Hey, this is John Ortberg and I want to ask you today, how full is your hope tank? What do you do to keep hope alive? What are you hoping for? What is your hope rooted in? We come to the end today of series of learnings from loose needs, great memoir, my God and I, where he is trying to figure out what does he really believe? Not just what, what theological notions does he hold to? But what’s the faith that he lives by. And in the end, he says it all boils down to gratitude. And then secondly, to hope he writes gratitude is the pleasure of hope come true. Hope is the pain of gratitude. Postponed gratitude comes easy on its own steam. Whenever we know somebody has given us a real gift, hope comes harder. Sometimes, sometimes with our backs to the wall Laden, with doubts that what we hope for will ever come gratitude always feels good.
Close to joy. As we can get in this world, hope can feel unbearable when we passionately long for what we do not have, and that it is taking too long to come. We are restless as a farmer waiting for rain after in August, without a drop hoping gratitude or what it all comes down to in area is connected to each other as the past and the future. We’re tempted to view the past with regret. We’re tempted to look at the future with anxiety and fear, and then comes to despair, but we cannot loop with this bear. We cannot bear despair, no matter how sophisticated it may sound. We are made to look at the past with gratitude. Thank you God, for so many gifts that you give to me every moment when I don’t see him and to look at the future with hope, the anticipation of good and the Bible uses two wonderful adjectives to talk about hope.
It talks about how we have not just hope, not just generic hope, but what Peter calls the living hope. Peter says in his great mercy, our God has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of the Lord. Jesus Christ. His hope is not, not a fantasy. It’s not a a wish. It, it doesn’t lack roots. He says it it’s an inheritance for us that cannot fade perish or spoil. It is not just a hope. It is alive because it is a person and that person is alive. That person has been resurrected. And then Paul is writing the Titu and it gives another great adjective to describe the particular kind of hope that those of us who follow Jesus have its own legacy. Paul says to Titus, we wait and he likes to wait. We wait, not just for the hope, for the blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and savior the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself to redeem us from wickedness to be a people set aside for himself who are eager to do good.
Now, when he uses that little adjective blessed, see, he’s tying the hope that we look for at the end to the creation that was there at the beginning, when God made things and saw that they were good and said, now I bless you. You fish. And I bless you. You trees. And I bless you. You creeping things and I bless you. You human beings. And what we wait for is that blessing to be realized. So it is not just any old hope. It is not devised by human beings. It is the blessed hope. That’s what we wait for. How do we hope? What does it look like? Lou says hope is a universal human experience. And whether we hope as believers or unbelievers, I love hall. Lou so often tries to look while he holds onto devotion to Jesus at what is common for all of us as human beings, rather than, uh, so often just, uh, creating a forced artificial separation hopes.
A universal experience always comes as a blend of three ingredients. The first is dream. We can hope only if we have eyes to see even through a glass darkly, what it would be for us. If we got what we hope for. And the second ingredient is desire, we can hope only for what we want. Can’t hope for something just cuz you think you’re supposed to, you gotta really genuinely want it. And the third ingredient is faith. We keep on hoping only so long as we believe that our dream can or will come true. And our hearts desire for it will be satisfying. And then he talks about these three elements. First, the dream I dream of a world where no father will ever abuse his child. No child will ever abuse his father. I dream of a world in which no mother will ever watch her children go to bed hungry where no family is pour torn apart by mistrust or brutality, no woman will ever be assaulted or insulted by a man, a world where no father or mother will die of aids and leave their children as orphans where no aging person is sucked into the nowhere of Alzheimer’s disease, where no person ever dies alone where no tribe or race will ever make war on their brothers and sisters think about what’s going on right now in Afghanistan.
As I say these words, I have a dream. Alright. Who says, I don’t know about you. What do you dream? I know for me, when I was younger for better or worse, a lot of my dreams were about what I would do, what I might accomplish, what my life, my ministry would look like. What can a family I would build? What kind of legacy I would pass on to my children and is, is often the case for people as they get older. Uh, I, I have had to come to grips with the realization that those dreams will not be, and I have to let those go. And I have to find another one because we have to have a dream, but it will not really so much be about what I will do with my life. It has to be something way bigger than that.
Something that I cannot do, but in which I can invest myself, what are you dreaming for? And what do you do when you realize that your dreams will not, will never come true? Lou says I have the dreams, right? And I have the desire to go with it. I recall Jacque Lewis saying if your guts don’t ache for what you say you’ll hope for, you’re not really hoping for it at all. Immediates test. When I hope that God will come and fix the world, my guts ache like the guts of an old man with gallstones dream. Yep. I got it. Desire in spades, but faith, not so sure about faith. Sometimes I hang on to faith by my fingernails.
I just got back from a trip. I will remember for the rest of my life canoeing through the, um, Missouri river, the white cliffs Lewis and Clark trail with my friends from college. And we read together again through on donut courage. One of the amazing moments, August 12th, 1805 Maryweather Lewis climbs up to the peak. Having reached the headwaters of the Missouri to get to the other side and is expecting a half days port he’s expecting to see the Columbia river on its way to the Pacific ESE, almost home. When he set out, as far as they knew, the Allegheny were the highest mountains in America and much to his surprise when he gets to the peak, beyond the headwaters of the Missouri river, he sees for the first time as an American that any American ever did, the Bitterroot, snow covered mountains and Idaho and the Northwest empire. And he realizes the hardest part is yet to come. And then in the amazing words of Ambrose’s, he has to let go of the geography of hope and accept the geography of reality. How do you do that? What do you do with the geography of reality is not the geography of hope.
This is what Lou writes. One thing is for sure, if God does not come to fix his world, nobody else can do it for him to be blunt about it. His is the only game in town. I believe this to be true. Lou says I put all my eggs in God’s basket. For one reason, Jesus died and came back to life again. Then he became the life giving spirit to give us be it in DTS. A sampling of the good world we are waiting for. This is where the trolley stops. If it could be proved beyond doubt that Jesus did not come alive after he was murdered, we have lost our one and only reason for hoping that there can be a good future for the world. Without Jesus. We are stuck with two options, utopian, illusion, or deadly despair. I scorn illusioned I dread despair. So I put all my money on Jesus. Have you done that?
When I was young, I hoped with all my heart Christ would never come. He would stay up in heaven where he belonged to leave me alone every Sunday morning, as my family shuffled down to our pew in the brilliant church, I was scared half to death by a biblical prayer, taken from the book of revelation, painted large on the front wall. Marinna even. So come quickly, Lord Jesus. I counted it each Lord’s day with a prayer of my own. Oh Jesus. Please take your time. Now when I’m lying in bed awake at night, I find myself humming an impatient gospel song that chilled me to the bone every time the congregation sang it always as if we were standing at the station waiting for a tardy train that is carrying our soldier boy back from the wars. Oh Lord Jesus. How long, how long are we shout the glad song Christ return.
Hallelujah, man, this is where I find myself now on the journey that God and I have been on at the station called hope. The one that comes right after gratitude and somewhere not far from journeys in it has been God and I the whole, not so much because he has always been a pleasant comp company. Not because I could always feel his presence when I got up in the morning or when I was afraid to sleep at night, it was because he did not trust me to travel alone. Personally. I liked the last miles of the journey better than the first, but since I could not have the ending without first having the beginning, I thank God for getting me going and bringing me home and sticking with me all the way. And then a little Koda, cuz it was just a week after this, that Lou died on December 19th, 2002. My dad Louis Mead met the train at the station called hope and arrived at his journeys end. He had completed his walk with God on this earth and we all had that walk and we all made to live gratitude and hope. I wanna keep hope alive. I wanna live and the geography of reality and I wanna keep hope alive. So I’m putting all my money on Jesus,
Doubling down on the put all hope alive world.