Sunday Sermon

 Hope

Isaiah 49:9
You will tell the prisoners, ‘Come out of your prison.’  You will tell those in darkness, ‘Come into the light.’  The people will eat beside the roads, and they will find food even on bare hills.
                    
    Someone once told me a truth that is very inconvenient but has proven to be true over and over.  I was reminded of this truth just recently and it has been on my mind ever since then.  The truth that I learned was that if something starts to leak it will never get better and almost always it will get worse over time.  That truth has helped me but it also has made my life harder.  In the years after I learned that truth I have had to deal with leaky faucets, washing machine pumps and broken pipes.  As much as I did not want to face the truth about those things I still dealt with them because I knew what was true and I knew what had to be done if I wanted to limit the damage done by the leak.  What I really like is that because I knew this truth it helped me grow in my faith.  God tells us the truth about life and how it works even if we don’t like what He has to say.  Knowing the truth forces us to either act based on the truth or reject the truth and live as we want to.  The problem with rejecting the truth is that the broken things in our lives will not change and mostly likely they are going to get worse.  We have a God who tells us the truth not because He hates us but because He loves us and wants to fix the flawed things in our lives.  The greatest hope we have is the fact that God does not lie to us and tells us the hard truth because He loves us and wants us to know how to live our lives as they were meant to be.  Knowing God’s truth though does mean that things will be inconvenient because we will have to act in ways that are not easy or comfortable.  Just the act of getting up and going to church on Sunday morning to worship and honor God is living by the truth God teaches us.  It would be so much easier to stay in bed and not have to go out in public and spend time and effort to give God the respect He deserves.  Treating people with love and respect is not easy but God calls us to care about our fellow human beings.  Hating people and resenting people seems so much more comforting but in doing so we destroy ourselves.  All the truths that God teaches are there not because they are easy but they are there because they are the right thing to do and they are healthy for us.  Every leak that I have faced either did damage or would have done damage but by facing the truth, that damage was mitigated and that is the point of God’s truth.  When we live by them they help us face that broken things in our lives so we will not have our lives damaged by the sin in our lives.  We should be so grateful for God’s truth and we should find such hope in a God who wants to teach us these truths.  Our God does not have to speak to us about what is true and right but because we have a righteous God and He always does what is right God teaches us and helps us know what is true.
    At the center of our God is the fact that He is truth.  This may seem like an abstract idea but as I have shown above truth has a very real day to day reality.  When we live by truth each day we find this God who cares about us enough to tell us the truth.  God explains how reality and the universe works.  There are fundamental laws in this universe that if we brake them there is a price to pay and God wants us to know those ideas because they will save us from ourselves.  We should find such hope in a God who explains things to us and wants us to know how the world works.  The natural result of knowing what God has to say to us is to sing of God’s glory and to seek to live by the ideas God give us.  It is such a gift that God tells us the Ten Commandments.  There is no obligation for God to tell us how the world works but God loves us so He want us to have this information because it will save us from the destruction that we as humans seem to end up in.  God wants to give us life but we have to choose to listen to and then live by the truth God gives us.  Yes, the truth will cause us to have to face who we are and how broken we are but in that truth is life and hope and that is what we are looking for.  Let God teach us and show us how to live each day.  The whole point of God’s ideas are not some theological treatise about this invisible God but they are about how to live each day with a sense of purpose and meaning.  I know God’s truths are inconvenient and they get in the way of what we think we want to do but they tell us the truth about our choices and what they mean.  Learning from God about how to live our lives each day is the most powerful thing we can do to improve our lives and the lives of the people around us.
    My faith is not all about my God redeeming me even though that is an important part.  The God I put my hope in is a God who works with me both in the eternal things but also in the day to day lives we lead.  We are to love the people we encounter each day and we are to care for them not because they are good or helpful but because God loved them just as much as He does us.  For me I have begun to think of God as the source of life both in the theological sense and in the daily idea.  When we start to think about this, it really does change our lives and give us a new way of seeing our lives.  At the foundation of this is the idea we can find hope in God and really the only hope we have is God.  Look at this verse and see that God wants to set us free which gives us real hope.  And the freedom God is talking about is not some hope of heaven but a real hope about how to live our lives each day.  Instead of being slaves to all the things that bring destruction into our lives we have the hope in God that He wants to cut those chains that hold us down so we might know what real life is like.  We listen to God and we live by His ideas and concepts because we find hope in what we are told.  The whole idea of God teaching us right from wrong and showing us how to live in the right way is to prove we do not have an empty hope but one that can be proven.  In this verse we find the three things that we need to both build lasting lives and live each day.  Slavery, darkness and hunger are the enemy of our soul and so God addresses those.  We have already covered slavery so the next thing is darkness.  The world is so dark and we are so lost in that darkness.  God calls to us to step into the light of His grace and to see how things really are and to understand there is a right and wrong and because of that we need a light on our path or we will go the wrong way.  And last is the hunger we all feel about life and the emptiness in our souls.  It is so wonderful that God knows we have a hunger in our souls and He seeks to feed it.  Often the reason we do not grow as people is because our souls have been starved.  When we do not have good nutrition we will not grow physically and the same is true for our spirits.  God knows we need these three things and so He offers them to us for free.  If that does not give us a reason for hope I don’t know why we have any faith at all.  We are so love by God and He wants to offer us the life we long for and all we have to do is find our hope in Him.
    In this verse we learn something very critical to what our faith is all about.  Notice that God calls us out of prison and God calls us to come to the light and God feeds us.  There is so much here.  We have this God who knows what we really need and so He speaks to those points.  And again these are not some theological ideas that have no effect on our regular lives but these speak the to the deepest needs of every human.  God is the one who has the answers to the our needs and wants and it is so exciting that our God wants to share those answers with us.  We may need those answers but it is not incumbent upon God to give them to us.  That is what is so cool here, we have a God who desperately wants us to know this stuff and to find hope in Him.  This verse also tells us we need to look to God because He has the answers we are looking for in life.  Often we as humans reject God because God does not do what we want Him to do and so God must not understand us but this verse tells us God knows exactly what we need and that is why He offers it to us.  An important fact here is that God offers us hope but we do not have to take it.  We can reject what God offers but when we do we reject any answers God has to give us.  What I like is that God does not just offer these things but He then teaches us how they work and what we choices we have to make.  God wants to feed our souls but we have to choose to take in the nutrients or none of what God offers matters.  If we want the hope God gives we have to learn what God teaches us and then apply that teaching in our daily lives.  We place our trust in God because of the hope He is and that builds our faith in Him.
    It does need to be said that this verse also exposes issues with the broken human condition that we need to speak to.  The writer of this book understood the problem that we are looking at and he fought against it all his life.  God calls people out of prison and God calls us to come to the light but each person has to make the choice to do so.  When we think about it, why would people not want to come out of prison or leave the darkness that confuses us but that fact is that people do.  Instead of finding hope they reject the God who loves them and wants them to know hope.  Each one of us need to take time each day to make the choice to listen to God.  Choosing the hope of God is not something that happens once be it is a life time of choosing God and the hope He gives instead of choosing the darkness.  When we place our hope in God we find that the hunger in our souls is filled and that is a wonderful thing about our God.