It was 3:00 am. I woke up with these words repeating in my head:
“If you’re looking for renewed hope, you will find it. If you’re looking to go deeper to know, you will find that too.”
I was compelled to write it down, so I did, then went back to bed. It was a Sunday, so off to church I went. The sermon focused on the disciples at Pentecost in Acts 1. His three points were about a new power, a new mission, and a new HOPE!! In that moment I remembered my 3:00 am notetaking! The power of the Holy Spirit was being poured out on the disciples to fulfill the commission Jesus had given them. The story of Jesus was to continue, but in a new way. The words “new hope” stood out to me for obvious reasons. The sermon concluded with these two scriptures:
…we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, (disappoint us) because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Romans 5:3-5
For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trump call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After this, we who are still alive and left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so, we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words. 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18
Covid was not going away and people were losing hope. Fear was, and continues to, pour out into this world. Fear is not from God and fosters hopelessness. But with God, we can face the real thing we all fear most: death. The real elephant in the room is death, and death is painfully real, as so many have tragically experienced. It feels as though a new level of fear has been unleashed and many have lost so much. We grieve with you in your loss. But could our greatest loss be diminishing hope and hopelessness?
God’s inoculation to fear is hope, not wishful thinking. We can know real hope when we seek to know God Himself. He has solved the problem of death by sending Jesus, who died in our place on a cross. God has declared all who trust in him, “not guilty!” God suffered like many of you with own Son’s death. But Jesus did something new; he broke through the grave and rose, alive. He is still alive! This is our hope and Covid cannot mask that. This truth overcomes the fear this pandemic has brought upon our world. I realized as the day progressed that God was speaking the word “hope.” We who know this hope can help people face the elephant in the room. I read somewhere that “hopelessness sets the stage for the moving of God’s hand, and the impossible sets the stage for a miracle.”
This quarter, through YadaFactor newsletters, we will be sharing messages of hope that renews. Let’s share this hope intentionally and sacrificially. People are hurting, and we have the same power, mission and hope that was poured into the world so long ago.
As the day ended, my rendezvous with hope in the middle of the night made a little more sense:
“If you’re looking for renewed hope, you will find it. If you’re looking to go deeper to know, you will find that too.”
