Real Hope…came, here, coming

Hope_Is_On_The_Way

In the Christian calendar, today is the first Sunday of the season of advent, a four week period celebrating the coming (advent means coming) of Jesus to earth. During the first week of this holy season, we are encouraged to focus on hope. That’s a tricky task given the common use of the word hope in American culture. We usually use the word to refer to something that is highly unlikely to occur like “I hope I win the lottery” or “I hope I make a hole-in-one.” However, the biblical concept of hope is much different. That hope is a confident expectation of something not yet realized. In other words, in the Bible, hope refers to something that is guaranteed to happen. For thousands of years, the Jewish people had this kind of hope that a messiah was coming based on the many biblical prophecies predicting his coming. Tragically, when Jesus the Messiah came, fulfilling literally hundreds of Old Testament prophecies, most of those Jewish people who had been hoping for God to intervene in the world, did not accept the way God intervened. Thus, they missed the coming, or advent, of the very thing for which they had hoped.

What about us today? We believe Messiah came about two thousand years ago. And for those who have put their faith and trust in Jesus as their savior, we believe that we are already saved. So, for what do we now hope? I would suggest several ways that advent hope is very relevant to us today. First, though our salvation is assured when we put our trust in Christ, it is not yet fully realized. The Bible in several places talks of the future tense of our salvation – “we will be saved.” So, in this season, we are reminded that we have a confident expectation that we will be ultimately saved and united with God forever in heaven. Hallelujah! Second, in remembering that Jesus came to earth, we also remember that He died, rose again, and returned to heaven. But He did not leave us alone. He sent Holy Spirit to be with us always. Advent and Christmas do not give us the confident expectation that life will be easy, comfortable, or as we would want it. They do remind us though that God not only came to earth long ago, but that He is with us right now! Whatever life is going to bring our way in this season or the next, we can know that God is with us. Again, hallelujah! Finally, the focus on hope in this first week of advent reminds us that we also have the confident expectation that the same Jesus who came on that first Christmas will one day come again. Hallelujah indeed! This hope of Jesus’ second coming should encourage us to share the gospel with urgency because we realize that those who do not trust in Jesus can never be right with God and will be eternally separated from Him.

So, the first week of advent’s emphasis on hope points us personally to our own salvation, binds us together through the Holy Spirit, and points us outward as missionaries to the lost who desperately need the Hope that came on that first Christmas. I pray that our first week of advent will be filled with true biblical hope as we prepare to celebrate His coming.

GBU – Psalm 33:22

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