Love Is Here In Hope
This is the time we celebrate the advent, the coming of Jesus Christ into our world. It is also a time when we look forward with anticipation to his second coming. The theme for our Advent series this year is Love Is Here. With the advent of Christ, God’s love came to us and is now here and present with us. God’s love saved us. Now we are called to bring His love to others, to make His love here and present for others.
Today on the 1st Sunday of Advent, we look at hope. God’s love is here with us in hope. Our hope is based on who God is and what He has done. Hope is powerful and changes who we are and how we live. And because of hope, we can face any situation and crisis. What is hope? According to the Bible, hope is a vision for better days. “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord …” (Jer 33:14). Jeremiah 30-33 is called the Book of Hope, and today we will look especially at Jeremiah 33.
1. God’s People Face A Crisis
God’s people are in a crisis. The year is 587 B.C., and the king of Babylon and his army have surrounded Jerusalem. They have set up a deadly siege, and the people are dying of hunger. Zedekiah, the King of Israel, still thinks he can beat the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, so he keeps fighting back. On the one hand, Jeremiah tells the king that it’s over and that he should surrender. He should trust God. On the other hand, the rest of the spiritual leaders and prophets were assuring the king that Jeremiah was a fraud and crazy. They kept telling the king exactly what he wanted to hear. He should keep fighting. “Nobody can mess with our nation. We always win because God is always on our side.” Jeremiah warns the king that these false prophets are merely offering cheap and false hope. Jeremiah’s basic message was this: Look deeper, King, because this isn’t a military thing; it’s a spiritual thing. The people of God have rejected the covenant of God. They’ve been committing spiritual adultery for far too long. Jer 33:4-5 — For thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the houses of this city and the houses of the kings of Judah that were torn down to make a defense against the siege mounds and against the sword: They are coming in to fight against the Chaldeans and to fill them with the dead bodies of men whom I shall strike down in my anger and my wrath, for I have hidden my face from this city because of all their evil.
King Zedekiah didn’t like this message, so he called Jeremiah an unpatriotic menace to national security, arrested him, and threw him into jail. But while Jeremiah sits in a prison cell, misunderstood, persecuted, labeled, and derided, he proclaims some of the most powerful words of hope.
2. Hope Is About a Promise
Hope is about a promise. Listen to God’s promises to his people as they face this crisis. Jer. 33:6-9: Behold, I will bring to it health and healing, and I will heal them and reveal to them abundance of prosperity and security. I will restore the fortunes of Judah and the fortunes of Israel, and rebuild them as they were at first. I will cleanse them from all the guilt of their sin against me, and I will forgive all the guilt of their sin and rebellion against me. And this city shall be to me a name of joy, a praise and a glory before all the nations of the earth who shall hear of all the good that I do for them. They shall fear and tremble because of all the good and all the prosperity I provide for it.
As followers of Jesus, our hope is never based on our wishful thinking, positive feelings, or how much faith we have. Our hope is based on who God is and what He has done.
We can trust God’s promises because of who He is. “Thus says the LORD who made the earth, the LORD who formed it to establish it— Yahweh is his name” (Jer 33:2). “Thus says the LORD: If you can break my covenant with the day and my covenant with the night, so that day and night will not come at their appointed time, then also my covenant with David my servant may be broken … Thus says the LORD: If I have not established my covenant with day and night and the fixed order of heaven and earth, then I will reject the offspring of Jacob and David my servant and will not choose one of his offspring to rule over the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For I will restore their fortunes and will have mercy on them” (Jer 33:19-21, 25-26). He is the Creator God and Lord of the universe. He made an unbreakable covenant with the day and night and with the fixed order of heaven and earth. Therefore, as Lord and Creator, his promises are true, firm, and unbreakable.
We can trust God’s promises because of what He has done. Our hope in God is never pulled out of thin air. It’s based on a particular history with God, a history that shows us God’s character and provides reasons why we should trust Him and place our hope in Him. His actions in human history show that He fulfilled his promises, and He will fulfill his promise that better days are coming. These are not empty promises. They are never pulled out of thin air. Our hope is based on who God is and what He has done, on a God who is really there. Above all, our hope is especially based on what God had done in a specific person, Jesus Christ.
3. Hope Is About a Person, Jesus the Christ
So, hope is about a person. God’s promises point to a specific person, and that person is Jesus Christ, the promised Messiah. Jer. 33:14-18 — “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah. In those days and at that time I will cause a righteous Branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will dwell securely. And this is the name by which it will be called: ‘The LORD is our righteousness.’ “For thus says the LORD: David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel, and the Levitical priests shall never lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings, and to make sacrifices forever.”
God promised that He will raise up a king like David, that He will rule God’s people, and bless the whole earth. God fulfilled that promise in Jesus Christ. In Jeremiah 33:16, Jesus is called the “Lord our Righteousness.” A righteous person is someone who lives totally right with God and with others. The Bible teaches us that none of us is righteous. But this Branch, this promised one, this Messiah, is called “The Lord our Righteousness.” He is the only fully righteous human being who has ever lived. And this is the heart of the Gospel. When Jesus died on the cross, he took upon himself our unrighteousness, and in a marvelous exchange, we received his righteousness (2 Cor 5:20-21). That is the astounding good news of freedom and new life for all of us.
In Jesus Christ, God fulfilled his promises of healing, restoration, prosperity, and security. In Jesus Christ, God forgives all the guilt of our sins against Him. In Jesus Christ, we are reconciled with God, and one another, and God’s promise of peace is fulfilled. In Christ, we receive the new, eternal life. We are healed and restored. In Him, we have security and peace because Jesus Christ is our eternal King, Lord and Ruler of the universe. He is our eternal Priest who intercedes for us with God all the time. He is our Hope.
4. Hope Changes Us In the Present
And this Hope changes us in the present. Once you start down the path of hope, there’s no turning back. Once you start hoping, your heart starts to burst with longing—because now you have something that you want. Hope will turn your life upside down. Hope sets your heart pounding with enthusiasm. Hope opens your life to more joy and delight and adventure than you ever thought possible. Once you have tasted the new life in Christ, once you have experienced God’s love that is now here and present in Christ, you will want more of this new life, you will want the deeper life with God, you will want to experience more of God’s love here and now.
But hope also opens our hearts to the ache of waiting and longing. We have this new life in Christ, but the old still battles with the new. We know that in Jesus God’s kingdom has already come, but it is not yet fulfilled. In the meantime, while we deal daily with this broken and hurting world, we suffer in this world while we wait with eager longing and anticipation for our Lord to come back. But we rejoice in our sufferings because the Bible promises us that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame (does not disappoint us), because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom 5:3-5).
Do you see how hope changes you? If you’ve opened your heart to Jesus, He will give you a vision of better days. Actually, for the follower of Jesus, those better days have already come—at least in part. The better days are available to us right now. You can call on the Name of the Lord and receive and enter into the promise of better days. That is the good news of the Gospel. The power of God is available today, not just for some distant future. God’s beautiful future has already begun, and you can have a taste of it today. In Jesus, God’s love is here and present and available to us now.
But be warned — once you place your hope in Jesus Christ, you won’t be able to go back anymore. You will have to, you will want to live this new kingdom life — fully, passionately, deeply. When you come to Jesus, He fills you with his Holy Spirit. Jeremiah couldn’t just live a comfortable life anymore. He couldn’t just go along with the crowd that was cheering Zedekiah and offering cheap and shallow hope. God had given him a picture of a new future and a new hope. Even if it meant going to jail, When God says, “Better days are coming,” and we really start to believe it, it will change us. We start to align our lives with the hope we have.
5. Hope Empowers Us To Risk
And so, there is one more way in which hope transforms us. Hope is powerful. It empowers us to take risks. Hope provides us with a vision of God’s future, and that vision allows us to risk. Hope gives us bold courage to take risks for Jesus and his Kingdom.
Against all good sense and worldly wisdom, Jeremiah bought land in Jerusalem (see Jeremiah 32). This is the worst time to buy a property. The city is under siege, it will fall to the Babylonian army, and everyone is going into exile. But Jeremiah lives by the promises of God. Again, this isn’t wishful thinking or merely a feeling; for Jeremiah, it’s all based on God’s track record in creation, history, and redemption. To Jeremiah, the decision makes sense. So he buys the field, hoping to come back to live in that field as God had promised. God had given a promise of better days. Jeremiah put his faith into practice.
If we have hope, if we hold on to God’s promise of better days, if we trust that Jesus is the Righteous One, that hope has to work itself into our lives. Hope empowers us to live out the kingdom life here and now. It enables us to be radically, revolutionary counter-cultural. To stand up for and to stand for our Lord Jesus Christ. Hope empowers us to endure in faithful witness and kingdom living no matter the circumstances and the consequences.
I want to leave you with these questions: Is your hope centered in Jesus Christ or something else? As you have grown as a Christian, has your hope expanded or diminished? How has hope “ruined” your life? What are you willing to risk because of who Jesus is and what he has done?
And if, as a follower of Jesus, you have lost your hope — and that happens as we get overwhelmed by circumstances, trials, and sufferings — if you have lost your hope, let us journey together during this Advent and ask Jesus to put hope back into us. Pray, call to Him, and He will answer you. God’s love is here with us in hope.