Most of us are so busy getting through the day, that we’ve forgotten completely that Jesus is coming back. In fact the reality of today, and the promise of Christ’s imminent return almost seem … incompatible. Is Life Tearing You Apart? Great to be starting a new series on a subject that pretty much all of us are really interested in: Hope. I don’t know how much you’ve thought about this, but having hope for the future is fundamental to our well-being today. Think about it. If you don’t have any hope to look forward to, if you have no hope for the future, then you and your life are what we call hopeless and hopelessness, if you’ve ever been there, is the place where people start thinking about taking their own lives because they’ve got nothing left to live for. The future looks so bleak that we come to the conclusion: ‘Well, what’s the point?’ I once read a book about a holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, and he makes the point so powerfully when he recalls an experience from a concentration camp. Have a listen to what he writes: The prisoner who had lost faith in the future, his future, was doomed. With the loss of belief in his future, he also lost his spiritual hold. He let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually, this happened quite suddenly in the form of a crisis – the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends. It usually began with a prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash and to go out on the parade ground. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect: He just lay there hardly moving. If the crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up, and there he remained lying in his own excrement, and nothing bothered him any more. What a devastating picture of hopelessness, but a lack of hope in our lives takes many different forms. Sometimes, it’s not quite as desperate as that. It’s just that we’ve had this numbness because we’re so buried in the minutiae. We worry about this and that; we worry about ... well, we worry about just about everything really. I saw a great quote the other day on Twitter that went something like this: Worry is nothing more than your imagination creating negative visions of the future. It’s true, isn’t it? We create all these negative snapshots of how things could turn out, as though that’s any way to live your life. Hope is the complete opposite of that. Hope is about creating positive snapshots. It’s about a vision in our heads and in our hearts of having a life that’s worth living, and the sort of hope that God’s into is the sort that makes a powerful difference in the good times and in the bad. We don’t find it particularly difficult to have hope for the future when things are going pretty well. The time we struggle is when things aren’t going well, and it’s right in that place that God wants to pour His hope into your life and mine. Romans 12:12: Rejoice in hope; be patient in tribulation; be consistent in prayer. Did you pick that up? God’s hope is right in there, in the mix, next to, butted up against tribulation – a word which, in its original Greek language, literally means to have the life squeezed out of you. So, when you’re being squeezed and crushed, when it feels like your life is draining out of you, it’s right there that God plans to give you hope. Our problem is that the hope that we’re all too often looking for is way too short-sighted. We hope that the pain will go away. We hope that the thing that’s causing us grief will go away: Not next month; not even next week; not even tomorrow ... We want it fixed now. It doesn’t always work that way. I can’t tell you the number of letters and emails I receive from people who’ve been suffering for a long time – some of them a lifetime, and they want to know: What the blazers is God up to? How can I possibly have the hope that you’re talking about? Those are eminently reasonable questions for you and me to be asking, so let’s lift our gaze and take a much bigger, much more expansive view of the sort of hope that God has for each one of us today. Let’s have a listen to the apostle Paul, who was going through his own tribulations on death row in a Roman dungeon. This comes from Philippians 1:18-26: And I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for my deliverance. It is my eager expectation and hope that I will not be put to shame in any way, but by my speaking with all boldness, Christ will be exalted now as always in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me, and I don’t know which one I prefer. I’m hard-pressed between the two: My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that’s far better, but to remain in the flesh is more necessary for you. Since I am convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with all of you for your progress and joy in faith, so that I may share abundantly in your boasting in Christ Jesus when I come to you again. So much hope does Paul have in the eternity that he’s going to spend with Jesus that instead of panicking about the consequences of being on death row, he’s actually torn – not between this and that in life, but between continuing in this life or moving on to the next. Now, just stop and think about that there for a minute. Take a deep breath; let it sink in. Paul had so wrapped his heart and his mind around the amazing eternity he’s going to spend in the presence of God, with Jesus for ever and ever and ever, he’s completely torn between finishing the course that God’s set for him here on this planet, and letting it come to an early end so that he can be with Jesus. Wow! So let me ask you this question: How different would your perspective on life be if you had that sort of hope within your heart right now, tomorrow, the next day? Well that’s precisely why we’re talking about this hope – the certain hope that we have in Jesus Christ for all eternity, in this series that I’ve called Merchants of Hope. When Jesus Comes Again Ok, tomorrow starts off like any other day. The alarm clock goes off, you roll out of bed, into the bathroom, breakfast, off to work ... You look out the window, but ... well, the sun’s not there. What’s the time? What’s going on? Here’s the picture that Jesus Himself paints of His return. Matthew 24:29-31: Immediately after the suffering of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light. The stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken. Then, the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And He will send out His angels with a loud trumpet-call, and they will gather His elect from the four winds – from one end of heaven to the other. Wow! So is that good news to you, or bad news? Is that something you’re looking forward to, or not? And what about this? Going on in that same chapter, Matthew 24:36-44: But about that day and the hour, no one knows. Neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the...

Released on 20 Mar 2022