Hope: Expect the Unexpected

December 18, 2016     NOTES NOT EDITED
Hope: Expect the Unexpected

Luke 2:25-35

SIS: Hope is the confident expectation that God will fulfill His promises, though He may do so in unexpected ways.

As I was studying and praying in preparation for this week’s Advent Celebration of Hope, my initial thoughts about hope are confirmed. Hope is the confident expectation that God will fulfill His promises, even if He does so in very unexpected ways. Hope is expecting the unexpected.

Here is how another preacher outlines this matter:

“We are often unprepared for the answers we receive from God. His answers frequently do not look at first like answers. They look like problems. They look like trouble. They look like loss, disappointment, affliction, conflict, sorrow, and increased selfishness. They cause deep soul wrestling and expose sins and doubts and fears. They are not what we expect, and we often do not see how they correspond to our prayers” (Jon Bloom, Desiring God).

As I have said before, the number of times that God has miraculously answered my prayers exactly as I expected have been few. These times have been a glorious encouragement to my faith.

There have been times, more than a few, in which God’s answer to my prayer seemed to be such that it challenged my faith.  Often it seems God has either ignored my request or He flatly refused it. I am not talking about the “name it-claim it” heresy promoters who believe that if one asks God for wealth and riches, God is obligated to provide the same.

I am talking about prayers for healing or help, oftentimes for others and not myself. When I see the suffering of others continue after I have prayed, my faith is badly bruised. Perhaps, I am a man of weak faith. I suspect, however, this happens to many others, even those whose faith is much stronger than mine. Hope has a hard time staying afloat amidst storms of unanswered prayers or difficult circumstances

What I am learning about hope is that what we perceive as “unanswered prayers” are really “unexpected answers.” This is really a thread weaved throughout the entirety of God’s holy record. We certainly see “unexpected answers” to prayers throughout the Nativity Story and beyond.

Certainly Joseph’s request for a place where Mary could deliver their first child would not have been a musty stable. Despised and lowly shepherds would never have expected to be the first recipients of the birth announcement.  Wise men from hundreds of miles away would never have expected to find the Messiah by following a strange star as it danced along the night sky coming to rest over the exact place where the King of Kings could be found.

Certainly, the disciples never expected the Messiah to lead by example rather than fiat. Neither did the followers of Jesus expect Him to destroy death by dying.

God often delivers His answers in unexpected packaging. Hope is expecting that God will fulfill every promise, even if He does so in very unexpected ways. While this does challenge our faith, holding on to our hope through trials and uncertainties also strengthens our faith.

The story of Simeon, often overlooked in many Advent season preaching series, vividly displays the power of Hope.  Simeon’s story outlines several significant requirements for having hope.

1.  Hope must be PINNED to a Promise (v26)

Recently, one of those new, hip, skinny jeaned preachers with a megachurch platform ruffled the feathers of the evangelical community when he said, ““Christianity doesn’t hinge on the truth or even the stories around the Birth of Jesus.”

Andy Stanley is the pastor of hugely popular Northpointe Community Church in Georgia.  He got his start when breaking away from his equally popular, pastor-father, Charles Stanley.  Andy likes to present an “edgy, seeker-driven message.”  His seeker-driven brand of preaching attempts to repackage Christianity so non-churched people can relate better to it.  He’s sort of the “new and improved” version of his father—at least in his own mind.

In the same message he declared boldly, “If somebody can predict their own death and then their own resurrection, I’m not all that concerned about how they got into the world.”  Andy’s theological position is that the entire message of the Bible leading up to the resurrection is secondary, or even insignificant.  What really matters is the resurrection story.

Well, this “new and improved” version of the gospel may relate better to the non-believers Stanley wants to communicate with, but it will leave them with a false, powerless, gospel-lite version of the truth.  The foundation for our faith is God’s promises. 

A gospel that is disconnected from God’s promises in God’s Word is a “placebo” gospel.  Merriam Webster’s Dictionary defines a placebo as:  inert preparation prescribed more for the mental relief of the patient than for its actual effect on a disorder.  In other words, it makes one feel better but does not affect any change whatsoever.  A placebo gospel simply makes a lost person feel better about being lost—a worse condition than not even knowing one is lost.  There is no hope in the resurrection when disconnected from the thousands of years of God’s promises.  There is no Easter without Christmas.

There is no hope without a promise.  Hope is the expectation that God will fulfill His promise.  Take away the promises and there is no basis for the hope.  There’s no, “Thus sayeth the Lord” foundation for our faith.

Simeon had hope because he was given a promise by God.  Look at v26 again:  It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he saw the Lord’s Messiah.  This promise was specific.  So often people speak of hope as some “general expectation that something good might happen.”  There is no specific promise.  There is no real hope.

This was not the case with Simeon.  It was not the case with the entire nation of Israel in general.  They were “looking forward” to a coming Messiah—A God-man, or God Himself—who would deliver them even as Moses had delivered their forefathers from Egypt.  Look at verse 25:

²⁵ There was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon. This man was righteous and devout,  looking forward to Israel’s consolation.

Let me read that from the New Living Translation to give you a better sense of what “looking forward to Israel’s consolation” means: “Simeon. . . was eagerly waiting for the Messiah to come and rescue Israel.”

Many people misunderstand the Bible because they fail to see it as a single story with a single theme.  They tend to divide it up like a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken during a Super Bowl Party.  The Bible is one story about the One True God’s plan to redeem the elect from their sins.  Everything in the Bible relates to the single theme of God’s redemption.  We can draw many great truths from the stories and teachings of the Bible, but we must never disconnect one part of the Bible from the rest.

The story of the birth of Jesus is as central to the message of salvation as the story of the resurrection.  Without the former, you don’t have the latter.  Without the virgin birth of Jesus, you do not have a Messiah—or God-Man.  The identity of Jesus is crucial to the efficacy or “effectiveness” of His death on the cross.  Every detail about the birth of Jesus demonstrates Who He was—the Messiah. 

God’s promise of a Messiah that would one day deliver people, once for all, from their sins begins in the very first book of the Bible.  God declares His plan to send a Messiah to “crush Satan’s head”:\

¹⁵ I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.

I’ve never counted all the promises of a Messiah in the Bible, but there are a lot of them.  Someone actually has a list of 365 of them.  (www.bibleprobe.com/365messianicprophecies)

The Nativity Story impacted those that experienced it because it was the exact fulfillment of God’s promise of a Deliverer that had given the Jews hope for centuries.  Real, lasting, powerful hope is always Pinned to the Promises of God.

This is why we sing the hymn: 

Standing on the promises of Christ my King,

Through eternal ages let His praises ring,

Glory in the highest, I will shout and sing,

Standing on the promises of God.

Refrain:

    Standing, standing,

    Standing on the promises of God my Savior;

    Standing, standing,

    I’m standing on the promises of God

To stand means to have hope.  We have hope because God has made us many and varied promises and we can expect—that is, hope—that God will fulfill every promise He has made.

2.  Hope is maintained through PERSISTENCE (v29)

Now, Master, You can dismiss Your slave in peace, as You promised

We are not told exactly how old Simeon was at the time of the Lord’s birth.  The feeling of the story and the words, “Master, you can now dismiss your servant,” imply that Simeon was advanced in age.  If you take this implication and combine it with the narrative of Anna which follows the emphasis is upon old age and waiting patiently, even persistently, for God to fulfill His promise of the Messiah.

36 There was also a prophetess,  Anna, a daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.  She was well along in years,  having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, 37 and was a widow for 84 years.  She did not leave the temple complex, serving God night and day with fasting and prayers.

Years, in fact decades, stacked one upon the other as Simeon and Anna erected a tower of devotion while waiting for the promise of God to be fulfilled.  How many times they each must have prayed, “Oh, Lord, please let this be the day that our eyes behold your Salvation.”  Day after day passed and their prayers seemed to go unanswered. 

With prayers rising up like a mountain, year after year, neither Simeon nor Anna lost hope.  Even as their backs bent under the weight of the wait, and their eyesight dimmed, their hope never lost its brilliance. 

Often, as a believer I know I SHOULD feel hope, but I really don't feel hope.  A prayer is not answered or circumstances are difficult, and my hope takes one to the chin. My faith gets bruised.  Often within my heart a conflict rages between how I feel and how I know I should feel because I am a child of God.  It takes a great deal of persist faith sometimes to adjust my “feeling” to my “faith.”  Hope requires a persistent faith.

I came across a real gem in a quote while studying for this sermon. It describes perfectly how discouragement and hope often simultaneously inhabit our hearts and cause conflict. Here's how one writer expressed this dilemma: Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not permanent.--Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960.

That’s what gives us the persistence to passionately maintain our hope even when the circumstances of life assail us.  Hope reminds us that it is our “faith,” not our “feelings,” that form the basis for our hope. 

God has made us many and varied promises and He has both the will and the power to fulfill each one of them.  Yet, often our circumstances in life will shout in our face:  “God has abandoned you; God has ignored your pain and dismissed your prayers.”  This feeling that God has indeed abandoned us and has indeed ignored our prayers is a very real experience in the heart of even the most devout believer.  Even Jesus—God’s very own Son—cried out in pain:

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!”

It is precisely at the place in our life where our hope seems to crash headlong into our circumstances that we need to be persistent in our faith.  We need to realize that hope is the confident expectation that God WILL fulfill His promises, though He may do so in unexpected ways.  Our hope persists through trials because by faith we understand that the “feeling that we are feeling are not permanent.”  Faith, not feeling fuels our hope.  We need to persistently pursue the promises of God no matter how long it takes.  Hope requires persistence.  There is a final characteristic of hopeful people:

3.  They PREPARE by Expecting the Unexpected (30-35)

³⁰ For my eyes have seen Your salvation. ³¹ You have prepared it in the presence of all peoples— ³² a light for revelation to the Gentiles and glory to Your people Israel. ³³ His father and mother  were amazed at what was being said about Him. ³⁴ Then Simeon blessed them and told His mother Mary: “Indeed, this child is destined to cause the fall and rise of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed — ³⁵ and a sword will pierce your own soul—that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

Joseph and Mary were amazed at what Simeon declared.  The long awaited Messiah had arrived.  He was the Deliverer in the spirit of the great deliverer Moses.  Hebrews 6:1-6 makes this comparison declaring that Jesus is a “greater deliverer than Moses.”  However, Simeon was talking about a newborn baby, not a mighty man such as Moses.  Simeon also spoke of Jesus as being a “light to the gentiles.”  The Jews were looking for a Messiah to “free them from the gentiles, particularly the Romans.”  Simeon’s words brought “amazement” because Jesus was not at all what the Jews were expecting the Messiah to be.  The whole experience of Jesus’ birth presented unexpected twists and turns, not the least of which was Mary’s surprise pregnancy without sex. 

The whole story of the Bible is about God acting in unexpected ways.  God had Noah build a boat to save them from a flood when it is likely no one had ever seen a flood before.  God sent Moses to speak on behalf of an Unseen God to Pharaoh, a man considered a god, and the sign of Moses commission was a shepherd’s staff.  David killed the most powerful soldier of his day with a rock.  Joshua brought down the mighty walls of Jericho with a blast of a ram’s horn and the shout of the Jews.  Gideon destroyed the Midianite army with only 300 soldiers armed with a ram’s horn and clay pots! 

The record of God’s actions throughout the Word of God is that of God meeting His peoples’ needs in unexpected ways.  This led the hymn writer William Cowper to pen those immortal words,

God moves in mysterious ways//His wonders to perform.

Simeon’s description of the ministry of Jesus amazed Joseph and Mary, but as Simeon continued, their amazement became confusion and perhaps even despair as Simeon continues,  ³⁴“Indeed, this child is destined to cause the fall and rise of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be opposed — ³⁵ and a sword will pierce your own soul—that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

This statement was completely unexpected.  Just as a boat was an unexpected way to save mankind in Noah’s day, and a stone was an unexpected way to bring down a mighty giant, so dying upon a cross was an “unexpected” way for God to deliver His people.  Simeon’s prophecy in regard to “a sword piercing Mary’s soul” looked forward 33 years to when a Roman soldier would pierce the heart of her beloved baby as she stood at the foot of the cross to watch.

This is not at all what Mary expected to hear about her son.

We will lose hope unless we PREPARE ourselves in advance to expect God to work in unexpected ways.  God through Isaiah gave us this instruction many years before the birth of Jesus:

⁹ “For as heaven is higher than earth, so My ways are higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.

Hope requires we expect God to fulfill His promises but realize He may do so in unexpected ways.  This is the clear teaching in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.  God’s ways are not our ways. 

It is hard sometimes to accept God’s way of answering our prayers.  On Monday, March 8^th, 2004 I received a call in the evening that my little brother, Tim, had been taken by ambulance to the hospital and was in intensive care.  He was on a liver transplant list, but he had started to bleed again as the result of his failing liver.  I remember going to the church and praying.  I remember very clearly what I prayed.  I asked the Lord to give my brother a new liver—and I was not talking about a transplant.  I believed as confidently as humanly possible that God would answer my prayer.

I got a call from my older brother the next day.  God had answered my prayer.  My little brother had left this world.  He not only had a new liver, but he had a new residence in that city we call Heaven.  It was not the way I expected God to answer my prayer.

This has happened many times over four decades of ministry.  I have not given up hope, because I have absolute confidence that God will fulfill His promises, including answering every one of my prayers.  I have learned, however, that God often answers my prayers in “unexpected” ways.

I wish I could say I had the same deep and devout faith as Simeon and my hope never wavers.  I cannot say that because that would be a lie.  My hope does waver.  My hope takes on water when hit by the storms of life.  But, my hope never sinks into despair. 

My hope is PINNED to the promises of God.  My hope is maintained through dogged PERSISTENCE to exercise faith and believe that the “feeling I am feeling is not permanent.”  Finally, my hope stands up against every challenge because I am PREPARED to expect that God may answer my pray in an unexpected way.

In this season of Advent we celebrate the hope that we have in Christ—that blessed hope that just as He came according to God’s promise and plan the first time, He will come again and receive us all into His Presence.  That hope.  That’s “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13).  That’s the hope we celebrate at Christmas and every other day of our lives.