LIVE Join our service streaming live right now! Click here to watch.
We can be full of hope and still put that hope in plans, forecasts, and outcomes that never arrive. When disappointment turns us into expert worriers—or convinces us that life will only get worse—we’re reminded to look to our true hope and the Power behind it.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Emily Dickinson said, hope was a thing with feathers. But I was thinking this week, at least at one point, on one particular day, hope for me was a thing with meatballs. Anyone else ever had hopeful meatballs before? No? Well, I thought maybe.
Just short of six years ago, I was having lunch with a friend. I can show you that lunch. Ikea. Anyone like Ikea meatballs? We have some Ikea fans? Okay, yeah. So I’d never had them before. This is my first time, actually my only time having Ikea meatballs. Not because they’re bad, I just don’t get down there. But I was having this particular meatball lunch to talk about a church plant.
You see, the summer before, this was in October of 2018, the summer before I’d started having conversations that were going to ultimately lead to the planting of Little Hills Church. My friend Brad Harris, the pastor over at Bible Baptist, had said, “Tim, are you sure you’re not supposed to be planting a church?” He’s just down the street, and I thought, okay, he’s saying that maybe I should be planting a church here. This is from the Lord. Brad’s a wise man in general, a very kind and unselfish man, but also it strikes you when the pastor down the road says maybe you should plant a church nearby.
So I thought about that and started talking. So this lunch, I was having lunch with a man who coordinated church planting ministries. He said, just come down, he called it his office, come down to Ikea, have lunch at my office, and tell me what’s going on. So I started to talk about what it was I was hoping would happen, and I had a lot of things in mind, one of which is that we were ready to launch in 2019. We’d just, you know, we’d do this thing, right? We’d get going, and then I kind of had a feeling who it was that was going to be a part of it and who wasn’t, and all these different ideas, and what would it look like, and how we got to pay for it, and there’s so much involved.
It’s one of those things that sounds simple. Oh, let’s just get a group of believers together, but then you start to think about, well, but how do you make it work? How do you make sure people actually are gonna come? How do you make sure they can sustain itself? All kinds of things involved. We’re talking about those things, and it’s kind of appropriate to think about that particular set of meatballs today because it was this weekend, six years ago, that the Little Hills website went online. And yeah, that’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?
I got one of those social media anniversary reminders about it today, and I thought, wow, it’s just, does it say actually in print? It was the one on X, and it had a big six on it. I thought, how could, is there a mathematical error there? How is it, but six years ago, it went online, and we ran a bunch of social media advertising, and the goal was to find out, are there actually people that want to come? We had several dozen people respond, most of whom never actually walked in the door.
There’s nothing big that happened between then and now, which we call that little, maybe you heard of the pandemic. We had this thing happen, and there were all kinds of other complications. Needless to say, as I was at that lunch, I had hope in this list of people I had. I had hope in this plan I had for the next year. I had hope that this friend of mine had the path forward that we could make this all happen, and virtually nothing that we discussed during that meal is how it came out.
Almost nothing. Not zero. A few of you who signed up on that initial list are here tonight, and I think that’s pretty amazing, but wildly different, and what I thought was gonna come out of that meal and how I thought it was all going to unfold, not how it happened, but there was a lot of hope. And as I think about that, and I think about as we’re going to look in Ephesians 1.18 at hope tonight, part of what we’re being challenged to think about is not just to be those who are hopeful, but to be hopeful in the right things, because while I was hopeful, the exact way I’d laid out that hope and I thought it was going to happen wasn’t how God was going to work. And if it had been, this would be a very different-looking church than it is today.
For example, we know we have church family in multiple states and in Mexico, along with our missionary partners, our extended church family who are around the world. That whole way that that worked in the character of our church, where we are a church online and in person together, that wasn’t the initial vision. Yeah, I’m a geek. We were going to have a live stream. But the fact that it’d be right in the center of who we are, that was God’s doing.
And so, just as a little clue up front, I think the key thing where we’re going is that when we’re talking about hope, it’s not about hope in our plans. It’s hope in our God. That’s what we’re going to see tonight. So let’s go ahead and pray that God would help us to see that more clearly in our own lives as we go into his word.
Father, thank you for this evening and for your word. Would you help us to see clearly what it is that you want us to see? How is it that we are trusting in things that are of you? And how are you calling us to trust in you more? Lord, we pray for your grace and your guidance tonight, that your Spirit would guide us. We ask this in the name of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.
If you turn in your Bibles to Ephesians 1.18, last week we saw the first part of this verse, having the eyes of your heart enlightened. But enlightened to what? Well, that’s what we’re going to think about tonight. Three things. First one, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you.
Just hold on to that next part. I’m just going to have it up there, teasing you, we’re not going to look at that just yet, because we need to think for a moment, what about this hope to which he has called you, called me?
Well, we need to understand, first and foremost, we are a people of hope. And as I said, it’s important to know what hope, what are we doing with that hope, and that we’re going to get into that. But the first thing is, we are a people of hope. And too often, I think people hear Christians speaking in the world, hear us, see us, and it doesn’t come across that way.
We live as people of hope. Do we live as if every day is something depressing and moving us further into disaster, or do we live as those who know that God is faithful and in the end, he will make all things new? Do we live as people of hope?
Now, I don’t say this to add further guilt upon us. I’m an expert worrier. And if you’re like me and you’re an expert worrier, a lot of times, I’m busy worrying rather than hoping. I’m also, I love dreaming up things, so I can kind of be doing both at once sometimes. I’m busy hoping, but I’m also busy just being terrified.
But am I allowing God to keep working on me so that I am more a person of hope than a person of fear, more a person of hope than a person of despair? Because if what we believe is true, and it is, that Jesus came, he lived on this earth, he suffered, he died, he triumphed over death, and he ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty, if those things are true, then anything we despair over is temporary. Doesn’t mean we’re not moving out of the things that bring us despair.
Because notably what we see here is that God has called us into hope. It’s not that we’ve always had hope. There’s plenty of us who say, but I’ve seen an awful lot of horrible things in my life. Maybe you’re scrolling down Facebook and you’ve seen all the depressing, angry things, and then you see this live stream, you click on it, and what is this guy talking about? Hope, hope. Everything says I shouldn’t be hoping right now.
God’s calling you from that. He’s calling all of us from that. Take a look at, we’ll just jump a little bit, Ephesians 2.12: “Remember that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants and promises, having no hope, and without God in the world.”
He says to the Ephesians, there’s plenty of reason why you didn’t have hope at one point, because you didn’t have hope. You literally did not have hope. It wasn’t that you weren’t feeling optimistic enough. You didn’t have it. But God called you. And it’s not just true to the Ephesians. It’s true for each and every one of us.
As we respond to God’s calls, we experience him working in our lives. We go from those who are without God in the world, those who are without restoration, those who are separated from his people, to those who are now part of his people. And in that, we go from those who didn’t have hope to those who arrive at hope.
And that’s why I think maybe the thing we should ask ourselves is, not that I have everything figured out, because none of us do. Not that I always feel perfectly positive and chipper about everything, because none of us are going to. But am I living as someone who’s on a trajectory where I know that hope is my destination, that my hope is real?
Makes such a difference. That’s why Paul brings it up here. If you think about hope, if we understand that there’s hope, it changes how we act. When we live as if there isn’t hope, even if we intellectually know that there is, we live just trying to somehow make things work right now. We cut corners.
I was talking to some of you before church, and I have a confession to make for the rest of you, which is that I am a complete chicken when it comes to being in a swimming pool, unless it’s warm enough. You know, it’s like, it has to be perfect. And I do mean perfect. It needs to be, well, maybe it doesn’t need to be 87. It could be 85.
But people say, oh, I know, it was nice. I got in, it was 79 degrees. Are you kidding me? I don’t need to be in the deep freeze. I don’t want hypothermia. I mean, come on. It’s cold.
But my attitude towards that changes throughout the course of the summer. Because if I have a chance to swim, and it’s June, and it’s 79 in the pool, am I getting in that pool? No. I’m gonna say, it’s June. There are months of swimming ahead. There will be times that swimming is going to be delightful. Today is not going to be delightful. I’ll pass.
When it’s 85 degrees outside and 79 degrees in a pool in September, am I getting in that pool? A lot more likely, because I say, this might be as good as it gets. It’s not gonna be good, but it might be as good as it gets. So I’ll just go for it. Give it a try. It’ll be good. I want the hope of at least getting in.
And I think a lot of times we live our lives as if we’re living for September swimming. There’s some hope. Maybe we can get in still one more time, two more times. And maybe we won’t even catch hypothermia as we do. But it’s not gonna be good. It’s gonna be painful.
I’m not gonna feel my feet. I’m not gonna feel my arms. I’m gonna get out and I’m going to be a giant ice cube. But at least I got in. That’s not how we’re supposed to live the Christian life, friends. Not because we don’t know there’s challenges, but because we know that the summer is coming, that even if we do need to get in the pool that day, that’s not the last day.
Too often as Christians today, we live as if this life really is all that we’re hoping for. That’s the only thing that really has us going. And so we make our decisions based on, well, here I am and it’s September and the pool’s cold. But if I’m gonna get anything out of this life, I might as well just jump in.
Now, I’m not saying that God isn’t sometimes calling us to get in uncomfortable situations, because he absolutely does. But it makes a huge difference what’s my attitude on why I’m getting into that ice-cold pool? Am I getting into it because I think God has a mission for me in there? Or he’s trying to teach me character in there? Or am I getting in there because, well, I’m going to eat, drink, and be merry because tomorrow we die?
Am I living as someone who has hope? Because when we’re talking about a swimming pool, it’s really not that big a deal, right? Okay, I was cold. I wasn’t cold. I got to go swimming. I didn’t get to go swimming. But when we’re actually making choices in life and deciding what we’re trying to do, and we settle for the okay that at least I get to do something in my life, at least my life gets to have some kind of meaning, and what we’re not instead saying is, but God’s going to make everything right and it’s going to be good and it’s going to be glorious and it’s going to be beautiful.
So often we don’t actually keep our eyes on where God wants us to be. Sometimes he is calling us into that 79-degree pool, but because he’s having us train for an Olympic swim. For some reason they like it cold. I don’t know. I’d be a terrible professional swimmer. It would not go well for me.
And if that’s where God’s calling you, then you jump into that discomfort. But when it’s just, I’m going to settle and get by in life, and I’m going to just, at least when I die, I can say, okay, it was okay. Well, yeah, everything might not be comfortable in this life. It might be difficult and painful, but it’s not going to end just okay. This life’s just the beginning.
The problem where we find ourselves is that so often we’re not balanced and we can go off the deep end to either direction there. Sometimes we have our hope so out of whack that we think I’m going to plant a church in three months, no problem. I’m going to pull everything together in my life and it’s going to be great in the next month.
Well, we’re never going to pull everything together in our lives. It’s never going to be perfectly great in this lifetime. And so we set ourselves up for disappointment on that end. But the other side of it is we just keep living kind of an Eeyore life where we keep assuming it’s only going to get worse. And it may get worse in the moment, but it’s not going to get worse in the end.
You see, when I’m trying to decide towards the end of summer, do I want to go swimming or not? A lot of times what I do is I look at the forecast and I try to see what are the days going to be like? What are the nights going to be like? Is it going to cool everything off at night? Is it going to get really hot during the day and get that water comfortable or not?
And I put my hope in that forecast and sometimes I’m right on and sometimes I make a terrible mistake, right? I’m not going to get, and it’s not quite right, but there’s some 90-degree days coming up and they don’t come.
So often in life we put our hope in the wrong forecast and it doesn’t come. So not only do we need to be people of hope, but we need to be people who have hope in the right thing. And that’s what we see as we go on to the end of verse 18.
What are the, here’s the second thing that our eyes of our hearts are enlightened to. What are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints? Do we have hope in the right thing?
I have to say, there are plenty of times in my life I’d imagine all of us can point to those things where we haven’t hoped in the right thing. We have trust in that forecast that turns out to be wrong. Remember, anyone else remember this back in school? You’re trying to get an assignment done and I was never someone who put off working on assignments. I was just someone who kept working on them. If I have more time, I’ll keep working on it. And then I’d think of, well, if I redid this and I’d start tearing it apart and it’s the night before and I just rewrote this whole section here or there and it’s sort of like, oh boy.
And then you think, but was that ice I hear on the roof? Think, oh, could it be a snow day tomorrow? That’d be great, right? Because then I know I’m okay. I have a whole nother day. I can go ahead and rewrite a whole nother section. I can go wild, right? Because I don’t have that pressure.
And sometimes, sometimes I was so overjoyed because that ice starts coming, I’m not going anywhere. But then there was those times I put my hope in that, oh yeah, I can see the ice coming. I can see it coming. It’s coming. It’s not coming.
What’s our hope in? Is it something that’s actually coming? 1 John 3, verse one: “See what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God. And so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now. And what we will be has not yet appeared, but we know that when he appears, we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”
How do we meet the deadline? What do we hope? Well, it’s not in how righteous I am, how brilliant I’m going to be, right? I’m going to have to figure this all out. How fortunate my circumstances are. How everyone around me is going to solve everything for me. What is it that I hope in? Hope in his righteousness.
And in that, as we are those who hope in his righteousness, we see the thing that actually gives us hope right now, right, because if I’m in that pool and it’s freezing, I’m not feeling hopeful no matter how much I thought I could get in again. But even as we’re in the cold pools of life today, God gives us a heater. Gives us two, actually.
You see, we have the blessing of fellowship with our God right now. We’re going to have the Lord’s Supper in a few minutes. And as we do, as we come before our God, and we pray that his Spirit would nourish us, what do we find? This is about actually being with our God now. Yes, we don’t get to see him in his full glory right now. Yes, we hope for what is to come, but we have his presence with us right now.
Whatever parts of your life feel dark and lonely, you’re not alone in right now. Because God’s in them with you. You’re taking that chill off. You can come to him, and you may not even have the words to say, but you don’t need to. He already knows. He just is there with you.
And so too are his people. That’s what’s beautiful about being here together. And it’s beautiful about being on the other side of that meatball hope. Because here I am, and here you are, and here our online church family is. We’re all here together.
And I think about that, and just how amazing that is. That it doesn’t mean that I don’t get discouraged, and there aren’t those times where I’m not living as a person of hope. But I have to say, with all of you here surrounding me, and during the week, say we get onto the signal, and we’re praying for each other, and there’s that hope, and even our most challenging circumstances that we’re in this together, as we study God’s word on Tuesday nights, and it’s just sort of that midweek time to kind of settle back in, and we’re caring for each other, and walking through things together. The beauty of that.
Some of the pools of life are cold, but he doesn’t leave us in to be cold. Not even now. Again, it doesn’t mean everything’s right yet, but it means it’s moving in the right direction. And if I were in that cold water, and in that cold water, you walked over with a giant water heating unit, and you placed it into the pool, and you assured me it wasn’t going to electrocute me. It was safe. And I knew that heat was coming, and I felt the first little glimmer, well not glimmer, hopefully I’m not seeing it, then I’m getting electrocuted.
But that first little ripple of warm water going by, you know what? I’d feel a lot warmer than I actually was, because I knew it was improving. That’s what God gives us the fellowship we have with him, and with his people now for. That we might not see the full restoration yet, but he is already bringing that warmth.
We’re not just hoping in something, trying to construct it over a meal with friends, sitting in Ikea, talking about what could be. We have what God says in his word will be. He’s giving us something better than meatballs, he’s giving us his Spirit in us. Meatballs are great, but God’s Spirit in us, now we’re really talking.
And if that heater goes in the pool, I know that the water is eventually going to get warm. It’s going to get to where it’s supposed to be. The amazing thing is, as we look at God’s word, and we read about where it’s going, we know that we’re going to be those who get to experience the absolute glory of God, to be in his presence, to be restored, whatever is broken in our lives, whatever has us, where our hearts ache tonight. It’s not going to be. It’s going to be made right. God will wipe away every tear.
We need to hope in the right thing. All those other indicators, they end up falling short. One of the interesting things I’ve run into this year is, I didn’t know this before, I don’t know how long this has been going on, but did you know you can actually track how popular the pizza delivery joints around the Pentagon are?
There’s a Pentagon pizza tracker. And it’s a pizza tracker. Pizza tracker. And you see, there’s a reason why they want to know how many slices are going into the central hub of the American military and nourishing those planning things out. Because if the pizza orders go up, there’s probably something happening.
And so you can go to the pizza tracker and see, oh, it’s Friday night, and Domino’s is twice as busy near the Pentagon as normal. And you can say, oh, I wonder what’s going on. There might be something happening. And so like in the buildup to the missions that took place in Iran earlier this year, people are really watching closely. Well, how many pizzas are being ordered at the Pentagon? And what do you know on the night that they launched the attack on those nuclear sites? They ordered a lot of pizza. A lot of pizza.
But there have been other times, other times around then and since then where people have been ordering a lot of pizza and nothing happened. Not a single thing happened. So if I put all my understanding of what’s going to happen in the world in a pizza tracker, I’m probably going to be disappointed. If I put all my hope in what’s going to happen in my life in some life coach tracker, right, some self-help book, some plan, some ingenious timeline in my own head of how everything’s going to work, sometimes it’s gonna be right.
Sometimes it’s gonna tell you when people are ordering, sometimes it’s gonna be nothing other than the fact that there were a lot of people who were really hungry. I don’t know, maybe they were going into their once yearly recertification in HR compliance that night. And yeah, they were eating pizza, but they were, we’ve all been in those meetings, right? It wasn’t anything earth-shattering at all. In fact, they were trying to stay awake as they ate their pizza. It’s quite possible.
And a lot of times our plans as we have them all worked out, what we need to do is say, God, help me to actually have my hope in what’s right because the things I’m putting my hope in right now, I’m feeling really hopeful right now, but I’m gonna find out that I’ve been called to nothing more than another human resources expo. No offense to anyone who might be listening who’s an HR director. I know you have a tough and thankless job. It’s not to make fun of that.
But I think we all know that there are a lot of those things that are just not the most edifying. Where am I putting my hope? How many things have I hoped for that have never happened? How many things that, play this game with yourself for a moment.
When you plan things out, how many things have you hoped for, maybe even, let’s not go back too far. Just in the last year, how many things have you hoped for that haven’t happened? How many things the last week have you hoped for that haven’t happened, right?
I mean, we can start coming up with these lists and what does that tell us? It tells us we put our hope in an awful lot of things that don’t happen. If my hope is in the wrong things, it won’t happen, but if I put my hope in the right thing, the meaningful thing, it will.
Now, let’s say all this is well and good. I mean, it is well and good. This is wonderful news here, right? But there’s another question. You might have the best plan worked out. I may have been sitting over those meatballs and had the best plan. Maybe someone far smarter than me actually had nailed down exactly how Little Hills really should be and was sitting there eating meatballs.
That still doesn’t mean it was going to happen. Right? A person walks out of Ikea and gets hit by a bus. It’s not going to happen. You plan to open as everything goes into lockdown. It’s not going to happen.
So not only do we need to know that we’re hoping in the right thing, but we need to know that we’re hoping in the sure thing, and that’s what we see in verse 19. And what is the measurable greatness of his power towards us who believe according to the working of his great might?
You see, we need more than hope. We need hope, right? Anyone else love when you’re feeling hopeful? Anyone say, I hate when I feel hopeful? Oh, awful feeling. No, we all want hope, but I think we also know that we want hope that actually matters.
And for it to matter, it needs to be the right thing that we’re hoping in. It needs to actually be the sure thing as well. That’s what Paul wants them to understand here is what they have. What is the measurable greatness of his power towards us who believe? God’s power is strong and sure. It will work.
Not some wistful longing as one commentator put it. We find a lot of wistful longings. I can do wistful longing all day. I’m good at that, right? Oh, wouldn’t it be nice? But a lot of wouldn’t it be nice, we just carry a bag of wouldn’t it be nice with us. And if anything, they actually drain hope from us because wouldn’t it be nice, but it’s not.
What God’s promising is something that actually is lasting and good and not even just passing, not just, oh, I felt really good after I shared this plan and someone said it was a good idea and it’s going to happen. But it’s actually going to happen.
First Corinthians 15, 19: “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.” Kind of an interesting thing when you think about it.
If all we have in Jesus is what’s happening in this life, we say, well, I feel pretty good when I leave church, right? I sing some great songs, I’m around some great people, I feel hopeful. But can you imagine if we do all that and you get to the end of life and that’s it, boom, done.
Paul says, you know, we really are those who are most pitied because at the end of life, when you realize all that hope was leading to a dead end, I just, well, this is it. It almost would be worse than actually coming into life and running all the way through life with despair because at least you weren’t disappointed at the end.
Saw an ad on Facebook the other day for the death clock. Anyone seen this? You can actually buy it, you can pre-order one of these if you’d like. You can get it and it will count down how many seconds you have left to live.
See, can you just imagine every morning you wake up and instead of it telling you what time it is, I have X number of seconds left in my life. You can’t press a button, it’ll show you the time and then you can press another big red button and it goes right back to how long you have until you don’t.
And the company says somehow they have an algorithm, you answer two minutes worth of questions and it comes up with the statistical likelihood of how, statistical, not participation, it’s not raining. Statistical probability of how long you’re going to live.
There you are. And so you can have that. And we might even say there’s some quality to having that clock, right? Because if you wake up and you watch the seconds falling off of that clock, there goes another second, I’m never getting back. Let’s just look at that thing again, right? Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
What’s that do? Well, it might make you go and jump in that pool when it’s cold. It might make you go and apologize to someone before you run out of time, right? I don’t want to have this broken relationship. I don’t want this thing that I always should have said to go unsaid. I don’t want to waste time. I’m not going to doom scroll Facebook and look at ads for death clocks. I’m going to go and do something better with my life because I only have this much time left.
But it struck me also how morbid it is when you think about that. Basically, it’s saying the only thing I can count on, besides maybe taxes, right, Bob? Is death. Just wait and count down.
I can’t imagine having that clock and seeing it start to get kind of low. You hold your breath and think, I wonder, when it actually strikes zero, I just. And so everything is predicated on, I wonder how I can make the best use of this time. I might as well try to live everything I can out of it because the clock, well, it’s told me what I have.
What if instead of being this red, dooming clock, we had a clock to glory, a clock until we fully see our God and are fully restored? Shouldn’t be counting down to death. We count up. We count to the fullness of experiencing our God.
What am I living, believing is sure? Is it just death and taxes? Or am I living that what’s truly sure is that the God of the universe loves me and is going to restore me and is going to restore those whom I love, that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved, that this is something that I can actually have hope in.
Am I living that it’s not just counting down until I’m out of time and I hope I made some good use of this time, but I’m making good use of this time because God is going to do something with it. There is some place that I’m going, some place that all who trust in Jesus are going, that I’m sharing Jesus with people, well, at least I made some good use of the time before I just ceased to exist.
But no, because I’m in eternity with our Lord and I want everyone else that I know to be in eternity with our Lord too. Jesus is our sure and lasting hope. There isn’t anything else that we can be more sure of. We can’t even be as sure of death and taxes as we can be sure that Jesus is our lasting hope.
And so when Paul prays that the Ephesians’ eyes would be opened, what he’s really praying is that in the gloom, in the false hopes, in the passing hopes, the things that give us hope for a season or even years but then fade, that in all the midst of that, they would actually see with clarity that there is one hope that won’t fade.
Jesus is our sure and lasting hope. Today, and for however many days that clock shows, and in all the days beyond it, would you pray with me, please?
Father, we come before you as those who need hope. We need hope that matters. We need hope that is sure and is lasting, that won’t fade away, and you have given it to us. And yet, even as you do, we struggle to keep our eyes focused on you.
Lord, would you help us tonight? Whatever else we’re hoping in, whatever we’ve quit hoping in because we’re too busy looking in our own abilities and realizing that it’s not working, would you help us set all those things aside? And turn our eyes towards Jesus.
As we do, Lord, would you speak to us afresh, reminding us that our hope is sure. And that in everything else that comes and goes, that your love is a thing that will not fade.
Would you speak that truth to each of our hearts and embed it in there and not allow it to get ignored or fade away, but rather that it would be there as we wake in the morning, as we go to sleep, that we would be people of that sort of hope, and that then we would show that kind of hope to this world around us.
We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Start the Conversation