Hope: More than a Story

Series: Hope for the Holidays

 “Hope: More Than A Story”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sunday, Dec 16, 2018

Text: // Series: Hope for the Holidays

 

Good morning.  Welcome here, friends.  My name is Brad Sumner, I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge and it is our privilege and pleasure to have you here with us this Advent season.

 

I was looking through some old photos this past month and I got to thinking about things that I put on my Christmas wish list as a kid.  Do you remember anything you really, really wanted as a kid for Christmas?  In the movie The Christmas Story do you remember what Ralphie wanted? An “official red Ryder two hundred shot range model air rife! with a compass in the stock and this thing which tells time.” He wanted a carbine action red rider bb gun.  Can you remember anything you had on your Christmas wish list as a kid? I can remember one year when I was maybe 10 years old really, really wanting a Hulk Hogan action figure.  I may seem now like a rational adult but for a period of time as a kid, I loved wrestling.  The WWF – the World Wrestling Federation. WrestleMania.  Prime Time Wrestling.  Saturday Night’s Main Event.  I was hooked.  And Hulk Hogan was the undisputed champion.  Well, except for that time in 1987 when Randy “Macho Man” Savage defeated Hogan in King of the Ring and was the Intercontinental Heavy Weight Champion.  “ooooohhh Yeah!” 

 

But I can remember where I was when I heard a commentator on the match with one of those long silver, late 80s microphones say that Randy Savage was perhaps the greatest wrestler of all-time because he brought “"a higher level of credibility to the title through his amazing in-ring performances”.  Performances?!  Wait a minute.  My 10 year old world came crashing down around me.  You mean to tell me that the elbow dropping and the head locking and the chair smashing and the hair grabbing was all an act?  My mind was replaying things I had seen and slowly I began to realize what some of you are still coming to grips with.  That my heroes were actors in a scripted drama, not athletes in a competition.  I didn’t watch WrestleMania after that and I took Hulk off my Christmas list.  I went away a little wiser about the world that Christmas and I’ve never willing watched another wrestling match since.

 

Our theme this Christmas season at Jericho Ridge is HOPE for the Holidays.  And one of the things that we are talking about each week that we gather and look into God’s Word is how hope, our sense of expectancy and our sense of what is real shapes us as human beings. One of the things we need to ask ourselves is “is this stuff the kids sang about real?”

I mean, some of it sounds a bit far-fetched.  A virgin girl conceiving and giving birth to the Divine. Angelic visitation and visions. A celestial event that guides eastern mystics on a journey of thousands of miles to Bethlehem. Choirs of angels breaking into the night sky over Palestine…Is this stuff real or is it some kind of literary choreography that is designed to give us hope because it’s just a giant metaphor for light breaking into darkness.  It’s a legitimate question to pause and ask “Is the Story of Christmas just a Story?”  Is it like a WWF event where, upon closer inspection, one might say that didn’t actually happen but wow was it great entertainment!  Let’s explore that option for a few moments this morning. 

 

If you have you Bibles or your phones, you can open them up and head to the New Testament, the gospel of Luke.  Chapter 1.  Luke 2 contains perhaps the most well-known account of the birth of Jesus but Luke 1 is like of like reading the preface or the introduction where we learn a bit more about the human author who wrote this down.  Look at Luke 1:1   

“Many people have set out to write accounts about the events that have been fulfilled among us. They used the eyewitness reports circulating among us from the early disciples. Having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I also have decided to write an accurate account for you… so you can be certain of the truth of everything you were taught.” (Luke 1:1-4)   

 

We know from historical scholarship that Luke was a medical doctor in the first century.  So he isn’t a poet or a story teller.  He isn’t an actor or director wanting to make a buck.  He is a man of science. As a medical professional, he is trained in the process of collecting the facts and following them to the logical conclusions that they lead him to.       

 

Many people throughout history have done just that with Jesus.  In the last century, a highly regarded scholar and professor at Oxford and Cambridge named Clive Stapleton Lewis began his own spiritual journey.  At age seventeen, Lewis wrote to a longtime friend "I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best."

 

But he could not shake the suspicion that the supernatural was really real. And so he went on a journey of investigation that was both intellectual and experiential.  He dabbled in atheism, the occult, history, literature and religion and in the middle of his life he wrote back to that same friend:

I’ve concluded that "Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things namely, the actual incarnation, crucifixion & resurrection

CS Lewis went on as a scholar and author to distinguish between something that was a fictional story and what he called true Myth

Stories: fairytales, make-believe, playacting (Wrestlemania; Aesop’s fables; good drama or literature - scripted). But

True Myth: Transcendent historical events

 After chasing down all roads, Lewis became convinced that what is recorded in the Christmas story was more than a story. Listen to what he says when he was asked “isn’t the Bible just a myth, good literature:

“The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference: that it really happened.”     – C. S. Lewis
                                 

We can watch cute kids and turn the Christmas story into nothing more than a nostalgic myth: a well written morality tale to give us hope when we are feeling hopeless.  But that would be to do to the Christmas story what it is not prepared to allow. Christmas is, in Lewis’ words, God expressing himself in real things.  It may have some of the qualities of a story, but with one tremendous difference: it actually happened! 

 

Sometimes it can be helpful if we work to place ourselves into the shoes of the participants in that first Christmas.  Let’s watch this lyric video from a song by Nicole Nordeman. The song is entitled “REAL” [VIDEO – 4:28] 

 

We’ve made the distinction between stories and what Lewis calls true myths.  I think we also need to distinguish in our conversation between wishing and hoping

 

When it comes to Christmas, it’s easy to confuse wishing and hoping.  Kids, you may be wishing that a particular present is going to appear under the tree.  And you may even use the language of hope to describe that desire: “Oh, I hope that I get a particular Lego set or an Hulk Hogan doll or a remote control car” or whatever it may be.  But that’s not quite hope in the way the Bible describes it.  The Bible uses a very specific nautical or boating image to describe the experience of Hope.  Hebrews 6:18-19 “God has given… His promise. Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong & trustworthy anchor for our souls.”

 

Hope is to our lives like a good anchor to a boat. It helps us stay afloat. When we need refuge from the storms of life, when you get weighed down by guilt from your past, when you get anxious about challenges you face in the present or if you are uncertain about the future, Christian hope is very different than wishful thinking.  If I’m    

Wishing: Something may or may not happen

Hoping: Active confidence in future realities. 

We can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. Because the hope that God provides us a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls. 

 

Author Eugene Peterson in his book “Living the Message: Daily Help for Living the God-Centred Life” puts it this way:

“Wishing grows out of our egos; hope grows out of our faith. Hope is oriented toward what God is doing; wishing is oriented toward what we are doing...Wishing is our will projected into the future, and hope is God's will coming out of the future. Picture it in your mind: wishing is a line that comes out of me, with an arrow pointing into the future. Hoping is a line that comes out of God from the future, with an arrow pointing toward me."

 

This, friends, is the message of Christmas – a message of hope.  A message that declares that the baby born some 2,000 years ago ushered in hope in a way that only God can.  That hope came has come into the life of countless millions of people down throughout recorded history. 

 

Let me ask you this morning: What is the source of your HOPE?  In my own family journey, my parents went through their lives believing in a kind of cosmic accounting.  That God, if God existed, was up in heaven keeping track of good behaviour.  God was “making a list, checking it twice, gonna find out what was naughty or nice.”  And that if you were a good enough person, obviously you would make the “nice” list and you were good to go.  But my parents began to be haunted by the question “how good is good enough?” What confidence do I have that I’m good enough? Or more pointedly, what if being a good, decent moral person isn’t the point? See, I can try to be a decent moral person on my own without God.  But then I’m left wishing and hoping that my good deeds are enough to get me into heaven. And that doesn’t feel substantive enough to place my hope in.   

 

The writer of another book in the Bible, Ephesians, was a man by the name of Paul.  He grew up actively hostile to faith.  In fact, he persecuted anyone who called themselves a Christian.  He was placing his hope in being super religious. Zealous for what he thought God wanted him to do.   But he writes about his experiences somewhat auto-biographically in Ephesians and he says “Once you were far away from God…You lived in this world without God and without hope.”

 

Being a good person or being religious and HOPING that is enough is simply not good enough.  There’s got to be more to the story than that.  That strategy is like groping around in the darkness and hoping against hope that you’ll find what you are looking for.

 

Jesus Himself gave an unambiguous statement about why He was born into human history.   

Jesus came into the world to offer HOPE

I have come as a light to shine in this dark world, so that all who put their trust in me will no longer remain in the dark.”(John 12:46)

    

This is incredibly good news! You don’t have to fumble around wishing that you had some kind of assurance that God loves you.  Hope is not something that you and I have to muster up or create.  Hope “is a line that comes out of God from the future, with an arrow pointing toward you & me"

 

In John 10, someone asked Jesus a pointed question: “you claim to be the son of God. If that’s true, why did you come into the world?”  Jesus replied with a story about sheep (us) and a good, kind, loving Shepherd (God). [Painting]  He talked about how sheep love to try to find their own pathways but often, they simply get lost or stumble through the darkness. Then Jesus said “I have come for a very specific purpose:” My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd sacrifices his life for the sheep.”(John 12:46)

 

Christmas is about God coming into the world to open up the way for you and I to have a rich and satisfying life.  And God did it in the most surprising and unexpected way: sacrificial love.  Jesus was born to show us a better way to be human, and He willingly gave up His life so that you and I could find our way home to God.  So that we could have hope, not only for the future, but also for the present life. 

 

The response that this calls for is simple but also very profound because it challenges our pride and self-sufficiency.  You and I are invited to stop striving and grasping and wishing that maybe we could be good enough to be part of God’s family.  We are invited to respond by acknowledging that Christmas is more than a story.  Because friends, it actually happened.  The invitation that God gives to us is not to try harder, but to simply    

BELIEVE & RECEIVE

“But to all who believed Him and accepted him, He gave the right to become children of God.”  (John 1:12)

Hope means that we don’t go through life as unloved orphans. God’s deepest desire is that you become part of God’s family & experience hope:

Ephesians 1:18 says it this way “I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those He called—His holy people who are his rich & glorious inheritance.”   

 

Maybe you are listening and God is calling you.  You sense a stirring inside of you. Something is ringing true for you today in a fresh and compelling way.  Don’t leave without saying YES to Jesus.  In a few minutes, I’m going to lead us in a prayer of faith where you can express that to God. If you want to pray along with me, I would invite you to do so. Then tell me or the person you came with today about the new hope you have in Christ.    

 

Maybe you are here this morning and this is all new for you.  You are not ready to make a decision like that.  You need more information or you have objections or questions. Know that at Jericho, we welcome that conversation.  We have some booklets at the Welcome Centre for you. They are called “Why Christmas?” and it walks through these questions in more detail.  We would love for you to take one. If you need a Bible, please take one off the resource shelves in the foyer.  I would love to follow up with you have a coffee together you can ask any question: nothing is off limits!  Our deepest desire is that you could come to know God in a personal way and experience God’s love through us as a church. 

 

As Megan and the team come to lead us in three songs of response, I want to challenge those who call Jericho home: early this week, 22,000 of the postcards you see on your chairs will be hitting mailboxes all over Willoughby and Clayton.  We are putting the word out and we invite you to help in that.  Ask your neighbour “did you get your invite to Christmas Eve?”  Better yet, take one home and walk it over yourself and Invite others to COME & SEE

Take a postcard & invite someone to join you at Christmas Eve

 

This may just be the year when you come and see that the story of Christmas is so much more than a story.  Because it actually happened.

Would you bow your head with me and I’m going to pray.   

 

Benediction: Romans 15  “Such things were written in the Scriptures long ago to teach us. And the Scriptures give us hope and encouragement as we wait patiently for God’s promises to be fulfilled.”  “I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy & peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Is Christmas just a feel-good narrative to give us some hope in a dark world? Or is it something deeper; something more than a story?

Speaker: Brad Sumner

December 16, 2018

Brad Sumner

Lead Pastor

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