therefore you have access. Therefore you have glory. All of it given as a gift. You are justified. The God who made the universe says to you in Christ Jesus, Well done. He says at the baptism of Jesus as he's baptized in the Jordan River, this is my son with whom I'm well pleased. And then Paul's favored shorthand for what it means to be a person who indwells deeply the mystery of Christ Jesus is this little phrase in Christ. And I tell you this often because I just want to believe it myself and I want you to understand it. That when Paul talks about us being in Christ, he's saying that everything that is true of Jesus is true of you. And before Jesus does any of the great things that he will do, before he fulfills the laws and the prophets, before he undertakes the cross, before he does all the miracles for which people regard him, people that don't have any faith in him, God says of him, This is my son with whom I am well pleased. The love that is at the center of the universe justifies the way you are living when you say yes to Jesus. You have peace. And you've become to realize that peace is not circumstantial or transactional. Peace is the face of God, his rule and his reign, the shalom that he carries in the wake of his rule and reign. Peace, far from our cultural assumptions, is not individualistic or self-serving. Peace is cosmic, it is social, it is just. You get a picture of this in Genesis 2. There are trees that are good for food. Everybody has enough to eat. There are trees that are just pleasing to the eye. There is beauty to behold and wonder to be undertaken. There is wonder, delight, joy, and feasting. These are all aspects of the scripture's vision of peace. Peace is not just individualistic, I have nice feelings inside. Peace is when our neighbors are treated well. Peace is when people that are often pushed to the margins are brought to the center. Peace is when everybody has enough to eat. And what Paul is saying is we have invitation to this kind of peace, both that it's eternal, internal peace, but also the social peace that Jesus enacts. We have access. The notion here in Romans 5 is of the high priest being granted access into the Holy of Holies. Now that access in the temple construct was limited, limited to one man, limited to once a year. Now Paul is saying to us that that access has been freely flung open by the grace of God. The temple veil has been torn. Hebrews 10, verse 9 says it this way. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is through his flesh. And since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart, in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised us is faithful. You've been given that kind of access. Tim Keller says the only person brave enough to wake the king at night for a drink of water at 3 a.m. is his child. And then he says, You have that kind of access. You have been brought into the inner ring of the universe. And we have glory. But this glory is not just the glory of material comfort, not just the glory cast on us from other people. This glory is the very glory of God, the cavod and eternal weight of glory beyond all measure. And this glory is not just something we look forward to in the future. We see glimpses of it in our lives, in the everyday. Like we see the sculpture slowly taking shape in the hands of the master sculptor. You are being transformed from glory to glory. You are not what you were. And you are not yet what you will be. God is faithful. And he is making us into something that we cannot even begin to imagine right now. This is the context and the construct for Paul to begin talking about hope. And we notice that hope is wrapped in this beautiful package, this gift. You have been given this kind of hope, justification, peace, access, glory. This is the package in which hope comes wrapped in. And it's important that we see that hope is not just about what might happen. It's not just wishful optimism or positivity. Hope is something far better. The hope that we are given is not given as a byproduct or a plan B to address all that is wrong in the world. A gift wrapped in some sort of barbed wire, like the Pandora story. It's a gift. And it's a reality that testifies to the very heart of God. It's this gift and this reality that reorients our hope away from our circumstances or from our ability to achieve towards God Himself. In these short verses in Romans 5, Paul gives us an expectation that we collectively are to be a people of hope. A hope not simply located in the future, as if we have this future that awaits us, that is sure and certain. But we are to pull that future hope into our present life together. However fleeting, however we do it in fits and starts, God is calling us to be a picture of that future, of that new Jerusalem. When we will join in the marriage supper of the Lamb forever. Romans 5, verses 1 through 5 is one of the many sections in the scriptures where I think you could say the whole of the life with Christ is sort of crystallized and distilled. And today I want to look at a few of these verses as a framework for hope in our lives. We tend to think of things with this kind of progression. If you read Romans 5, it does seem like there's this progression through these different stages. And then you get to character, and then you get to hope, as if hope is sort of the byproduct of this long process. I don't think that's what's going on here. I think if we could instead change our image from a progression to more of an ecosystem. A farmer is a person who has skill. They have knowledge, they have experience in causing the crop that they intend to grow or to raise, the animals that they intend to raise. They're the most important people in the world from a career hierarchy standpoint. Am I right? I mean, the cliches on the bumper stickers are true. No farmers, no food. I am grateful for farmers. But farmers do all of their work, a profound skill and discipline, within an economy, or we could call it an ecosystem, of which they have no control over? What are the kinds of things that food needs to grow? In addition to skill and discipline, it needs sunlight. What farmer ever said, I would really like the sun to shine today? No control over it. Now, God's faithfulness causes the sun to rise every day on the just and the unjust. What farmer ever said, I would really like it to rain today, I'm gonna make that happen? No, we can irrigate, we can manage some of these things, but we cannot control these processes. The soil needs hundreds of billions of tiny microbes and bacteria and invisible processes to take place to make fertile ground for good things to grow. So, what I'm talking about here in Romans 5 is this part of the ecosystem that we don't manage. Next week we'll get into a little bit how do we become skillful co-cultivators, to cultivate the kind of hope that Jesus has given to us freely. But today I just want to talk about the reality that we are ushered into by the grace of Jesus. Afflictions, endurance, character, and hope. The word for produces here, in that afflictions produce endurance, is a word that means effectuates, brings about. I asked the question last week, where are you looking for hope? Which in many ways was just another way of asking the question: where are you afflicted? Often the place that is most obvious to us where we're looking for hope is the place of the deepest pain, of the most obvious pain. And if we had a switch or we had godlike powers that were given to us, that is the first thing that we would change, right? Like, I'm gonna fix that. And whatever the scale of that is, that may be deeply personal, it may be deeply political or relational. Where are you looking for hope? The word for afflictions has the picture of walls closing in in the Greek, of pressure on all sides. Often is translated in older English translations of the New Testament as tribulations. For many of us, you don't just understand that word cognitively, you can feel it. Like, how do you respond to stress, stress, and angst in your life? Or stress. For me, I can feel it in my chest. Like if there's relational strife or there's something that I'm not sure how to manage, it it just sways on me. Me right here. You probably have your own version of this. Maybe you get pain right in the back of your shoulder blade or your head hurts. That feeling of affliction is not something that we need described to us. The wall sort of compressing in is an experience that so many of us can relate to. Now, what is Paul saying that we do with these afflictions? Do we deny them? Do we minimize them? No, for Paul, we not only acknowledge them, we revel in them. The word for boast here as the image of the throat giving full throat to, loudly and confidently declaring. Now, I have to be honest, and this will be especially prescient for some of you who grew up in some church streams I grew up in. I would find it strangely dissonant if somebody were in here walking around saying, I'm terminally ill, glory be to God. Or I'm tens of thousands of dollars in debt, praise Jesus. And again, if you grew up in certain kinds of churches, you probably know people that think this is what faithfulness requires. So is this what Paul is talking about? This kind of relentless, almost delusional positivity? I don't think so. What he's saying is that the presence of afflictions, constricting pressure, whatever feels like it is closing in on you, is not a sign of God's disfavor or a reason for shame. Far from it. Rather, God is using those things that seem to be compressing in on you to create something new, something that isn't compressed or beaten down or just shoved into a mold, but something that is beautiful and of immeasurable worth. Jesus says it this way, using the same Greek word that is here in Romans 5. In John 16, verse 33, Jesus says, I've told you these things so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have afflictions or trouble or tribulations, but take heart. I have overcome the world. And Jesus doesn't just say this to us as a nice turn of phrase, he lives this out. He takes the depth of affliction, of trouble, of trial and pain onto his very shoulders on the cross. The collusion of imperial forces, the collusion of human sin and shame and the cursing of God, Jesus takes upon his shoulders and undoes them. And so whenever we feel ourselves hard-pressed on every side, we find that Jesus himself has been there, has testified to his victory over that place because of what he's done on the cross and in his resurrection. Paul will later ask the question using this same word in Romans 8: who shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus? Shall affliction or tribulation or trouble or pain? He says, No. In all of these things we are more than conquerors in Christ Jesus. Nothing, not height, not depth, not angel nor demon, not heaven or hell will ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And it's within that context that these afflictions produce endurance or perseverance. The root word of the noun for endurance here is the Greek word meno, which Jesus uses in John 15, one of my favorite passages. Jesus says to us, He says, I'm the vine. You are the branches. Remain in me. Jesus tells his disciples there that he prunes every branch that bears fruit so that it might bear more fruit. And I gotta be honest, I don't always know what that means. But what Jesus is saying here is that sometimes what feels like affliction in our lives is actually God working his power, his grace, his sanctification in our lives so that more good things may grow. Some of you who are really talented gardeners in here or farmers, you know that even things that are producing can produce more if they are pruned and cared for properly. I, on the other hand, just let the tomatoes grow until they won't grow anymore and just hope for the best. But you know that pruning is a discipline and a wisdom in and of itself. Jesus says, Remain in me, mennow in me. And the word that we have here has the same idea of holding fast, of remaining, of staying, even when afflictions and circumstances seem to be telling a different story. The story that Jesus has lived out and given to us as a gift holds true and holds us. Now, some of you, if you're honest in here today about your walk with God, the most that you could say about the quality of your life with God right now is that you are here. You showed up. I commend you for it. From the vantage point of Romans 5, I can testify to you that that endurance, that perseverance is very likely the dominant thing that God is up to in weaving his grace and goodness in your life, even though it often feels like something far different. Maybe you're sick of church, you're tired of the cliches, you're tired of the platitudes, the long-winded sermons, tired of the songs, you're annoyed and frustrated, you're disillusioned, you're disappointed by Christians, especially the dominant political witness in America, of people that claim to love Jesus and to do a bunch of different things that said yes, they maybe don't know him. And you're here. And you showed up today. Or, if you're honest, your life is so hard right now and nobody really knows. You feel alone and afraid, you feel of regret full of regret or shame. Or you just feel like nobody sees you. But you're here. I'm not just talking about physically here at church. You are here, I can acknowledge that. But you're straining to see Jesus even through tears. You're craning your neck, saying, maybe there's a fresh word for me. Paul says that this is a sign of what God is doing in your life. Endurance, being formed in you. I know it may not feel like it, Ecclesia. But the promises of God are not based on our feelings, they are grounded in His fidelity. You wouldn't need endurance if this was an easy walk in the park. But this is an ultra marathon through the wilderness. Your lungs burn. You want to quit. Things appear so much easier for everybody else that's not running. Let me remind you and us that the scriptures were not written to individualistic societies like our own. They were written to a collectivist consciousness. When Paul is talking, he often is not saying you, as in you individually, but you all, you together. This endurance is not a solo sport, it's a team sport. And it's why when we talk about this idea of hope, I talk to so many people who, if they're honest, they put up the idea of hope a long time ago. And it's why I, as pastor, and we as people that sit alongside these people have every opportunity to say, Well, I will hope for you. I will hold out hope for you even where you've long ago put it away. Because we are a people of hope. We are a people that endure together. Hebrews chapter 10, going back to that verse we ended on, let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day approaching. Much of our life with God is defined by just keeping going. Where else would I go? Who else holds the words of life and truth that you hold? Remaining in Jesus, even when it's hard through afflictions. This endurance produces character. The proving ground of patience, perseverance, and endurance makes one tried and true and weathered. The image here is of being proven over and over again of reputation or established character. I often think of people when I think of this word. People in my life that I've seen as a vision for what I want to be as I increasingly get older, as I'm experiencing and aware of, like, what do I want to be like? And it's so fascinating how the things that used to be attractive to you, they really do pivot and shift. Those markers of success move from those things that are obvious to those things that are tried and true. And I see people that are people of integrity, people of their word, and I'm like that. Or did they just have that solidity to them when you're around them? You're like, that's a person who can be trusted. I see people that can fix things, and I really want to be like that, but that is not in the cards for me. I don't know about you. Others begin to see character in us. It's not always obvious when it's being formed in us. Often when God is forming good things in us, it's not obvious to us. But others begin to see it and be drawn to it because of the storms that we have weathered, because there's something that Jesus is doing in us that is tried and true. It's why we need you in here saints who are a little bit, shall we say, advanced in the art of living. Sincerely. We often are a young church, and we need your witness. We need your non-anxiousness, we need your experience that you've been through some of the fires and you've come out the other side and said, you know what, you're gonna be okay. And you might even laugh about it. We need you. We need your testimony that it's all worth it, that Jesus truly never fails. There are no shortcuts to character. In many ways, I'm promising you something right now that I can't deliver on, but it's not my promise, it's Jesus's. Eugene Peterson, using Friedrich Nietzsche's beautiful phrasing, describes the arc towards character as a long obedience in the same direction. But what we can begin to do is to shape our desires towards this end. Leviticus 11, verse 44, the Lord tells us, be holy as I am holy. Now, if you're being honest with yourself, that's terrifying. But on the ground of the grace that we now stand upon, this can begin as a desire and flower into something that God works in us and through us. A longing for holiness, for character, to be, in Paul's later usage, to be conformed to the image of Christ. Remaining, staying in the midst of afflictions produces provenness, character, solidity, integrity. Paul seems to certainly have been aware of and conversant with the philosophy of the Stoics in his day. The Stoics very broadly believed in the sort of non-anxiousness and strength of character that much of the scriptures would fully affirm and agree with. This is a quote I want to read for you. It says, True happiness is to enjoy the present without anxious dependence upon the future. Not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears, but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient for that he is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not. Now, you're probably like, that sounds great. And if I just said that's like Proverbs 16, you'd be like, that's probably in there. It's Seneca, one of the foremost philosophers of Stoicism. But you can see, especially if you're somewhat familiar with your Bible, you're like, that sounds directionally correct, right? It's quite beautiful and it's quite true. It's just a little bit short-sighted. For the Stoics, and for many today that have kind of applied that kind of mantra and mindset towards the world, the point was to develop the kind of strength that didn't need hope in some external source. You access all the resources that you have within you to be a solid and strong person, to accept your lot in life and to be a person of integrity within that. But here in Romans 5, we see that this is not a closed loop ending at character, but an ecosystem that begets hope. Character produces hope, verse 4. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. And it's here, I think, we see this key insight into hope. Hope is not just a present conviction about what will happen in the future. It's not less than that. But hope is generative in the present. I think the last phrase in this powerful paragraph is not simply that God's love has been poured into our hearts as if we are reciprocants of God's love, that we receive it. But the emphasis rather is that love for God has been poured into our hearts. In the great ecosystem of the sanctifying grace of God, through afflictions we find endurance. Through endurance, we are built into people of strength and integrity, and through all of it we find hope, not just in the blessed assurance that all will be well and all manner of things will be well, but that newness that is generated by the love and the face of God shining upon us. I don't know if you've ever played a game with a little kid, but the worst thing you can do is something that delights them. Right? Because then what have you signed up for? Like an hour of doing it again, right? And you know, I know I love the show Bluey. Have you seen that? Yeah. But the parents, I don't know, do they work for a living? Are they trust fund kids? They are always available for their kids to play these ridiculously complex and imaginative games. And I want to be that kind of dad, but my goodness, I gotta work. But a child that is delighted may be much closer to the heart of God and the hope that he has for us than the parent who says, I'm tired, I'm done. G.K. Chesterton says it this way. He says, The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke they especially enjoy, a child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence of life. Because children have abounding vitality. Because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they always want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, do it again. And the grown-up person does it again until he's nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says, every morning, do it again to the sun. And every evening, do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we. The repetition in nature may not be mere recurrence, it may be a theatrical encore. This is the kind of hope that is pulsing with newness, with joy. It's not just about the future that we have somewhere else to go to. That somewhere else is coming here. A marriage of heaven and earth. And we are a people of hope in the here and now, crying out to a world that is aching for hope, that is striving for all these things, for peace and for access, for glory. And we're saying, it's all a gift. It's right here. An embassy of hope. Vladimir Nabakov writes of a moment of awakening in one of his characters as he watches an older woman receive a cup of coffee given to her. And I think what he encapsulates is so beautiful. I've had these moments where it just feels like time slows down. You kind of see people for who they are. You're just like, wow, what a wonder, what a glory. And he writes this he says, I became aware of the world's tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounds me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation. I realize that joy breathed around me everywhere. I realize that the world does not represent a struggle at all or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated. The ground upon which you now stand is a ground of grace. You have been given justification, peace, access, glory. And then you've been called to walk a path that will form things in you that you could not begin to imagine. Things that I can promise you, not because they are my promises to give, but because they are Jesus's and he is faithful to his promises. You are God's workmanship in Christ Jesus. He's forging out of your life, out of all the complexities, all the pain points of your life, all the afflictions. He's forging something so beautiful and weathered and tried and true that you could hardly begin to conceive of it. This is what the cultivator, the master gardener, the vine dresser is wanting to bring about in each one of us and us collectively. An awareness and love of this God who takes the depths of human bleakness and turns them into hope, who takes the cynicism of Pilate's dismissive question, what is truth? and proclaims the life, the way, and the truth. It is this grace that we now stand upon because Jesus has carried his cross, died, and stood again on the third day. We have this hope as an anchor for our souls, firm and secure. It is this hope that we've received as a gift. And we receive it because of the revelation of God in Christ Jesus. I'm gonna invite our worship team to make their way forward. I'm gonna transition us to a time of response and of pouring back that which God has poured into our hearts. And so as we do each week, we pray for the Holy Spirit to come. Again, we don't think we can order God around, but one of Jesus' key admonitions and exhortations is for us to ask and to expect that he will show up where people are gathered in his name. And we believe that in the power of Jesus risen and reigning, that he has poured out his spirit, made our hearts into temples of his presence, and made our gatherings into witnesses of his manifest presence. And so when we're here, I don't have a laundry list of things that you are to do, a laundry list of applications for you at times, because there are times when God will minister to you directly. And that's why we, at the end of each time of talking about the story and the word of God, try to allow for all the words to move to the side. And the presence of the Holy Spirit and the ways that He deals with us to be front and center. So we pray, come, Holy Spirit. We ask God that you would make your presence manifest. Lord, for those who have long ago put down hope, Lord, or hung it up. God, I pray that you would both help them to see people around them, to their left and to their right, and bring people to their minds, Lord. Lord, who can be stewards, torchbearers of hope in their life, God. Carrying hope where they have long put it away. God, I praise that as we return to that question, where are we looking for hope, Lord? Often that brings us to a place of tenderness and affliction. And we can get stuck there. And it's understandable why we do, because that is the most dominant and loudest thing in our experience. But God, I pray as we talk about hope, we could see hope beyond our afflictions, beyond our circumstances. And we could see hope held in your hands, Lord. Not as something that you're dangling over us and calling us to change something about our lives, but something that is true and tried, Lord. Something that is given to us out of the abundance of your hands, Lord. Something that often looks different than we would have accounted for, but is no less certain and sure. That we would find hope as a sure and secure anchor to our souls here in this place. And I pray, as I've been praying throughout this series, as this time and the season in the life of our church, Lord. Lord, that in us grabbing onto one foothold of hope, of saying, Lord, I want to see you move in this place in my life. I want to see these circumstances be different, Lord, that we would just find you. Lord, that we wouldn't try to accommodate you with some sort of cosmic slot machine or something that we can conjure or manage or control, but that we would find the God of the universe meeting us in our hopes, meeting us in the land of the living with all of your goodness, Lord. And meeting us with your power, Lord. That both changes and invites. So, God, would you make us a people of hope, a people of hope received as a gift? A people of defiant hope in the midst of all that travails and all the circumstances that we endure, both individually and collectively. Jesus, we pray all these things in your name because of the story that you have lived out. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen. Echosia, I'm going to invite you to a time of response. And as you do, uh you can stand up. And Gene, do you think we have enough room back there? Probably okay, right? Uh if you'd like to receive prayer, sometimes in a room like full like this one, it can be a little hard for the geography of it. But Gene is in the back. Uh, I don't know if anybody else on the prayer team is here. Uh just encourage you. Uh, prayer is often a way that we sort of move in faith. It's kind of a first step. And so if you're feeling like, oh man, I don't really know what to say or to do, I just encourage you to take a step of faith and go receive some prayer. Uh, we're going to respond in worship just kind of with those uh guiding questions and footholds, and then in a few moments we'll come and worship at the table together. We invite you to stand. Let's respond to the grace of God that has been poured out in the hearing and reading of his story here today.