Today we're going to talk about being desperate for ultimate hope. This raises a question for us. Is there a hope that you and I can count on when every other hope lets us down, because eventually, other hopes will? Pastor and writer, John Ortberg, observes four things about hope that I believe are true. (John Ortberg, "Vital Optimism: What Makes Things All Right When…" 8-13-00) These are things that are true about the people around you, sitting next to you or watching me on television this morning.

One thing is that no matter what we hope for none of us has the power to make them come true. We can try and work and plan to achieve them but in the end we discover we have little power to make them happen. Another observation is that we are by nature, hopers. As long as we live, every morning when we get up and open our eyes, we hope about what might happen that day and the next. A third thing is that our hopes also come in all sizes. There is a distinction between something called big optimism and little optimism. Little optimism involves something specific and big optimism is about something general. You might say there are big hope and little hopes. The person next to you has some hopes, and some of them are little hopes, but some of them are big hopes. There is still one more thing that is true about the person sitting next to you and that is some of their hopes have not panned out. That's the way hopes work. Sometimes they turn out quite well. Sometimes they don't. When you hope for something and it's core to what your future looks like to you, and you realize that it’s going to be disappointing, then what do you do? The answer is that it is time to get another hope!

Bruce Medes writes, "Tammy Kramer was chief at the outpatient AIDS clinic at Los Angeles County Hospital. She was watching a young man who had come in one morning for his regular dose of medicine. He sat in tired silence on a high clinic stool while a new doctor at the clinic poked a needle into his arm, and without looking up at his face said, ‘You're aware, aren't you, that you are not long for this world–a year at most?’ The patient stopped at Tammy's desk on his way out, his face twisted with pain and hissed, ‘That BLANK took away my hope.’ Tammy Kramer said, ‘I guess he did. Maybe it's time to find another one. Maybe it's time to find another hope.’" Now that's the question. Is there another hope?

Regardless of what you hope for there will come a day when my human hopes run out. Death will come my way, and yours too. For most of us, we spend large portions of our lives, or our entire lives, pretending that that day will never come. But it will and it will defeat every hope anybody has for any future days on this side of the grave. So maybe it's time to find another hope. That's the question. Is there another hope? I'm here today to tell you that there is. There is hope that is ultimate, lasting and goes beyond now and will carry us into forever! This is much deeper stuff than merely human optimism–than the hope or expectation that things will turn out okay tomorrow or the next day.

That’s what I want to talk about today—ultimate hope! Hope that makes life worth living now and will give me life forever. That’s the kind of hope Paul prayed that the Roman Christians would have when he said, "So I pray that God, who gives you hope, will keep you happy and full of peace as you believe in him. May you overflow with hope through the power of the Holy Spirit." Those words tell us three simple things: that God is the one who gives ultimate hope, that we must receive that hope by believing and that this hope is assured by God’s power.

I believe people want ultimate hope for life now and life forever. They want a reason to live now and knowledge that there is more to life. They need to discover that God is the one who gives us the desire for ultimate hope. (Rom. 15:13; Eccl. 3:11)

Paul says, "So I pray that God, who gives you hope…" When you see the amazing ability of humans to be optimistic in the face of horrific circumstances, you don’t have to wonder about the source of such an expectation. God is the one who gives that to people. The Bible makes it clear. "God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end" (Eccl. 3:11). The Bible says that in each person, every person, all people, there is some sense that there is more to my life than the physical, that there is another dimension to my existence. It is this sense of eternity that makes people different from everything else in the created order. God has given to people a sense of "eternity" and a desire to make sense out of the whole of life. That sense of spiritual thirst in each individual is the result of our being made in God’s image.

When Dr. Jerome Groopman diagnosed patients with serious diseases, the Harvard Medical School professor discovered that all of them were "looking for a sense of genuine hope—and indeed, that hope was as important to them as anything he might prescribe as a physician." Even with all the medical technology available to us now he discovered that, "we still come back to this profound human need to believe that there is a possibility to reach a future that is better than the one in the present." (Rachel K. Sobel, "The Mysteries of Hope and Healing," U.S. News and World Report, 1-26-04) Where does that come from? It comes from God who gives us hope!

If that is true then why do people look for hope other places than in God if he is the one who gives us the desire for hope? The reason, the Bible says, is, "people cannot see…" Why? Because we are people who rebelled against the knowledge God offered us and wanted our own way. We have cut ourselves off from God’s truth for our own answers. We now live separated from Him, stumbling blindly in the darkness of our own creation. We try to get to God but our ways always fall short. So we live with this spiritual thirst, failing to understand our eternal value and not understanding that we will never be content until we are secure in a relationship with Him. The good news is that what you feel inside you is God conducting an all out search for you. That desire for an ultimate hope in life now and forever is because God is looking to give you what you hope for-ultimate hope!

So what do you do? You long for something more now and something that will last. What is so hard to explain is that unless those who are searching for ultimate hope find that search ending in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, they will search without ever being satisfied. We can change careers, addresses, and do good things but if we aren’t changed then we will never be content. That’s why there is Jesus. God in Jesus offers ultimate hope for life now and what he offers must be received by faith. (Rom. 15:13; John 10:10)

Paul said that he prayed that God would, "keep you happy and full of peace as you believe in him." That tells me that God has a longing to give me more life than I am currently experiencing. A life that is happy and peaceful. Jesus said something very similar, "The thief's purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give life in all its fullness." (John 10:10) In John 10 Jesus describes himself as a shepherd and those who have a personal relationship with Him as sheep. His desire is to protect those who are His from any attack. So in order to secure them He puts himself between anyone or any thing that could hurt or harm them. Those who want to harm those He is trying or seeking to save will be ruthless in their attack. They will use deception (steal), death (kill) and destruction (destroy). Their desire is to keep persons from ever knowing the fullness of life now that Jesus would give them. For that reason Jesus said that His purpose was to offer life to people and not just any life but an overflowing life now! What Jesus says to those searching for ultimate hope is that the search ends in Him.

In his book, Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller shares a story of how he helped a friend whose alcoholism was destroying his life: "Last year, I pulled a friend out of his closet…His marriage was falling apart because of his inability to stop drinking. This man is a kind and brilliant human being, touched with many gifts from God, but addicted to alcohol, and being taken down in the fight. He was suicidal, we thought, and the kids had been sent away. We sat together on his back deck and talked for hours, deep into the night. I didn’t think he was going to make it. I worried about him as I boarded my flight back to Portland, and he checked himself into rehab.

"Two months later he picked me up from the same airport, having gone several weeks without a drink. As he told me the story of the beginnings of his painful recovery process, he said a single incident was giving him the strength to continue. His father had flown in to attend a recovery meeting with him, and in the meeting my friend had to confess all his issues and weaknesses. When he finished, his father stood up to address the group of addicts. He looked at his son and said, ‘I have never loved my son as much as I do at this moment. I love him. I want all of you to know I love him.’ My friend said at that moment, for the first time in his life, he was able to believe God loved him, too. He believed if God, his father, and his wife all loved him, he could fight the addiction, and he believed he might make it. (Donald Miller, "Searching for God Knows What" (Thomas Nelson, 2004), p. 130-131) Not until this man believed the love of his father could he receive the love of God for him.

I want you to look closely at John 10:9, "I am the door; if anyone enters through me, he shall be saved…" Jesus says that He is the way, the bridge from where we are to where God is. He is the answer to our thirst, our longing for meaning, our sense of aimlessness, our incompleteness. How? Not by His example, not by His words, and not by His goodness. The way he became the bridge for us to know to have ultimate hope is by His death for us on the cross. (John 3:16, Romans 5:8) He is saying, "If you want, ultimate hope in life and for life now then you will only know it in me and my death on the cross." The only way to have the kind of life that Jesus speaks of is by our receiving it by faith. When you receive by faith the love of the Father you experience ultimate hope.

There you are seeing that God has never stopped searching for you. He is on one side of a divide that you created yourself. You are on the other side knowing that fully in Him is all you ever wanted. You understand that a way, a door, a path has been made for you by the death of Christ in your place. So what do you do? What assurance do you have that what you hope for is really there? The answer is that Jesus assures us that ultimate hope for life forever is found in him. (Rom. 15:13, John 11:25-26)

Paul prayed that they would know hope at such a level that it would overflow into the rest of their life, "May you overflow with hope through the power of the Holy Spirit." But the assurance of that hope being there when you need it is not dependent on our power but on God’s. He says, "through the power of the Holy Spirit". Jesus assures us as well that the life he offers is secure and certain. He said in John 11:25-26, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die."

Jesus spells it out by saying that in Him is life that is eternal—now! In spite of the certainty of death in this life, those who believe or trust in Him live forever. Jesus doesn’t ask of you and me anything more. What he asks of us is to believe that He and He alone is sufficient to free me from my past and give me life forever. He invites me to trust Him – "to believe". Jesus offers you His hand and says, "Take it! Here’s hope forever. If you take it, I promise you, I promise you, you will never know anything but life, life forever." Just take His hand.

I want to explain to you how it is that an ordinary human being is able do something like that. This is the heart of the gospel, friends. You were designed by God with the capacity to live with him, to be with him, in his very image. That’s a remarkable thing. There’s something wonderful about you and about the person sitting next to you, right now.

We are born with this wonder about us but then things happen and our lives become filled with other things too–stubbornness, selfishness, a capacity to deceive and defy authority. You see just as there is something wonderful about us there's also wickedness about us too. "All have sinned," the Bible says. That’s true about you. There is darkness inside me. The Bible says it’s very serious business. It says that the wages, the natural consequence of this sin is death. This just, holy God has no intention of allowing sin or destructiveness to have the last word over his creation–no intention of that.

His intention is that there will be a place of perfect community and harmony and one day there will be. God will not be stopped in this. So that sets up this enormous problem. How do we get right with God when there's this chasm, this moral gap, between me and him–a perfect holy God and a fallen, sinful person? Now, this is the point where many people settle for quite an uncertain hope.

People think, "If I just do enough good deeds or pray enough prayers or give enough money or go to church often enough or volunteer for enough charities, maybe somehow I can pay the debt. Don't know for sure I just hope things work out." The Bible says there is no "enough." There are not enough things that I can do–not enough money to be given, not enough good deeds to be performed on my own.

If I were on my own with this moral debt that I owe to God, I would have no hope. I would face death without hope. When I realize this then it would be time to find another hope, and that is what God offers. This is the gospel. Jesus left home one day. He packed up his suitcase and came down to this planet and became an ordinary human being, like you and me, and lived among us and taught us about the life that God intended his human creatures to live, and was arrested and died on a cross.

The Bible says that when he died on the cross, though his enemies thought that was his end, he was really dying the death you and I, by all rights, should have died. He was paying the price that you and I could not pay for our sins. Our penalty fell on him. As a result of that, the Bible says God says, "The price has been paid. Your debt has been paid. So I offer you forgiveness now, as a free gift of grace."

That’s how people are set right with God. But now you must decide. For this hope to be certainly, surely yours, it’s not enough to understand. You must decide. You must say, "God, I acknowledge I am a sinner. I realize that now. I understand there is not enough I can do to pay that debt. I understand now that Jesus Christ came from heaven to this earth, and he died on the cross in my place to pay for the sin I could never pay.

"So I receive forgiveness as a free gift, and I ask Jesus Christ to be the forgiver of my life, and also to be my leader, to guide me. I will live in submission to him for the rest of my life." You make that decision. Then you too can say, "Surely, certainly, this is my hope." That's the most important decision a person can make.

I want to give you a chance to do that, right now. I'd like to ask everybody in this room, right now, if you would to join me in prayer. Close your eyes if that would be helpful for you to kind of focus. Some of you are here this morning and I know you are seeking, and you need more time. Some of you have already made that commitment. You are already followers of God. Then you pray for somebody else that’s maybe still searching. But I want to challenge you right now. If you're here this morning and you've been around for a while, and you understand what the gospel is about but you have never really taken this step, you have never made this decision, then you need to face the truth, which is you don’t have this sure and certain hope right now. You don’t have ultimate hope.

But you can right now. I want to invite you to pray in your spirit as I pray out loud. "God, I understand that you love me. I understand that I'm a sinful person. There is darkness inside me, and I have fallen short. I understand now that I can't do enough, give enough, work enough to pay that debt, so I'm going to quit trying. I understand now that Jesus Christ came to this earth and died on the cross in my place to pay the debt I could not pay.

"So now, Father, on this day, right in this place, I receive forgiveness from you as a free gift of grace. I'm so grateful and I offer you my life. I want Jesus to be the forgiver and Lord of my life and I want to live every day, the rest of my life, with the certainty that I have ultimate hope. Then I know I will be with you forever in the life to come. Amen."

Now, you just need to know, if you prayed that prayer and you meant it, you've entered into that life. You have made the most significant decision that any human being can ever make by far. I strongly encourage you to tell somebody that you've decided that. Tell somebody else who follows Christ. Maybe it’s somebody in your family; maybe it's a friend or somebody here at this church. Come down and tell me. Because, friends, a lot of different hopes are out there. Some of them are small. Some of them are quite large. This is the only one that is the ultimate hope.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Dr. Bruce Tippit, Pastor

First Baptist Church

Jonesboro, Arkansas

btippit@fbcjonesboro.org