Christmas: A Reason to Hope
We are aliens and strangers in your sight, as were all our forefathers. Our days on earth are like a shadow, without hope. 1 Chronicles 29:15 niv
The Child lying in the manger--God incarnate--represents hope to a people born without it. Just about everything about God is reciprocal. Worship Him, and He fills the heart with song; pray to Him, and He brings comfort and consolation; serve Him, and He showers joy and blessings into a life. And, as the prophet Isaiah tells us, those who find their hope in the Lord will be given new strength with which to walk, to run--to soar ever higher into His presence. In other words, those who hope in the Lord will also receive from Him hope. Those who reject the Child whose incarnation we celebrate at this time of year are afraid that they will lose something valuable by trusting in something beyond the familiar soil of earth. In truth, however, they have everything to gain. The one who lives higher gains God's limitless vision and perspective. The one who hopes in the Lord has fewer reasons to hope in anything--or anybody--of this temporal plane. The reluctance of some to live this way is really not surprising for, after all, what this type of living really entails is surrender, a frightening--even repulsive--contemplation for many. To "wait upon," to "hope in," to "wait for" the Lord means that we surrender our shortsighted, immediate aspirations to His limitless, eternal promises, and some people simply can't wait. We live in a world of immediate gratification--a world in which something's value diminishes exponentially with every minute one must wait for its realization. Most people today haven't the patience to "wait for the Lord." But God is more generous than that; He doesn't make us wait for everything. This promise is as much for today as it is for tomorrow, and eternity. Those who place their trust in the Lord of heaven receive an immediate result; He is a living God who is surely as alive in this minute as He is in the boundless minutes of our tomorrows. He doesn't want us to only live with Him tomorrow, but today! We place our life's savings into the hands of the banker. Before we leave the premises, we shake his hand. That handshake represents his promise that when we return our money will still be there in the vault--plus interest. God came to earth in the person of Christ to put flesh on His promise of salvation--to, as it were, extend His hand to solidify the promise. God's hope is not a yearning that something might occur, but a promise that something will. And that something is our redemption in His Son, and the promise of an eternity with Him.My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus' blood and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus' name.
When darkness veils His lovely face,
I rest on His unchanging grace;
In every high and stormy gale,
My anchor holds within the veil.
His oath, His covenant, His blood,
Support me in the whelming flood;
When all around my soul gives way,
He then is all my hope and stay.
When He shall come with trumpet sound,
O may I then in Him be found:
Dressed in His righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne.
On Christ, the solid Rock I stand:
All other ground is sinking sand.
(Edward Mote)