Table Rock Fellowship Worship service

well good morning everybody thank you for braving the apocalypse to be here i appreciate that it is it's been a weird week right uh if you don't know me my name is kellen i'm the youth and young adults pastor here normally i'm hanging out with kids but i get the privilege every so often to come and share with you guys this morning so i'm going to go ahead and do that i'm going to grab this so because i get the opportunity to share every now and again i get a lot of time to think about what i want to share when i'm in here so i've been having lots of conversations with people both in and outside of the church and over the past i don't know year or so i feel like throughout all my conversations there was a common emotion that kept coming up in these conversations i was having and it took me a little while to pinpoint what it was but i think ultimately it stood out to me and the the chief emotion i feel like a lot of people have been expressing has been anger i don't know if you've gotten that at all um i was realizing that this is something that's affected me as well that i was getting really short-tempered with things that didn't really seem to matter or frustrated with people that i really love and i care about and so the pastors meet every tuesday and it'd come up in a pastor's meeting and i found out that it wasn't just me that was experiencing that it was all the other pastors and it wasn't just them personally it was the people that we ministered to and so i was thinking about this and i think to some extent the amount of anger that we're feeling makes sense there's a lot to be angry about i think the world's kind of been a tough place it's tough in the best of times and it hasn't been the best of times there are problems that people are looking at and whether or not it comes from washington d.c or salem whether or not it's the ever-changing information that comes about the pandemic anger over riots anger over masks anger over anger there seems like there's a lot of things that's just driving people to be frustrated all the time the problem is that i didn't necessarily find the anger itself surprising what i did find a little surprising is that the church wasn't immune to it the law of conversations i was having with my brothers and sisters they were expressing the same sort of thing and here's the problem is that uh for a world with no truth or no real faith in anything aside from the power of man that anger seems to fit there's a lot of things going wrong and it looks like it's unlikely to change for the better and so people are ticked i i fully understand that but i've had more tense conversations with members of the church in the past 18 months that i think all my years of ministry combined i had conversations with somebody one of my best friends i've known him for 30 years he and i had a very tense conversation about the state of affairs in the world and we didn't talk for months i thought what a stupid thing that was how dumb that somebody i love i've grown up with we have a conversation and all of a sudden it causes a rift in our relationship and so i was thinking about all this and that i think the problem is the church should be a refuge it should be a calm place and a culture obsessed with figuring out who to be angry with and who to cancel next and so i was thinking about what drives some of that anger and i think there's a lot of different reasons if i was to go around and ask everybody you all have different reasons or you'd pinpoint different things but i think a lot of it stems from a common cause a lot of this anger comes from when we lose hope when we lose hope that things are going to get better or when we lose hope because things aren't going according to plan or when we're frustrated that it's all going awry and we're the only intelligent people in a country full of idiots the irony is everyone thinks they're the smart ones here's the thing though is that the christian faith is founded on a relatively simple premise that god so loved the world that he sent his one and only son to die for us that's the simple truth of the faith that we believe and in that self-sacrificial act we have communion with god and in him lies our source of hope so today i'm not going to talk about anger but rather i'm going to talk about hope because i think it's one of the most powerful things that we could possibly focus on for the passage i'm going to be reading today i'm going to be reading from hebrew so if you have your bibles and you'd like to read along with me it's going to come from hebrews chapter 6. i'm going to start in verse 13 and work my way through verse 20. i'm reading from the esv and this is what it says for when god made a promise to abraham since he had no one greater by whom to swear he swore by himself saying surely i will bless you and multiply you and thus abraham having patiently waited obtained the promise for people swear by something greater than themselves and in all their disputes an oath is final for confirmation so when god desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose he guaranteed it with an oath so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for god to lie we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us we have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf having become a high priest forever after the order of malchezidek i'm going to open this up in a word of prayer god i just thank you for this day i thank you that we just have a moment of our busy lives in the midst of a crazy time to come and worship you in song and in scripture uh god let it not be my words but yours and let let our hearts be receptive to the truth that you would have for us in your word give this to you in your name amen so one of the things that's always really good if you're going to look at a biblical passage it's always really important to try to understand the context you have to understand who it's being written to why it's being written what the purpose is and so i want to give a little bit of background on this passage in hebrews before we dive into some of the other points there's a lot of things that are happening here first off this passage is called the certainty of god's promise and the author of hebrews is giving his readers a reason for why we can place our trust in god and more importantly in the supremacy of jesus christ in fact the whole book of hebrews was really written to prove christ's supremacy his supremacy over angels and prophets uh and then ultimately proving him as the mouthpiece of god so that's the intent of the book of hebrews and in this little passage we've got a snapshot of the author of hebrews we're not entirely sure who it is and he's basically pitching this idea of the supremacy of christ and he's using the background of abraham so most of his readers would have been jewish and very familiar with the books of the torah so abraham was the one who god chose to start building a nation and that promise was that god would make his descendants into a mighty nation so that's the promise that he's referring to the name mao kisi deck pops up at the end and it's only found in a few places in the bible most notably it appears in genesis chapter 14. and in this you've got this sort of odd snapshot of this character this very mysterious character sort of entering into the scene uh he was a king priest who ruled over a land known as salem now believed to be early jerusalem he was a priest of el elyon which in hebrew is translated to god most high and when abraham encountered this priest he gave him a tenth of everything that he had he received a blessing and this solidified this pre-spell kizi deck as a man after god now christ would later on be called a priest in the order of melchizedek don't worry this is not a history lesson we're not going to talk much more about this but again it's important to understand the context if you want to read more about this just continue on in hebrews in chapter 7 and you'll find more information it also says that there are two unchangeable things about god's character and that is referring to the promise he made and the oath he made concerning himself so god's character and then his promise two different things by which we could absolutely rely on him and these are important notes and we're going to come back to these in just a minute but what i want to do is i want to look at the promise of hope that we have in christ as presented by this passage because in my experience hope is one of the most powerful elements of christianity and yet i think it's one that is often misunderstood i think we slap it on tacky bumper stickers without fully understanding the power that hope has to completely alter the landscape of the world so today my goal is to talk about hope i'm going to first define what it is i want to talk about why we often lose it and then i want to talk about the power that hope can have not just in our life but in the world around us so first thing i want to do is i want to define hope because that's important if we're going to use a word we should know what that word means and why we're talking about it usually if you're to ask the common person how would you define hope i think that most often it's a fond wish it's something that we would like to happen but we don't have a lot of certainty as to whether or not it will happen so you might say man i hope tomorrow is less smoky that would be great right i i hope i get that promotion i hope the dodgers win that's me personally but there are a lot of things that we hope for but we have no guarantee that those things are going to happen and so oftentimes we find ourselves using this word as a fervent desire but no certainty and because of that we take those who hope to be sort of vapid dreamers uh who waste their time on fantasies but when you take the contemporary definition of hope and you apply it to the christian faith it robs hope of any power and by proxy it makes the christian faith seem foolish and frivolous which it is not the truth is that as christians if we're using hope in that way we would be foolish because any time you place your hope in something that has no guarantee you are bound to be disappointed i think that happens a lot when we hope for something and it doesn't come to fruition it doesn't happen we find ourselves frustrated with the outcome of things and so if we have this idea in our head that hope this big word that's behind us all the time if we have this idea that hope is something that oh that'd be great if things work out that way well that makes us seem kind of silly because we talk about hope all the time we place our hope in christ see hope is not supposed to be a fleeting witch there's a fantastic quote about hope it says this hope is not blind optimism it is not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path it is not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight hope is that thing inside of us that insists despite all evidence to the contrary that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us but by us by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is who have the courage to remake the world as it should be i think that's a fantastic definition of hope because it changes hope from being this sort of passive thing that we experience with lethargy to this thing that motivates us compels us to look at the broken fallen world around us and think i can do something about that i can be a part of the solution i can help to change to remake things the way they ought to be so i want to look back at this passage in hebrews because it uses hope three different times and each time it helps us kind of dial in a little bit what that word actually means so the first thing he says is we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us i love that line uh hold fast i don't know if you're familiar with it it's often used as a maritime term in fact sailors would often get hold fast tattooed on their knuckles and that meant when when this ship was going through a stormy sea or they were encountering some dangerous waters or territories they would yell out hold fast and it was find anything you can and grip onto it for your dear life so the fact that the author of hebrews is equating hope to this idea that we need to hold fast to something is both daunting and reassuring because it means what he's effectively promising is that you're going to encounter things that's going to make you look around for something to hold on to that you're going to find yourselves in times of uncertainty and you're going to need to wrap your arms around something and just hold fast as tight as you possibly can i don't know if you guys have ever been on a ship or in a boat when the seas have gotten really rocky i worked on a cruise ship in alaska and it for the most part it was very calm but there was one point where we're in a bay and we're watching this huge glacier and about a half a mile chunk of this glacier calves and it falls in and the captain just comes on and says everyone hold on to something and when the captain says that you know it's going to get a little rocky and so i'm on there and this boat's just doing this and i'm watching people slide across the lobby i'm trying to get them in there and that was a very small scale of like what it means to be on the open sea it's still terrifying for me but it was on a very small scale so when he says hold fast onto something it's scary because it means that that's going to happen but the good thing is he says god is going to give you a lifeline god is going to actually supply the thing that you can hang on to no matter how bad things get that hope will be made manifest and secure the next thing hebrews says we have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul again just a beautiful imagery i love that idea see anchors were again a common uh metaphor for stability so if you're out on a ship and you couldn't navigate either because it was stormy seas or cloudy skies or you couldn't see the stars they would drop anchor and they'd wait and they'd wait because at least they could have a fixed position or if they were going to go to shore they'd drop anchor and they'd send the boats to shore so the idea of an anchor was something that would hold you firm despite whatever else is happening that you wouldn't stray you wouldn't wander from where you were that it gave you some certainty right where you were at an anchor meant there was something tethering us in a sea of uncertainty and that's what he says this hope is this hope from god is something that holds us firm regardless of what else is happening then he goes on a third time to use the word hope and here is where he really defines what he means he says a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf this is the core concept of what he's been driving at he's been setting this up setting this up and then finally he sinks it he says our hope is jesus christ he says that he enters into the curtain and if you're not familiar with the concept of the curtain the curtain was something that was in the temple in jerusalem and behind the curtain was the most holy of holy places behind the curtain set the ark of the covenant and the mercy seat it was somewhere that was so incredibly holy that they would do a raffle it was a lottery and a priest would go back there once a year and they'd actually tie a rope around whatever priest went back there in case the presence of god showed up and they died they could just drag him back out so that curtain by the way is the same curtain that christ in the moment that he died and said father into your hands i give up my spirit was torn in two that was a divine act that symbolized that our access to god was now free that we no longer had to be selected it was no longer this dangerous thing rather the holy spirit was now made accessible to all of us so when that curtain was torn it was opened and now you and i can commune with guide in this incredible fashion um so that's what he's saying about jesus that jesus entered into that curtain to prep things that he was getting ready to do that and that when that curtain was torn when it dropped that there's nothing that could separate us from god's presence so this is what the foundation of hope is this is again what he's been driving he's been trying to get us to realize he's been sort of working his way around this concept of hope and here's where he lands on it that hope is not just a verb hope is not just a noun hope is a person hope is made manifest in who jesus christ actually legitimately is and it transforms it from being this sort of idol wish to something hope has a face it was jesus and it's an absolute it's something that we can rely on because jesus christ lived and he died and he made a promise and he made good on that promise you and i are called to trust in hope and in jesus christ the same way that we trust in gravity right you guys all came in here and you all just sat down in your seats trusting that gravity would lead you there nobody thought like oh boy i hope it doesn't turn off and i go bouncing around the ceiling because that would be a weird thought because i know that because i had that thought but it's something to be confident it's something that you just rely on every single day that you just you trust and hope you trust in jesus christ that's why at the start i was saying that god's people are called to be different we're called to be set apart we're not called to be angry and frustrated the way the rest of the world is because we have hope and our hope has a name it's that unshakeable hope that we're called to put in christ that should make us rocks in an uncertain time because christ has never failed us and it says in hebrews that christ went behind the curtain as a forerunner not for his own gain not for his own glory not for him to prove something but he did it on our behalf that god so loved the world that he did that for us that's that's where we're called to place our absolute hope because god's love for us was made manifest in his son that god saw the broken condition of the world and wasn't content to sit idly by and let that go instead he did something about it and he stepped into the world and his son changed everything so i feel like in some ways i could just end the sermon there right like yeah just go ahead go home take that phone call if you need to just we're good right just just hope don't be angry don't be frustrated and like have a fantastic sunday the reality is that it's a lot harder than that the reality is that simple truths are rarely enough on their own so i won't talk about hopelessness it's not the fun part of things but i think that's where we tend to find ourselves a lot i think there can be a variety of reasons why we wrestle with despair or hopelessness we could we could stand here and we could comb through each of your individual traumas and hardships and we could come up with as many reasons for hopelessness as there are people present today but for simplicity's sake i think that we can distill them down into sort of three bigger truths that'll i think a lot of things fall under the umbrella of these three things so the first reason i think that we find ourselves in a hopeless state of affairs is when our hope becomes deferred or more simply when we don't get what we want right away that's what happens often so one of the reasons i want to use this passage in hebrews i think it there's some there's some wonderful irony here so the first thing that he talks about is that when god made a promise to abraham right if you know the history of what that was the the promise that god made was found in genesis 22 it says this surely i will bless you and i will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore and your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies and in your offspring shall all nations of the earth be blessed because you have obeyed my voice so an angel came down made this promise to abraham who had no children and said your descendants are going to be numerous and abraham was so old that when his wife overheard this promise she laughed because she thought it was ridiculous and it didn't happen right away you know how long it took from the time that that promise was first made to when it came to fruition 25 years 25 years in between when god said to abraham you're going to have a lot of descendants to when he had one legitimate son that that's so crazy to me in fact when when abraham and his wife sarah did have their first son she was 91 years old that's incredible i mean that's insane no wonder he got frustrated in the in the meantime that same son by the way was the same one that god said hey cool you know how i've been promising you the son yeah kill him that's that same son he didn't but that could you imagine that if you've been promised something you waited for 25 years and god's like yep kill him what it's an incredible story so did god make good on his promise yeah absolutely did it take a while yup sure did took a real long while in fact it took so long that during the gap of the promise and its fulfillment abraham had an illegitimate son with his servant and you wanna know the really crazy thing it was his wife's idea can you imagine that and if you can don't gross we're at church okay so that son isaac he became the father of israel god definitely fulfilled his promise this is just an interesting side note because as i'm coming through these things you find these little interesting tidbits but the other son the other illegitimate son ishmael he actually became the father of islam many muslims believe that the promise made to abraham to be fruitful multiply was actually fulfilled by them it kind of makes you wonder where we'd be at if abraham had just been a little more patient that's all i'm going to say about that another example of hope deferred not getting what we want when we want it is the jews response to christ when he came to jerusalem for the last time you have this incredible drama where jesus comes in and the city of jerusalem shows up and they hail him as a king hosanna hosanna here comes our king finally five days later crucify him crucify him five days that's an incredible turnaround that that is that is a phenomenally short attention span they're going from from hailing a new king to crying out for his death in the span of five days and you think what on earth happened in those five days what happened it's simple they had this idea of who jesus was and he disappointed them that's all that's what it took it took them to be disappointed to crying out for his death in less than a week they had this idea that jesus was going to ride in as a warrior king they had read the prophecies and they had misunderstood them they thought that jesus is going to come and he was going to cast out the romans that they were finally going to become a great nation once again a world superpower and instead they got this little jewish dude who just sat there and talked for like days most of the book of john is jesus's last few days in jerusalem and it's just all about his marvelous teaching but he disappointed them their hope became deferred they had hoped for some sort of salvation in their minds which meant being uh being removed from the romans and the reality is they got someone who disappointed them i'll tell you why jesus didn't come in and kick out the romans because he could have we sometimes forget that he could have just come in and like like fried them with his laser eyes and just got rid of all of them but he didn't jesus didn't come in and remove the roman occupation for one very simple reason had he done that he would have become a political savior he would have become a savior that came in and cared about the politics of a single nation when jesus entered in jerusalem he knew that the biggest problem in jerusalem was not the roman occupation it was the sinful condition of man's heart and that's what he came to liberate people from they rejected him they rejected him though because he failed to meet their expectations i think this is actually a very common way that we tend to treat jesus in our own lives see we have these expectations of who jesus is or i think maybe more accurately we have these expectations of what jesus is going to do for us and when he fails to meet our expectations that are not founded in who he is who the bible claims him to be rather who instead we want him to be i think we get short and we get frustrated and we tend to look for other messiahs because we want jesus to be a lot of different things i think sometimes we want him to be a genie a magician we want him to be the person who will give us all the answers for a test we didn't study for but we don't always want to accept him as lord and savior we don't always want to bend our knees and do what he asks us to because often what he asks from us is hard and when jesus disappoints us because we had a bad idea of who he is i think that we find ourselves like the jews rejecting him and wanting to have nothing to do with him when our hope isn't met by our time frames or expectations we easily discard that hope and we instead pursue a cheap imitation i think a lot of us would be right there alongside those jews in jerusalem and we do this in our own hearts so that's reason number one reason number two second reason that we find ourselves losing hope is because we have misplaced that hope so when we misplace the rightful place that christ is supposed to occupy in our lives our lives become imbalanced we do this a lot we hope in a lot of things i think a lot of us place our hope in our possessions our things our homes our collections our cars and yet i mean just look outside we live in a world where fire and rust and moth destroy and when those things get taken away from us we find ourselves in a hopeless state of affairs some people i think grow up and they place all their hope in their jobs and in the money that it will provide but read the news people are losing their jobs on mass it's it's a rough time to be around and when people have been pursuing a career the idea that when they're looking at the stability that their money should afford them and all of a sudden that's taken away i think people lose hope we lose we place our hope sometimes even in our bodies and in our health and that's a hard that is a hard thing to be shaken of i for one have just decided to never die i just want to let you know that i decide i'm going to be healthy and happy and never die and i am woefully inadequately prepared to be disproved so like i get like if i stub my toe i'm like it's the end it's not but i'm very dramatic when it comes to that but here's here's the truth you and i are created to hope that's who we are created to be we are creatures that are designed to hope to believe in something bigger than ourselves and place our hope behind that thing and in the absence of god many of us will fill that with unworthy substitutes one of the biggest places that people tend to place their hope is in other people and that's a hard one we tend to place our hope in our friends and our family the people that we love we think they won't disappoint us a lot of people i know place their hope in a romantic relationship and that leads to so much heartache because here's the thing people are fallible people are always going to disappoint us because we're sinful creatures you know i've done weddings before and i can just see all their hope and in the back of my head i'm like yep you just stuck two sinners in a house and said till death do you part good luck it's hard it's really hard when we look to other people to complete us and we think this person is going to make me whole i don't think we're being that honest with what that looks like see truth is yeah people will let us down i think this misplaced hope has been perfectly exemplified especially by this last year so this is something i hesitated putting in the sermon okay so i'm going to say this because some of you guys are going to mishear me okay you're going to come up to me you're going to start writing down an angry note you're going to start typing out a sharply worded email and you're going to come up to me all blustery say oh you said this thing and refer you back to this moment in the sermon it is 9 59 according to that clock i'm going to say no go back and listen when i told you that what i'm about to say is not a political statement don't mishear me on that it's not a political statement so if you mishear that your fault not mine okay i've gotten that disclaimer out of the way so here it goes too many people in the church both capital c and local right here in medford placed too much of your hope in a candidate over the last election cycle it's just true if you're to go out in the parking lot today my guess is you'd see more political bumper stickers than you would religious ones and i think that drove a phenomenal amount of anger over the last year it made people so frustrated because they had placed their hope in what they thought was going to be the outcome of an election again not a political statement but i want to tell you this i can accurately predict who is going to take the oval office i can do it from this year and i can tell you who's going to take it in four years from now you ready for this a sinner tell me i'm wrong it's always going to be a flawed person irrespective of their political leanings irrespective of their character the policies you're going to enact it's always going to be a flawed person because people are fallible and so many people so many of my friends and families they had a lot of hope and it was hard and it led to some tense conversations and it led to anger inside of the church but the reality is the moment you gave your life to christ you're not citizens of america you're citizens of heaven that's where our citizenship lies and i am not saying that you should be dispassionate or that you shouldn't care about the issues that's not at all what i'm saying by all means be informed but don't let it be so divisive but it was we have the opportunity to do better i think that we can because we should be extending love to people no matter what because ultimately nothing that happened over this past year has surprised god at no point did he wake up and go wait wait what god knew exactly what was going to be happening and guess what his plan is still happening even if it doesn't look like it to some of us god has always been in control god is the only thing that can complete us anytime we place our hope in anything other than god anything you're going to be disappointed you're going to be frustrated you're going to be angry that's just how it works the last main reason that we experience hopelessness is when the problems confronting us seem so great that hope itself cannot overcome it i think that's where we get to at the end first we we look we look to try to control our circumstances when it doesn't happen in our time frame we think okay what can i do what can i control and that leads to frustration then when that doesn't work they think okay this thing didn't work out what's next and we put something else in there and then some of us get to this final stage we think there's no point it's never going to get better it's so hard we lose sight of the awesomeness of christ when confronted with the enormity of our problems and in a year that has been typified by loss losses that we thought were behind us just even a few weeks ago it's little wonder that so many people are looking at the current state of affairs and thinking it's not going to get better and they lose hope i was raised in a christian household i was homeschooled my parents taught me about who god was and at some point in junior high high school i decided i didn't really want to have anything to do with god i just kind of like walked away and i made a lot of bad decisions in that time and i used to have to go to church and youth group as a punishment for all the trouble and the mischief that i got into and i thought i was so clever i i would sit in the front row with my sunglasses on and fall dead asleep and i thought i was getting away with so much now that i'm a youth pastor nope i know exactly who those kids are and if you're a parent of them we should talk uh no so i thought i was getting away with a lot and and i i wasn't and god had this funny plan for my life where uh that same church that i attended i started off as a volunteer leader and i wound up being the interim youth guy for a while i'll never forget because i was there on a sunday i prep my lesson i'm teaching it's a relatively small room about 40 kids and there's this kid and he's sitting there and you know the kid that i'm talking about it's a kid that you just want to love so much he's sitting there and he's just like making faces and doing things and he's distracting me from my lesson i'm getting irritated and i'm not proud of this here's the thought that i had in my head i'm looking at this kid and i thought loser that kid's a loser and then i realized that he's sitting exactly where i used to sit and that shame just settled right on me because in that moment i'd forgotten about the transformative power of hope and what it can do and i knew at that moment that if adult me was looking at high school me i would have thought loser but god had a plan and god did something else and maybe that's you maybe right now when i said that person someone came to mind or maybe it's you and you think loser a great truth of being a christian is that we often see our personal sin as an insurmountable obstacle for christ to overcome but this is what jesus says in response to that in john 16 33 he says this i have said these things to you that in me you may have peace in the world you will have tribulation but take heart i have overcome the world that is one of the best bible verses if you take away nothing else from the sunday take that away that there is no thing that is so great that god's love his grace his mercy cannot overcome it cannot redeem it nothing in this world is a challenge to the person who created the world from nothing he created everything in the world and sometimes we think my problems are just too big really read through the bibles look look what god has overcome it's incredible talk to people here in this church look at what god has overcome look at what his grace and love has redeemed we can't lose sight of the fact that jesus defeated the grave in him all things are possible so we mustn't lose that hope we mustn't lose sight of the fact that god has conquered the world our problems don't even stand a chance and this is what hopelessness can do sometimes it can cause us to be frustrated and angry and short with one another i don't want to end it here so if that's what hopelessness can cause if that's maybe some of the core things that stem from where hopelessness comes from then let's look at the opposite let's look at hope what would truly happen if we embraced the idea of hope what would it mean if we truly gave our all to god i think that hope has the ability to alter the landscape of the world and that sounds like a really tacky bumper sticker but i genuinely truly honestly believe that okay so for proof of how incredible hope is i'm gonna throw some math at you because i know that's exactly what you came here for this sunday was math okay so 12 disciples minus one because judas uh then you've got 70. 70 that he sent out and commissioned plus a handful of women who arrived at the tomb so let's call this roughly 90 people roughly 90 people when christ was living by the time that he died bought in to who he was so you've got 90 people and then you put that by 2 000 years ago at a place that is 7 144 miles away i absolutely googled that all those things those people that far away that long ago completely changed the world and as a result you and i are sitting here in southern oregon worshiping the same god do you realize how incredible that is that here we are singing praise and worship songs to this god this guy that lived and died thousands of years ago that's the power that hope has those people fully caught the vision they've walked him watched him come out of that tomb they watched him die and then live again and they thought people should probably hear about this and they went and they told and they haven't stopped talking since then people's lives have been changed by who jesus christ is for the vast majority of people on earth our country wasn't even a myth at the time that jesus walked and yet here we are that's an incredible thing what else could possibly explain this phenomenon except for the power of hope and that jesus was who he said he was the question is that's great in the past does it still have the ability to impact our future does it still have the ability to change the world i'm going to be really frank here this is one of those things that you probably won't hear often from the pulpit i'm not even sure if i should be saying this but i'm going to level with you there are days when i hate my job don't get me wrong i i feel so privileged that god has called me uh to to be a pastor but there are days when it is so hard it's so defeating and it is so incredibly difficult i come home and think i could have chosen something else i could have done anything and i chose this why and it's hard because i see the impact of sin i see the way that impacts people's lives i work with kids but this is true for adults i watch the decisions they're about to make and i know the scars it's going to leave and i can tell them not to but the reality is people are going to make their own decisions not just the decisions that they make i watch the decisions of people around them and the damage they are doing to some of these kids is irrevocable it is going to leave scars on them forever and it kills me it kills me when i come home i'm having another conversation with another broken person sometimes it's their fault sometimes it's not and it makes me wish that i'd done something else it has i've said this before but you need to believe this it has never been harder to be a kid than it is right now and that statement was true in 2019 it is so incredibly difficult to just be a kid in this world i'll tell you when i was a kid growing up if i wanted to get access to a dirty magazine i had to go over to my friend's house and go through his dad's stash now this stuff is waiting for them on their pockets it's finding it everywhere when i was a kid i had a bully who lived down the street he used to torment me he'd hit me with things and call me mean names but i could get away from him now there's a whole generation of people that are waiting for someone just to post something and then rip their lives apart people have posted things on social media and the backlash has been so severe there have been cases of people committing suicide that's a crazy thing that's actually happening in our country right now i told you that i was homeschooled so i didn't go to public school but my friends did you know what none of my friends did growing up active shooter drills none of them did but now it's happening all the time my wife is a teacher and every time i hear about some school shooting on the news i want to pack up my bags and move to antarctica it's just not worth it it is so hard right now we live in a very difficult world and i've been doing ministry for 15 years now and in my most jaded moments i don't believe this most of the time but when i'm feeling down when i'm feeling depressed and upset i feel like my job is to try to peddle morals on people who want nothing to do with them that's what i feel like my lowest moments in addition to all of that i work at a church i don't know if you guys are paying attention but the statistics are bleak it's it's a rough time right now the church is becoming less and less of a valued institution it makes me worried and concerned for the future gallup just produced this poll it made national news in 2020 they found that for the first time since they've been gathering data there was less americans that attended church than did so from in the last 20 years when they started this data 70 percent of americans said that they attended church on a regular basis now in 2020 47 and let's be honest people who say they attend church i mean i know you guys like it's you attend church like when it when it's great uh some people i think just they would check the box if they attended in christmas and easter so that 47 that 47 might be a little bit high as it is and by the way i understand that church attendance doesn't equal salvation i know that i know there are people sitting here and there are people watching online being present doesn't equal genuine relationship with god i understand that however the trend that less and less people are coming says a lot about where we're going and it's hard because i look at these things and i wonder what's going to happen 20 years from now and when i get to those points i'm reminded of one very simple fact statistics are not prophecies statistics are made by short-sighted men and they are made assuming that we don't do anything about it that's what the statistics are pointing at us they're saying this is what's going to happen assuming god's people are completely content to let that happen and that's not the way that we operate you see we believe in a god that defies statistics a god doesn't care about what men think because he knows he's got a plan for things that's the power of hope jesus was never concerned with trends or predictions because you know what before christ came nobody had walked on water he was like the first one to really do that before christ no one had turned water into wine made the blind sea cast out demons and before christ no one had defeated death on his own power and yet on the third day he walked right out of that tomb before christ people would have said a lot of things were impossible and after that he really blew it out of the water and that's who we believe in we believe in a god that is not concerned when he looks at those things he says nah i've got a plan and that plan by the way is us we're that plan the church the body of christ his people we're part of changing those trends we're a part of making sure that the church is seen as a place where people are welcome that they know that when they walk through those doors regardless of what they believe or who they are what they identify as that they're going to be loved someone's going to minister to them and treat them like a person and a human being and want to connect with them that's the best possible way that we can share the gospel is by loving other people the way that christ calls us to and we do that because we believe in something bigger than ourselves and that person is jesus christ i believe that jesus has the power to change a broken heart and to remake the world for the glorious his kingdom and the day i stop believing that is the day i walk away from faith the day i stop believing that god can change everything is the day i wash my hands and i do something different as god's people we need to live in light of that hope that's what we're called to both the church capital c and local right here in medford we need to walk and talk like we genuinely believe it and that hope when it settles down deep when the resonance of that hope makes its mark on our soul that should change our attitude it should change our outlook it should change the way that we interact with people and it should make us not an angry people but a joyful people because we know that the god that we follow has overcome the world what's there to be frustrated about what is there to be so angry about that isn't trivial or small or petty we don't take any of the stuff with us when we go these are just things in the here and now we need to be focused on heaven and that attitude again should change our demeanor to change the way we interact with people and it should let the small things go the transformative power of hope is that we have one who enters into the inner place behind the curtain jesus went behind there and he contended with god the father our hope is in jesus who has gone as a forerunner on our behalf to prepare a place for us our hope is in a savior that cain lived and died and is now spending his time prepping eternity for you and me that's what he's doing and in light of that the rest of it's a vapor the rest of it is insubstantial it's just a thing that's here and then gone ultimately i think that most of us will be remembered for the way that we treated other people that's what i really believe i've been doing ministry for a long time now i'm fairly convinced that most of the kids that i have worked with won't really remember most of the lessons that i taught but you know what they do remember because i talked to them they remember the way that i treated them that's what we can do that's what we can do as god's people is that we can treat people the way that christ would have treated them with love and compassion not anger and judgment so to wrap things up our hope is founded solely in christ i love old hymns one of my favorite says this my hope is built on nothing less than jesus blood and righteousness i dare not trust the sweetest frame but holy lean in jesus name that's perfect that is a perfect refrain and if you feel like your hope is being deferred or that it's been displaced or that your problems have just become enormous let me give you one more verse it's romans 5 3-5 it says this 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 because god's love has been poured into our hearts to the holy spirit who has been given to us that's incredible and so wonderful christ came into the world to transform it he came to give us an anchor something that a fixed point that we could trust and lean on something that we could hold fast to even when everything seems like it's breaking apart at the seams and it gives us guidance and hope for a future and if our hope is placed in him then his purpose becomes our call and our job is to ready the world for the kingdom of god that is the best thing that we could possibly do and that's the power of hope that's what it does for us one of the things that we do we do it every week because it's a good reminder of what christ actually did is we we take communion so we're going to move into a time of communion right now see christ in his infinite wisdom gave us a way by which we might remember his life and his death on the cross it's a very simple ritual and it symbolizes his act and he became this thing that we have hope in the act upon the cross is ultimately why we place our hope and our trust in him his life and his death and his resurrection so communion is something that is for a believer so if you've given your life to christ this is for you and if you haven't done that yet first off i'm so glad that you're here thank you for coming but i want to encourage you because this is something that we do to symbolize christ's life and death that means that we also need to get right with god and so if you haven't done that yet this week i would encourage you and the moments before you come up and grab communion and take it back to your seats talk with god for just a minute if you had an angry thought on the drive over because someone cut you off now is a great time to get right with god so what we're going to do is we're going to play some music i'm going to give you guys a few minutes and there's a few communion stations that are at the front and at the back you're going to come you're going to grab the elements you're going to take them back into your seat but again i want to encourage you as you do that just take a moment talk to god and then we'll continue on from there [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] you probably realize by now these things are fiddly so there are two different layers one has the bread at the top and the other has the juice down at the bottom as you guys are prepping that i said communion really is this thing that we have that reminds us of the hope that we have in jesus christ this act that he did so i'm going to read the scriptures and we're going to take this together this passage comes from first corinthians chapter 11. it says for i received from the lord what i also passed on to you on the night when he was betrayed the lord jesus took the bread when he had given thanks broke it and said this is my body which is for you do this in remembrance of me in the same way he also took the cup after supper and said this cup is a new covenant in my blood do this as often as you drink in remembrance of me i'm going to close this in prayer father god we are so grateful that we have something to hope in because the world doesn't provide it there's so there's nothing here there's nothing here that that can live up to its promise and said god it's all about you i thank you for this time that we have just to spend a moment uh out of our busy weeks in communion fellowship i pray that we would leave better than when we came in more in love with you and closer to you i thank you that we have this hope that is jesus christ god it's amazing that you would love us so much you would send your son to die for us i pray that that single statement never ceases to awe and amazes us i pray that it changes our demeanor it changes the way that we interact with people that it makes us rocks that it fills us with joy it fills us with a hope that is not based on something insubstantial or disappointing god let us live in light of the gospel let us love the people as you have called us to we thank you for who you are in your name amen thank you guys so much for coming if you guys need prayer for anything we have a prayer corner in the back we would love to talk with you myself and some of the other pastors and elders will be down front i hope that you guys have a fantastic day go somewhere where you can breathe if you guys find yourself in crescent city that's where i'm going to go to get a brush some fresh air have a fantastic sunday when i was lost no hope afraid [Music]

Channel: Table Rock

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Id: 4cthROJUIJM

Length: 50min 50sec (3050 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 15 2021