Get Your Hopes Up

Please take a moment to open the Blue Oaks app if you want to follow along and take notes. Or if you have your bible you can turn to Matthew 13, starting at verse 31.

As we kick off the season of Advent, we’re going to look at a story Jesus tells.

Matthew 13:31

He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough.”

I want to start with a question today.

Does anyone here have any worries? Any concerns around this time of the year?

It was the strangest thing, but as I was trying to find the words to say to those of you who are worried… I had this most overwhelming sense of God wanting to say to me and God wanting to say to you, “All will be well.”

No matter what you’re going through right now, God is at work, and God doesn’t want you to lose a single ounce of life over worry or fear.

All will be well because God is at work.

God’s kingdom, although it started real small from a real unlikely source and is often hidden and unseen, his kingdom is spreading, and one day evil will be overcome, and God’s community will flourish and creation will be redeemed.

Jesus wanted to talk about this, so he tells these two stories, one of a mustard seed and one of yeast.

They’re really about human beings developing one thing… one characteristic as a result of this news.

It is the one thing, I believe, that human beings cannot endure the loss of.

We can endure the loss of an awful lot.

People throughout history have lost their health, their financial well-being, their reputations, their career success, but they’ve still endured. They’ve gone on.

People can experience relational loss, emotional trauma and still carry on.

There have been in history human beings that have suffered pain, rejection, isolation, even persecution and abuse.

There have been people that have faced concentration camps with unbroken spirits and unbowed heads.

But human beings cannot survive the loss of one thing.

They cannot survive the loss of Hope.

Human beings cannot go on without hope.

Hope is how we live. Hope is what gets us from one day to the next.

You go to school, you hope one day you’ll graduate.
You graduate, you hope you enter into a great career.
You’re single, and perhaps you hope you meet the right person and get married.
You get married, and you hope you have children, get kids into the house some day.
You get kids in the house and you hope one day they’ll leave.

We live by hope.

When hope is present, it leads to things like adventure and the desire to abandon yourself to a cause that’s bigger than just your own survival or advancement.

This spirit of hope gives you the ability to breathe hope into people around you.

It gives you courage to dream and risk.

Hope is what energizes nations. It energizes businesses and companies and churches and cultures and marriages and families.

We live by hope, and when hope is gone, endurance and joy and energy and courage just evaporate. Life begins to fade.

When hope is gone, you start to die.

There’s a fascinating study. A psychologist named Schneider did a test with college students. It consisted of this hypothetical situation.

Although you set your goal of getting a B in this class, when your first exam, worth 30% of the final grade is returned, you received a D.

Now, it’s one week after you learned about the D. What do you do? How do you respond?

And Schneider found the crucial variable was hope, just hope. Not brains, not intelligence, just hope.

He found that students who had measured out high in terms of their level of hope in their life, their response was first of all to try to work harder, and secondly, to think of a range of ways that they could bolster their final grade. They would think about creative solutions, and then muster the energy to pursue them with vigor.

Those are the students who had a high level of hope.

Students who had a moderate level of hope — even though they had the same level of intelligence — were able to think of some options to help their grade, but they were far less determined to pursue them.

And then, the third group of students — those that measured out low on the hope scale — they just gave up easily on both counts. They didn’t bother to think up solutions and had no energy to pursue them.

Schneider found that hope made all the difference.

Hope was a better predictor of how students would do in schools than SAT scores, grades, or I.Q. tests. Hope was the determining factor.

And it’s not just true in school. This is true in life.

People who lose hope do not see themselves as having the energy, ability or means to accomplish their goals or solve their problems. They don’t see themselves that way.

And they don’t see God as this all caring, infinitely powerful friend, who wants to partner with them in their life.

And a horrible thing happens. They just give up. They run into a barrier in terms of their vocational dream, and they just give up.

They run into a problem in their parenting life that’s quite severe. And you can see it in their response. “Well, this kid’s just too difficult to deal with.” And they withdraw into passivity or inactivity.

They run into a financial problem, they have a character issue that’s really hard to change. They just give up.

Let me ask you this morning, “Where in your life are you getting a D?”

Is there some area where the grade you’re getting back is not as high as the grade you’d like to get?

Maybe it’s in a relationship.
Maybe it’s in your marriage.
Maybe it’s with your kids.
Maybe it’s in your work.
Maybe it’s in your financial life.
Maybe it’s in your spiritual life.

How are you responding… honestly?

Are you asking, really asking God for help? Are you thinking about different ways to solve the problem? Are you mustering all the energy you have, because you know it matters, because you know it’s worth it?

Or honestly, are you just kind of giving up?

If you live without hope, you’ll develop a pattern. When difficulty, pressure, challenge or threat comes along, you just give up.

The writer of Proverbs put it like this. I believe this is one of the most profound of all of the proverbs.

Proverbs 13:12

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick.

Have you ever had a hope deferred?

When I was a boy growing up, I was very skinny.

When I was 16 years old, I was six feet tall and I weighed 130 pounds.

But I had hopes when I was younger.

When I was a kid my dad told me, “Eat vegetables. It will do two things for you.” My dad promised, “It will give you a muscles, and it will put massive amounts of hair on your chest.”

I pinned all my hopes on vegetables. That’s where all my hopes went.

I’m fifty-two years old. If something doesn’t happen soon, I think I’m going to cut back on vegetables. I’m just about ready to give up.

See, here’s the deal with hope. The issue is not just whether you are a hopeful person in general.

Today we’re not talking about becoming a more optimistic person, although that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We’re not talking about hoping that whatever wish you might happen to have will come true.

The issue is, are you putting your hope in the right thing?

Jesus was born into this world so that we can put our hope in him, and in the kingdom of God.

To help people see that, Jesus tells these two stories.

The first one is an agricultural metaphor, and the primary point in each of them is this tremendous contrast.

First he talks about a mustard seed. The mustard seed was famous in Jesus’ day for being incredibly tiny.

I did some research on a mustard seed. A mustard seed is thirty-nine one-thousandths of an inch across.

Think how small a thousandth of an inch is, a mustard seed thirty-nine one-thousandths of an inch across — barely visible.

But when it’s planted in the ground and surrounded by nutrients, a mustard seed could grow to twelve feet high in a single season, and birds love them for their seeds.

From this tiny, unlikely looking seed in the ground comes this flourishing plant, virtually a tree, that can provide food and housing for birds.

You’d look at the seed. You’d look at the tree and you’d say, this enormous tree is going to emerge from something as puny and insignificant as a little mustard seed?

“That’s right,” Jesus says. “Just put the seed in the ground.”

It’s just a matter of time, small beginnings, unlikely source, irresistible growth.

Once the seed is in the ground, the contest is over. The outcome is inevitable. No matter how small or unlikely the seed, once it’s in the ground, it’s just a matter of time.

Then he tells another story. It’s a baking analogy. A woman is baking bread, but it’s not leavened yet. Unleavened bread is hard and dry and unappetizing.

So she puts in a little yeast.

What happens with yeast is there’s a chemical process, and it fills the dough with thousands of tiny, little pockets of carbon dioxide. And as the bread is heated, each little pocket expands and the whole loaf rises.

Soon the whole house is just filled with the aroma of fresh bread.

What’s striking to Jesus’ listeners in this story is the amount of bread that he talks about.

We’d expect this woman to be making a loaf or two, but he says she uses three measures of flour.

That would be roughly 128 cups, or sixteen five-pound bags.

Add forty-two or so cups of water that you would need, and you’d end up with a little over 101 pounds of dough.

She’s making enough bread for Oakland.

Looking at this amount, Jesus’ listeners would think, “This huge amount of bread is going to be leavened by a tiny, little lump of yeast? Something so enormous is going to be transformed by something so insignificant?

“That’s right,” Jesus says. “Just put that little lump of yeast into the dough, and once you do that, it’s just a matter of time.”

In fact, when he tells this story, the word that in my translation gets translated “mixed” — the woman mixed the yeast into the dough — it’s actually their word for “to hide” something.

We get our word “cryptic” from that word.

Jesus says the woman hides the yeast in the dough. You can’t even see it.

I think he uses that word deliberately. I think he’s saying that the way the kingdom works is not always immediately recognizable to everyone. There’s something hidden about it. It doesn’t come in the way that we would expect it to — small beginnings, unlikely source, but irresistible growth.

No matter how small the yeast, no matter how huge the loaf, once the yeast is in the dough, the contest is over. The outcome is inevitable. It’s just a matter of time.

Jesus tells these stories to people who suffer from disappointment — like you and me; but he tells them especially to those who suffer from spiritual disappointment.

When you think about it, the people had been hoping God would act for centuries.

In a sense, the whole story of the Old Testament is a story of hope — because people know this world is not the way it’s supposed to be.

You go back to the beginning. In the story of the Fall, Genesis 3:15, after the man and the woman have fallen and told they’re going to have to leave the garden, before they go, they’re offered hope.

God prophesies that the woman will have offspring and that the serpent, the evil one, will strike at his heel. But it says in Genesis 3:15 that the offspring of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.

In the time to come, the people of God came to understand that as a reference to the Messiah.

One would come from God who would crush the work of the evil one, who would overthrow the work of the curse.

There’s this note of hope from the very beginning, from the Fall itself.

Then there’s the flood, but after the flood God sends the rainbow, and God says, every time I see the rainbow, I will remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature on the face of the earth.

Every time you look up and see the rainbow, God says, “Have hope.”

Hope was the manna that kept Israel going through the roundabout way of the desert.

Hope was the still, small voice that whispered to Elijah that he was not alone even though he thought he was.

Through a discouraged preacher named Jeremiah to whom no one would listen, God says, “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and hope.”

So the people wait, and they hoped for a big kingdom
They hoped for a powerful king
They hoped for mighty armies
And the destruction of their enemies
And the overthrow of Rome

That’s what they were hoping for and waiting for in the Messiah.

Then Jesus comes, and Jesus says these words that the human race has been waiting to hear since the Fall. Jesus comes and he says, “The kingdom of God is at hand.”

“The will of God, the redemption of the human race, the redemption of all of creation — to live in the kingdom of God is now available to ordinary men and women. What you have been waiting for all these centuries has arrived. The one who will crush the head of the evil one is in your midst. This is it, people.”

So some people leave everything they have to follow him. And many others watch closely to see what’s going to happen now if the kingdom of God has truly become available to earth.

What they see is this traveling rabbi and kind of a ragtag band of disciples. There’s some teaching and healing that goes on. That’s about all.

He doesn’t claim the crown
He doesn’t build a great organization
He never calls an army
Never marches on Rome
Never even meets the emperor

Jesus knows that all the people watching this will be tempted to think, “This is it?”

We had such hopes.
We were going to triumph over our enemies.
We were going to see the name of God vindicated.
We were going to see the doers of evil destroyed and crushed.

“This is it? This is the kingdom?”

Even John the Baptist in Matthew 11:3, sends word when he was in prison and heard what the Messiah was doing; he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come or are we to wait for another?”

“Is this it?”

And so Jesus says the same thing he says to you and me, don’t you be confused or misled or discouraged, not for a moment, for the kingdom of God has invaded this earth. Right now it may look about the size of a mustard seed.

The kingdom of God came to this earth as a helpless infant… laid in a crude, little manger located in the stable of a humble inn… in a hick town called Bethlehem… in an obscure outpost of the Roman empire that Caesar probably didn’t even know he controlled.

Looks pretty insignificant, but Jesus says, “Once the seed is in the ground, it’s just a matter of time.”

“Once the yeast is in the dough, the bread can’t help but rise, can’t stop it, so don’t get discouraged now.
Whatever you do, don’t quit now.
Don’t give in to fear now because the seed is in the ground
And the yeast is in the dough
And evil will be overcome
And the curse will be overthrown
And sin and guilt and death will be destroyed
God’s community will flourish
And creation will be redeemed
“Get your hopes up,” Jesus says. “It’s just a matter of time.”

How much time? I don’t know.

That’s the hard part. It’s not bread yet.

Hoping in this world is not easy. So I want to talk, in the minutes that remain in this message, about a few things hope does in a world where it’s not bread yet.

The first one is tough —

Hope waits patiently.

How many of you enjoy waiting patiently? Do you enjoy a nice long wait?

Well, hope waits patiently because God’s timing is not our timing.

Will you do that?

Let me ask you — where is an area in your life where you need to hold onto hope by practicing patience?

Maybe you have a child that struggles in some area, and you’ve just been expecting perfection now.

You get frustrated because your child doesn’t act like a mature adult, and you think there ought to be just perfection — 100 percent compliance.

Will you let go of that? Will you be willing to help that child grow one slow step at a time, and celebrate every step of growth?

Some of you have been wrestling with sin in some area your life for years, and you pray and you seek help and you slip again. You’re tempted to quit because you didn’t become perfect overnight. You’re tempted to give in to despair or self-pity.

Will you say now, “I’m on a battle with sin one slow step at a time? I will hope patiently.”

Some of you are dissatisfied with your work, and you’ve been praying about this, and you’ve been thinking nothing’s happening — “even though I’ve been praying about this for two weeks now. When is something going to happen?”

You’re ready to quit praying.

Will you pray with patience?

Sometimes God calls us to pray for a long time. We don’t know why.

As a general rule, the process of developing character, which is what God is up to in our lives, the process of developing character takes time because God will treat us as human beings. He will allow us to participate and be involved in the growth process.

That means it will take time. It will not happen overnight.

Enabling us to endure, which is what God wants for us, takes time.

So will you wait patiently?

Ultimately all will be set right, because the future is not in your hands and it’s not in my hands. It’s God’s project, and God fully intends to see it through, so will you be patient?

Hope means waiting patiently.

Another thing about hope —

Hope trusts God.

From a Christian point of view, hope is rooted in our understanding of who God is and how God wants to interact in our lives.

This is a very different thing than the kind of stuff you’re likely to read in the self-help section of a bookstore.

What I’m talking about is not simply a willingness to take risks and a belief that everything will turn out well as long as I just take risks and maintain a real positive attitude about it.

That kind of naïve optimism is not helpful. It can be non-productive at best and dangerous at worst.

Hope, in the biblical sense, is not about hyping myself into believing that everything is going to turn out the way I want it to.

It is the confident expectation that an all-powerful God is at work, even in this fallen world, to redeem it and to bring good out of it.

Maybe the ultimate statement along these lines is what Jesus said in Matthew 19:26:

With God all things are possible.

Now, you have to decide. Was Jesus in deep denial, or is that really true?

These two phrases go together. Jesus doesn’t simply say, “All things are possible.” Jesus says, “With God — all things are possible.”

With the life that is submitted to God, with a heart that is tender and yielded before God — all things are possible.

Without hope, I live at the mercy of my circumstances. My own sense of worth and esteem is continually up for grabs. And I lack a solid inner core of my identity and mission and purpose.

In the Bible, the author of the Book of James calls this lack of confident trust in God double-mindedness.

And the metaphor he uses is that someone who lacks this confident trust in God is like a wave of deceit blown forward one minute and blown backward the next because he’s just at the mercy of how the wind is blowing, how life goes from day to day.

James says, “They are double-minded and unstable in all they do.” There’s a marked instability.

Henry Nowen put it like this:

“At issue here is the question, ‘To whom do I belong, to God or the world?’ Many of my daily preoccupations suggest I belong more to the world than to God. A little criticism makes me angry. A little rejection makes me depressed. The wind blows that way. A little praise raises my spirits. A little success excites me. Often, I am like a small boat on the ocean at the mercy of its waves. It depends on how the wind is blowing.”

And I know what that’s like. It’s an unstable way to live, because then I’m just at the mercy of the most recent words that come my way.

A woman found me after a service a few weeks ago and said, “Matt, that was the best teaching I’ve ever heard.” I said, “Wow, really?” She said, “Yeah. I don’t go to church much.”

Now, if I’m dependent on positive feedback for the fuel I run on, I’m in a very vulnerable position.

Let me ask you a question. What does it take to ruin your day?

If you have a problem at work
Or your boss doesn’t rave about your performance
Or your financial situation goes a little south
Or a friend or a spouse snaps at you
Or you look in the mirror and you decide the aging process isn’t going well

What does it take to ruin your day?

You see, the lower your sense of hope, of confident trust that an all-powerful God is at work in this world and in your life, the less it takes to ruin your day.

And what will happen over time is you lose life. You lose energy and motivation for life. It just leaks out of you. And your life becomes kind of an emotional roller coaster.

When the wind is blowing in a good direction, that’s okay. When it pushes back, you’re in trouble. And you lose this clarity about who you are and what God called you to do.

Alright, hope waits patiently.
Hope trusts God.

The third thing hope does is —

Hope refuses to be negative.

I want to give you a profile, kind of a character description, and ask you if you can think of anyone that at least somewhat resembles this. Can you think of someone that matches this description?

Think of someone who consistently thinks of himself or herself as kind of a martyr.

When they tell stories about their lives, they’re generally the victim of bad circumstances — poor health, an unfair boss, disloyal friends, dishonest sales people, discourteous drivers.

And because of this they tend to be kind of self-preoccupied. They tend to be absorbed in their own problems. They have a hard time getting excited about or even acknowledging victories or successes in your life.

They will sometimes try to get you to feel obligated to them out of pity or guilt or both.

Over time you notice there’s a pretty high level of complaint in their words. And they tend to blame other people for their problems.

There’s a spirit of negativity that hangs over them like a cloud, and you can feel it when you’re around them.

They’re often quite judgmental. And they have critical opinions about a lot of stuff.

And maybe the hardest thing about this person is that they don’t recognize this about themselves.

If you were to ask them, “Do you think you have a martyr complex?” They would say, “No,” and feel like you were persecuting them unjustly.

It’s as if they have this distorted lens on that causes them to twist or warp the way they view things. And they really do perceive themselves to be chronically mistreated by life.

They experience very little joy. And they don’t create much joy in others. They are black holes of joy. They suck joy out of you like a vacuum cleaner.

How many of you would say you know someone in your life who, at least somewhat, resembles this description?

How many of you would say that your number one priority in life is finding ways to spend more and more time with this person?

I’ll guarantee you, if you live with this kind of negative spirit, you’re going to get increasingly isolated.

Now, I want to tell you a hard truth. Some of you are sitting in this room, and you suffer from a negative spirit. It is like a cloud hanging over you, and it’s choking your joy and your hope.

And it’s destroying your relationships with other people.

And you are maybe dimly aware that something is wrong, but you have never had the courage to face this.

I want to ask you today to face it.

I don’t know how it started in your life. Maybe it started when you were a child, and somehow in your family or through circumstances, you were taught that the world is kind of a dangerous place.

Maybe somewhere along the line, you got hurt badly. A dream was shattered or someone you were close to betrayed you, and you decided that really the only way to survive was to get defensive and put up walls and to expect the worst.

You stopped hoping because it hurt too much to hope and be disappointed.

And a negative spirit kind of took root in you from that point.

Maybe you were just born with a genetic predisposition towards anxiety or gloomy thought patterns. And the truth is you’re just going to have to wrestle with that. That’s part of the package that you’re going to have to wrestle with.

Maybe you don’t know why.

Now, I want to tell you something. One of the reasons why this issue is so important is this — a spirit is a contagious thing.

People who live with a hopeful spirit have a way of passing it on to others, especially their kids. And people who have lost it, people who live with a negative spirit, they have a way of eroding it in other people, especially their children, as well.

I don’t think anyone here wants to pass on a legacy like that.

I want to give you a challenge and I’m dead serious about this.

I know for people who wrestle deeply with this issue there’s something inside your spirit that just resists knowing it.

So my challenge is — sometime this week ask someone who knows you well, “Do you see any areas in my life where I struggle with a negative spirit? Do you see a loss of hope in me? Really, honestly, would you tell me the truth?”

I challenge you to ask that question.

Don’t ask it of a negative person. They’ll just say, “Of course. I see that in you all the time.”

Ask it of someone who is able to perceive reality well, someone that you trust and someone who has enough love for you and enough courage to tell you the truth.

But I really do plead with you or challenge you as your pastor — have the courage to face this. Ask this question because if you don’t face it, if you don’t deal with it, it’s not going to go away and people are going to avoid you.

And the more they avoid you, the more sad and miserable you will be inside, and the more darkness will come out of you, and the more people will avoid you. It’s a vicious downward cycle.

You will sign on for a deeply lonely life, and that’s too high a price for you to pay.

Alright, last thing —

Hope refuses to fear.

I was reading an Old Testament scholar this week who writes that in the Old Testament there is no neutral concept of expectation.

As people develop expectations for the future in the Old Testament, an expectation is either good or bad. Therefore, it is either hope or fear.

We live between hope and fear, and sometimes we go from one to the other so fast, don’t we?

It’s kind of a silly story, so forgive it, but this guy is going through the woods, and he’s doing fine until all of a sudden he comes before an enormous angry bear.

He’s filled with fear and he can’t think of anything else to do, so he prays.

He falls to his knees, clasps his hands together, closes his eyes and prays, “God, make this bear a Christian.”

He sits there for a moment terrified, until, to his amazement, the bear gets to his knees, clasps his paws and closes his eyes and begins to pray.

So the guy is filled with hope, until he hears the bear’s prayer — “Lord, for what I am about to receive, I am truly grateful.”

Kind of a silly story, I understand, but the truth is that human life in this world is lived between hope and fear. We live between hope and fear.

Things go well, I get a promising job opportunity or a possible relationship, then I’m filled with hope. Things go badly, possibility of bad news about health or money, and I’m seized with fear.

Good market, I’m hopeful. Bad market, I’m filled with fear.

In the Bible, hope wins. Hope always wins.

In the Bible what enables heroes to overcome fear is not courage or belief in their own resources or their own will power or persistence. It’s hope.

In the Bible what enables heroes in the faith to overcome fear is hope that someone far stronger than me is at work.

The writer of Hebrews says:

We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. (Hebrews 6:19)

“We have this hope” — that is, the hope in Christ and the kingdom of God.

“We have this hope which is a secure and steadfast anchor of the soul.”

“That’s what hope is,” the writer says, “an anchor for the soul.”

Hope is an anchor that will not be moved in the face of fear.

I want to share with you a story of one such person.

It’s about a woman I’ll call Brittany. Here name is Heather, but I’ll call her Brittany.

Brittany was raised in the church. Her father was pastor of the church where she grew up.

She graduated from a Christian college, became a pediatric nurse, married a fine Christian young man.

Four years later, she was two months pregnant with her first child, and her husband told her that he felt trapped, and he was not sure he was ready for a family.

Two months later she became very ill, and while she was staying at her sister’s, her husband left.

She kept praying for her husband, and she was just certain that he was going to return like the Prodigal Son.

But she found out that her husband had been unfaithful — not only that, but that he had contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

When the baby, Rachel, was born, her father’s one gift to her was this disease that he passed on, so that at the moment of delivery, when a baby is supposed to be screaming and crying, this baby was silent.

When the baby is supposed to be pink and wiggling all around, this baby was blue and its limbs hung limp.

Rachel was born with only a brain stem, no brain to carry on the most basic functions.

The doctor said she would live maybe days or weeks. But the weeks became months and the months became years.

Brittany’s whole life consisted of working twelve hours a day in her shift while her sister or a friend watched Rachel and then coming home and caring for her daughter.

What kind of hopes could she cling to?

She didn’t have any of the kind of hopes that the vast majority of parents have.

She had no hope that someday she would video Rachel toddling off to her first day of school.

There would be no report cards, no homemade valentines, no baking cookies together, no taking her for her driver’s license test, no walk down the aisle.

Brittany did not have the hope of ever seeing her daughter take her first step, or feel those chubby little fingers wrapped around her hand, or hear her laugh, or say the words “I love you” or even the syllables “Momma.”

Brittany could never even tell if Rachel knew who her mother was.

The only time Rachel seemed to respond to anything at all was during her baths.

Brittany would wash her and rub her back, and when she would do that, Rachel would give a low cooing sound, kind of like she was contented.

One day Brittany decided she was going to take a vacation, and it would be her first one in three years, the three years of Rachel’s life. When she was on vacation, she’d call home every day to talk to her sister.

One day her sister held the phone up to Rachel’s ear while Brittany talked into the phone, and then the sister grabbed the phone back and said that when Rachel heard Brittany’s voice, she started to coo, give that low cooing sound. It’s the only indication Brittany ever had that maybe her daughter knew who her mother was.

When she landed at the airport at the end of her vacation, her brother-in-law met her with the words that Brittany somehow knew he would say, which was that Rachel had died while she was gone.

Rachel’s father never came to the funeral, never asked about his daughter, never said, “I’m sorry.”

It wasn’t until six years later Brittany could even bring herself to read the journals that she kept during Rachel’s life, mostly asking, “Why?”

If you were to ask Brittany what sustained her through this, she would tell you it was not optimism about medical progress, or the way things might turn out physically, or what doctors might be able to do.

It was Christian hope.

What is Christian hope?

Christian hope says that flawed DNA will not be allowed to have the last word, not in God’s universe.

Christian hope says that one day Brittany and Rachel will be seated at a table where they will know each other and be fully known.

Christian hope says that one day around that table the words of wonder and gratitude and affection and love which Rachel could not speak here will flow ceaselessly there.

Christian hope says that the limbs that hung limp and useless in this world will one day define grace and beauty in the next one.

Christian hope says that where the mind that was cheated here will one day flourish in endless creativity and sparkling intelligence.

Christian hope says that the one who does reconstructive surgery on his children is not finished yet.

The day will come when a short-lived, little-noticed, obscure, damaged child in this world will dazzle through all the ages with a glory that we cannot now imagine or comprehend.

Christian hope says it’s just a matter of time.

So hope never gives up.

Some of you, I know, have been deeply disappointed. You had such hopes, and things have not turned out the way you wanted. Maybe they never will.

You had dreams to change the world, but you haven’t had much of an impact so far.

Or you had dreams of marvelous vocational impact that would be a gift to many, many people, but things seem to have turned out much smaller than you had hoped.

Or you had dreams for a marriage of great intimacy and love, but you never got married.m Or you married but it ended. Or it’s a difficult relationship.

You had dreams of children and what that relationship would be like, but you ended up having no children at all. Or maybe you had them, but the relationship is real difficult.

Or you had dreams that have been shattered because of health or because of circumstances.

Or someone you love that you had dreams for has found those dreams shattered.

Or someone you love has died.

You know Jesus understands, because Jesus, too, had dreams.

He stood one day on a hill, and he looked out over the city that he loved, and he said:

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God’s messengers! How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn’t let me. (Matthew 23:37)

Jesus understands all about broken dreams.

When he was crucified it seemed like his dream was crucified with him… but it wasn’t…

Because the truth is that when they laid his body in the tomb, they were just putting the seed in the ground.

They were just putting the yeast in the dough.

From that point on, it’s just a matter of time.

This is Christian hope that one day every wrong will be set right and every tear will be dried and every suffering will be redeemed, so Jesus says, “Get your hopes up, people. It’s just a matter of time.”