Abounding in Hope: Romans 15:8-13

Well this morning our sermon text uh comes from Romans 8.

Uh sorry, Romans 15, 8 through 13.

And given that it's the first week of Advent, we're focusing on this promise of hope.

And uh you'll notice that today being the 30th, uh, as we focus on this promise, it's not the first week of the month, and and that might throw you off because you're you're shortchanged today to uh finish memorizing the last promise of last month.

But this this month we begin this new promise, and we're gonna focus mostly on verse 13 in this passage.

And so again, I commend this to you to memorize this promise, to pray it in in order that we might deeply live it out.

Romans 15, 8 through 13.

For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, in order and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.

As it is written, therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name.

And again it says, Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.

And again, praise the Lord all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples extol him.

And again Isaiah says, The root of Jesse will come, even he who arises to rule the Gentiles, in him will the Gentiles hope.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

Let us pray.

Father, we thank you once again for revealing yourself to us.

We thank you, Father, for the way in which you have uh given us promises.

Promises that uh your son has purchased for us and is fulfilling, has fulfilled and continues to see fulfilled.

And so, Father, we ask, we pray, Holy Spirit, would you would you take these promises and would you uh bring us to know something of you even in deeper ways this morning, that we might be filled with with the hope that you would provide to us.

We ask and pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So again, this morning, as we uh begin this first week of Advent, we consider hope, um, this promise of hope.

And I want to begin with a question to you this morning.

The question is: what has your journey been like with hope?

What does that look like in your life?

Perhaps you you've known that there is hope beyond this present life when Jesus returns, and but your journey has been characterized by low expectation in the present.

You've tended to settle in, to hunker down, believing that the troubles of this life and this world aren't going away anytime soon.

Or perhaps hope has taken on a new dimension in your life through seasons of loss.

And while you've felt the loss, you have noticed something more profound at work, something deeper as desires were awakened in you as you thought more about Jesus and about heaven.

For all of us who are in Christ, we live in this tension between the two advents of Jesus that Ben mentioned earlier.

Right?

Having received the first fruits of the Spirit on one hand, and yet also longing for the fullness that's yet to come.

That's life between these two advents.

A life which requires much hope.

And it's promises like this that we've just read that keep us awake to God's intentions for us as we wait in between this period of time.

The context of this promise that's given, this prayer of the Apostle Paul that we just read is actually in relation to, well, he's he's writing to these believers in Rome who were becoming uh scrupulous towards one another regarding uh relatively minor issues, uh issues like observing certain days, uh preparation of foods.

And uh someone has said it like this.

They said they were they were attempting to yell where scripture only whispers.

And they were beginning to take or form these sides on these issues, where they were beginning to take uh moral judgments about these things.

And and the apostle was concerned that in these doubts and with these fears and this moral uncertainty and hesitation, it was beginning to produce this gloom that was beginning to settle in and hover over their fellowship with one another.

And so his prayer was that the God of hope would fill them with all joy and peace and believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit they might abound in hope.

And that's a that's a prayer and it's a promise that we also need to take hold of in fresh ways this morning to give us strength at the present time.

We only have to look around to see that there's still a lot of hope that we need in journeying through this life as God would have us.

And so, if I were to ask why pray in this promise, my desire would be that we would pray it in so that we would believe more deeply that God is a God of hope.

In order that we might be strengthened to fight against sin's gloom as we await his second advent.

And in that regard, I'm I fully confess that I still have a lot more room to grow.

I feel that there personally is still a lot for me to be done and being clothed with the kind of character that is deeply intimate with what's held out in these words.

And so, along with you, I press on to ask and to pray and to and to make more of this promise my own by his grace.

And so I want to keep in view two aspects of this prayer and this promise this morning, relying on the Holy Spirit to fuel hope within us.

The promise here conveys two things.

It conveys the reason we have for hope, and it conveys the need to be filled with hope.

The reason we have for hope, the need to be filled with hope.

We read, may the God of hope fill you.

This is about who we are going to for hope.

And coming to God, we come to a God who never throws his hands up in despair.

A God that for that reason means our hope is enduring.

Means that because God is unchanging, he never runs on empty.

Right?

He isn't full of hope one day and then the next day lacking somehow in hope, which can be true of us.

Faith takes us to a God who is characteristically hopeful.

And that ought to be a comfort to us and to be reminded of that, because it means that hope is always near.

It's always near.

As Christians, the apostle says, we've been born again to a living hope.

Because we believe that God exists and we believe that He, having canceled the debt of our sin, means we occupy a special relationship to him.

Hope is always near to us.

And why that's so vitally important to us is because when we or someone else needs hope, we need to believe that God is full of hope and that he is near with that hope.

Jesus' incarnation is evidence of that.

God coming into this world, taking on human flesh, bringing hope into this fallen world to bring us hope.

So, what is biblical hope?

What does it mean that God is a God of hope?

Well, if you pull over the scriptures, you see that you'll notice there are three primary aspects to hope.

First is desire, the second is anticipation or sorry, waiting, and the third is anticipation or expectation.

Desire, waiting, expectation.

What is basic to hope is desire, right?

The wanting of something.

We see it all throughout the scriptures, like you read Job 6.8.

Oh, that I might have my request, and that God would fulfill my hope.

That was the cry of Job's heart and petition.

Or we see Paul, I hope in the Lord Jesus to send Timothy to you soon, so that I too may be cheered by news of you.

Paul was hopeful that Timothy would be able to go and encourage the saints.

Desire is basic to hope in God.

That's the first thing.

Second, hope has to do with waiting.

Romans 8, 24-25.

Now, hope that is seen is not hope.

For who hopes for what he sees?

But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

So for something to be characterized as hope, we're not talking, we're talking about something that isn't yet seen, that isn't something that we have our hands on, as it were.

And because it's not yet seen, hope requires waiting.

We know about that in daily life, right?

We think about a car trip to a destination.

Some of you might have been in the car traveling for Thanksgiving this past week.

You set off, you're about ten minutes into your journey, and perhaps the question is yelled from the back.

Are we there yet?

The question is really getting at how long do we need to wait?

Hope requires waiting.

You and I live between the two advents.

There's waiting involved.

The question is not, must we wait?

The question is, how are we waiting?

What does that waiting look like?

Because we can all wait in differing ways.

And so we're going to hold on to that for a moment.

Hope has to do with waiting.

And that leads to one more aspect to hope, which speaks to these questions.

Hope also has to do with expectation.

Right?

Hope means to wait patiently while doing so expectantly.

It's praying patiently for revival while expecting to see it tomorrow.

Right?

It's going to that brother or sister who has something against you, anticipating God to work in the conversation that you know needs to happen.

It's longing for the day of being reunited with that loved one and the Lord while pursuing the weightier things of glory.

That's hope.

And I wonder if someone was to ask you to describe God, if you would characterize him in that way.

Are you going to, are you relying on God in order to be filled with that kind of hope?

The season of preparation, when we talk about Advent, it doesn't deny the gloom, but it announces that a greater light, a hope, has dawned to overcome that gloom.

And so we come and have access to that hope in our great God.

Second, the promise conveys our need to be filled with hope.

We read, may the God of hope fill you.

Notice the need to be filled with hope.

The use of the term here, filling, implies that our cup isn't always full.

There's nothing automatic about the Christian life that means that we automatically are just brimming over with hope.

We need to be filled.

That we put on a shelf sometimes.

You know what that's like.

You get a trophy and and you want to sit it on that trophy, and the only thing you really do with that trophy is you give it a glance every once in a while.

You put it on the shelf and you leave it, right?

Hope is not something to pull down and dust off or take a glance at it occasionally.

This living hope is something to fetch and ought to be well worn like your favorite sweater.

Day by day, moment by moment, drawing upon the God of hope as we live in this life and the brokenness and the fallenness of this world.

And this filling only happens as we bring our desires to God, believing his gospel and his promises.

Because there are ways that we neglect this filling, and I'm going to give three ways that I'll mention here that are really counterfeit to hope.

The first is hopelessness, the second is cynicism, and the third is optimism.

Each of these seeks to stifle or circumvent the filling that the Spirit would otherwise give us with true, genuine, God-given hope.

The first is this hopelessness.

There's an interaction that takes place in the book of Ruth, where Naomi shears with Ruth and with her other daughter-in-law, Orpah, of her hopelessness.

Naomi, you might remember, has just lost her husband.

Both Orpa and Ruth have also lost their husbands.

And so Naomi is setting off from Moab, where she'd been living, and she's going back to Judah and taking that journey.

And on the way, she turns to her daughters-in-law and she says, Turn back, my daughters.

Go your way, for I'm too old to have a husband.

Right?

If I should say I have hope, even if I should have a husband this night and should be her sons, would you therefore wait till they were grown?

What's Naomi doing?

She's saying, There's no hope.

I don't have anything to give you.

She is deadening her desire for companionship by failing to believe that God could bring hope to her daughters-in-law were they to join her on the journey.

To deaden desire, therefore, is a way of to avoid being filled with hope.

Right?

It says, I would rather bury my head in the sand than to take this journey of wanting and believing God to act.

The problem is if I aim to kill desire by just hunkering down and getting through this life.

Right?

It will show up in my prayers.

It will show up in my prayer life.

Because prayer is the very act of offering up our desires to God.

And so we can't, on one hand, just kill our desires and expect to offer up our desires to God.

We can't compartmentalize our hearts and our lives like that.

So we avoid being filled with hope when we didn't desire.

Second, cynicism.

Cynicism is also a counterfeit to hope, and it's something that occurs through repeated disappointment.

Alright, so what's happening when someone says, I would go for this job interview, but I know what they're gonna say.

It's gonna be like every other interview.

I'm not being cynical and saying I don't want to go.

I'm just being realistic that it's not gonna go well.

That I'm gonna face rejection.

The problem with cynicism is that after repeated disappointments, the enemy becomes your desire.

I'm done wanting this thing.

Right?

If I didn't want this job, then I wouldn't have to deal with the pain of facing one more rejection letter.

The problem is with the wanting it.

And it keeps us from being filled with hope.

Why?

Well, because it rejects the reality of resurrection power.

That's cynicism.

Third counterfeit to hope is optimism.

Optimism is thinking of this world in better terms than it is.

It looks to avoid and dismiss brokenness and sin by assuming it's a positive outlook.

Optimism likes words like renewal, anticipation, expectation.

But it neglects words that Scripture also gives us when referring to hope, like groaning, yearning, longing, birth pains.

Right?

Wrestling.

These are also words that Scripture gives us to describe the tension that we have as we live in this fallen world.

Now, awful, renewal, anticipation, expectation, they're good.

They're necessary parts of hope.

But the problem with optimism is that it ignores the tide of all creation that waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.

A creation that desires to be set free from all of the bondage and all of the corruption, all that's all not right, and obtain this freedom of the glory of the children of God.

What that means is that all that's touched right now with a sense of present misery is intensely longing and hoping for a resurrection.

All creation is eagerly awaiting, the Apostle Paul tells us, for that day when we will obtain that freedom as glorified children of God.

Optimism ignores that groaning.

Because the truth is that we groan precisely because we are and have been indwelt by the Spirit.

Right?

We can understand why that's the case.

In receiving the Spirit, we've now been given a taste of home.

Right?

We've been given a taste of renewal.

We've been given a taste of promise.

These are all the first fruits of the Spirit that He brings to us.

So therefore, we have this tension of actually wanting to arrive at home, of experiencing the fullness of a renewed humanity.

The fulfillment of these promises only serve to ramp up the groaning that we sometimes might feel in the waiting.

So that's not a problem or a fault that you have.

That's a necessary thing of living in the tension of this world.

And so the question then is, how then do we experience this filling with hope?

We see the apostle draw these believers' attention to the promises of Scripture that are brimming with hope.

Look at the four promises beginning with verse 10.

I mean, he just lifts one after the other after the other.

Therefore, I will praise you among the Gentiles and sing to your name.

Again, rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people.

Again, praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples extol him.

And then again, the root of Jesse will come.

Even he who arises to rule the Gentiles, in him will the Gentiles hope.

What is the Apostle Paul doing here?

He's directing their faith to the promises of God that speak to their inclusion and acceptance.

He's bringing them hope.

Frederick Buchner, a theologian, says it this way.

He says, hope stands up to its knees in the past and keeps its eyes on the future.

There's never been a time past when God wasn't with us as the strength beyond our strength, the wisdom beyond our wisdom.

To remember the past is to see that we are here by grace, that we have survived as a gift.

And why it's important to look back and to keep our eyes fixed on what is ahead is because those of us who give ourselves to hope don't need trite answers or platitudes as a way of avoiding or bypassing the brokenness in this world.

The sin that we experience.

And thank God he doesn't respond to us in that way.

We know that because hope came as a person.

In Jesus Christ, who entered into our world and now has entered into us by his spirit.

Not to bypass, but to enter into our brokenness and overcome it with his light.

First by coming in human flesh, then by his spirit.

The gospel, you see, announces that Jesus in coming to this world didn't remain detached or dismissive of our longings, but gave his spirit to us to enter into our longings and our brokenness in order to serve a greater purpose.

Consider that for a moment.

What does it mean to you that Christ came to enter your longings?

Where do you encounter gloom?

What are the things that cause you to groan?

What longings do you have that remain unmet?

Even in those places, he's pleased to enter with his light.

Which means there's hope for us.

Even in the groaning, even in the fears, even in our unmet longings.

None of it is wasted.

None of it is off-limit to his light.

The power that is at work in your believing through this gospel is the same power that brought Jesus up from the dead.

That's the reason why we have hope.

That's the kind of power that's working within us to bring us his peace and his joy.

Not I, but Christ in me.

That's the hope of glory.

Him, Christ, working by his Spirit, filling, hoping for me, as he has always done.

Need that kind of light?

Need to know that someone is working for you?

Helping you, aiding you, bringing comfort to you.

Christ's presence, you see, always brings his light and shines with his warmth.

You know what that's like.

I'm sure you've been in a room where it's poorly lit, perhaps, it's dark, it's maybe even cold, and and yet the morning comes, and you walk over to the window, and you grab the curtains and you spring them open, or you open the shutters up, and and in streams the light, and and the warmth of the sun just hits you in the face.

That's the kind of light that he can bring to enter your soul.

Are you in need of his light to brighten you, to fill you?

Are you even aware of this filling that he would give you?

And your need of it.

The kingdom of God is one of hope.

It's a hope that comes to live within.

A responsiveness of God to the pain in your heart as you journey through a fallen world, as you engage with others who have hurts of their own.

And because of that, it's often accompanied by joy and peace.

Even in the waiting.

God working for our redemption from age to age with expectancy, anticipation, energy, his joy in receiving us, his peace with regard to us, pulling us in.

The kind of fruits that overcome the gloom, that cast out the fear and the uncertainty.

It's a hope that comes to live within us.

It's also a hope that comes to expression toward others.

Right?

A strengthened desire to endure through fault or trial, to live in harmony with one another, welcoming one another as Christ has welcomed you.

Do you need more hope to do that?

None of us are perfect.

We can rub off on each other in good ways, we can rub off on each other in challenging ways.

Do you need hope to endure and live in harmony with one another?

Continuing to welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you.

I need that kind of hope.

I trust you do too.

Who else can empower that kind of hope but the Holy Spirit?

Are you asking Him for this hope?

Are you believing this gospel?

His hope is near.

His hope has come with power.

Because here's the reality.

The reality is that the day of fullness is quickly approaching.

All of our longings will be satisfied.

How are you spending today?

What are you doing to prepare?

Who are you serving with the hope given to you?

To make good use of the time.

May we continue to live in the bright hope of this gospel, walking in the abundant hope of our great God.

Amen.

Let us pray.

Lord, we ask and pray, Lord, give us the ability to take hold of this hope that you would offer to us.

Lord, draw near to us with your hope.

That even through the challenges of life, we might increasingly be those who possess and can say, I know the God of hope.

Oh Lord, grant us to be those who offer and extend that kind of hope to others.

Knowing that you are faithful, knowing that you are good, knowing that such hope brings with it both joy and peace, even as we wait for the fullness of hope yet to come.

O Lord, you've heard our longings.

We pray and we ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.