Hope: The Transformative Power in Our Lives

"Paul says this. He said, there's three things. We'll put up on the screen. Go ahead and put that verse up there. I'm not going to flip to it. We can just read it. He says, three things will last forever. Faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. For the next three weeks, we're just, hey, let's just get these simple concepts in. Let's just, last week, what is faith? And how does that affect us? Because Paul says it's an important thing. Today, we're going to talk about hope and the power of hope." [00:02:26] (25 seconds)



"And what he discovered was in this research that because he had saved them once, it created hope inside of a rat. So the first time they were in, the average rat would have drowned in 15 minutes. That's how long the rat would have lasted. About 15 minutes, he's having to save them out because they give up, they go to the bottom of the thing, saves them. Same rats, same water. After they've been saved once, now they're swimming, they're treading water, but they know that if they just tread water long enough, someone will save them. They lasted longer than 15 minutes. You know how long they lasted? 60 hours. 15 minutes to 60 hours, and it's landmark research. On the idea of hope." [00:01:18] (53 seconds)



"Hope as a noun is the intense desire, the expectation that it can and will happen. So here's the difference. One person might say, I don't like being single and I hope to get married one day. That's a wish, right? That's the verb form of hope. The other person says, I hate being single and my fiance has bought me a ring and given it to me and we have a date on the calendar of when our wedding is and I'm looking forward to that day. They're still, they're not married, right? They're still single. They still don't want to be single. One though is just this wish that's out there. The other person has this expectation. I have the ring. I have the date on the calendar. My parents know. His parents know. We've got the venue. All of a sudden, it's still a desire not to be single. There's still that wishfulness, but I've got reasons that I'm looking forward to that day because it's a tangible, real thing that can happen. Does that make sense?" [00:03:41] (61 seconds)



"y 'all remember that clip if you saw it he says this he says a lot of hope is dangerous he says contain it why is a lot of hope dangerous because a person who has hope like that rat in the water will hold on right they won't give up because there's something out there it's not just a wish without any tangible substance it's a it's a wish it's this intentional desire and i also see the finish line i also trust and know that it's coming and then hope can become dangerous in that context but it becomes powerful for us when we talk about faith hope and love because if you have faith of who god is and you have the hope that his promises are coming true you won't give up you won't give up okay i want you to go to a book of romans chapter 5 we're gonna look at three different passages of scripture tonight romans chapter 5 we're going to kind of just hit them pretty quickly romans 5 verse 3 through 5 paul writes this and he says this i think i've got it in this yeah i got the same version he says we can rejoice too" [00:06:16] (65 seconds)



"when we run into problems and trials, right? That's, stop there for a second. Most of us go, what? Like, I don't like problems and trials. Paul says we can rejoice when the bad things happen. We can rejoice when we run into problems and trials for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character. And character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. There's that word hope. Verse five, and this hope will not lead to disappointment for we know how dearly God loves us because he's given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love. That's a lot of verses. Here's what Paul's saying. Hit that next slide. He kind of, this kind of breaks it down of what he's saying." [00:07:21] (41 seconds)



"Like, problems develop endurance, right? You've got to make it through the problem. You can't just make a problem and go away. That endurance that you go as you're doing the problem develops strength of character for you. It makes you a better person. And the strength of character develops in you that confident hope of salvation. So problems aren't really the bad thing. But here's the thing. Go back to that verse previously. Put it up so we can see it. The issue here with hope, or the most important thing, is the last part of that verse. Like, if you're going to have hope," [00:08:03] (31 seconds)



"God also bound himself, God made a promise so that those who receive the promise could be perfectly sure that he would never change his mind. So God has given both his promise and his oath. These two things are unchangeable because it's impossible for God to lie. Therefore, if we have fled to him for, well, we can stop there. For it's impossible to God to lie. And then he gives us this last verse, Hebrews chapter 10, 23. We'll see it on the screen. He says, let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise. So we have hope. Here's what you need to understand." [00:09:31] (41 seconds)



"what Hebrew says in those verses that we just read is that God makes promises and he never lies. God's promises always come true. So if God's promises always come true, then I can have hope that when he says, hey, this is going to happen. I'm going to show up for you. You're going to be in heaven one day. Hey, I'm going to give you a way out of temptation. If he makes all of these promises that if you seek me first, that's Matthew 6, 33. If you seek first the kingdom of God, I'll take care of all of your needs. That's a promise from God. The promise is only as good as the person who gives the promise, but God never lies. God never breaks his promise. So because he's always truthful, we can have hope in his promises." [00:11:00] (47 seconds)



"So if you are living in a chaotic situation, but you don't know that promise, you don't know that you don't have the hope, right? But if you know it and you go, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to have faith, as we talked about last week, that God is true to his promise, and I'm going to seek his kingdom first. I'm going to make all of my life revolve around make him number one, and I'm going to trust, I'm going to have hope that he's going to take care of me in the midst of all of this family crazy. You've got to know the promise. You've got to know him. You're in a relationship, boyfriend, girlfriend, not going real well. You don't know what to do about it. Do I break up with him? Do I not? All of those things. What do I do? If you know the promises, and you're like, I don't want to break up with him because I don't want to be alone. But if you know the promises that God says, hey, I am with you always." [00:13:28] (48 seconds)



"His faith in God, him reciting verses to himself and preaching sermons to himself, he said was what kind of got him through that. Three years. Gets out of prison after eight and a half years total, and they tell him, you're out of prison, but do not preach Christianity. Do not preach Jesus ever again. And he does. And he gets arrested again. And this is Romania a long time ago in the days of communism. They begin to torture. him. The solitary confinement's pretty bad. They would burn him, literally burn him, then throw him into a freezer and leave him in the freezer until he almost freezed to death. They beat the soles of his feet, the bottom of his feet, beat them so much until the skin began just to fall off." [00:14:59] (46 seconds)



"He had hope and that's how he survived it. You've got to know the promise keeper and you've got to know the promises. Okay. So here's your next steps. Here's like, here's what, here's what we can do to develop hope. And then we're breaking into small groups. Here's number one. You got to know the promises of God, right? We talked about that. You got to know them. Like if you don't know what Jesus promises you, you can't have hope in those things. So you've got to know it. So here's one of the things we're going to give you. If you want to, this is kind of a next step. When you split up into small groups in a moment, y 'all grab those small group questions you walk through. I think on the back of them, there's two QR codes. There's a couple of devotionals. One's like a 20 something day. One's I think a little bit shorter. You can QR code. They're on you version on your phone. They're just some daily devotional, some daily time in the Bible. That's just every day. It's a new promise. Here's a promise from the Bible that you can know so that when you need it, hopefully it's in your brain. You might memorize that. You might go back and read those a couple of times. There's some that you might need right there. You might write them down. Know the promise. Know the promise giver. You've got hope, right? And it gets you through what you need to get through. Here's the second thing. And you're doing this tonight already. But put yourself in places where you see God's promises come." [00:17:06] (76 seconds)



"A lifetime in the church where God's people are, are, have given me over the 49 years of my life, story after story after story after story after story after story after story of God showing up. So when I'm looking for hope, I do know the promises of God. So I have hope. I do know God personally, and I've seen him move in my life, and I trust him because his promises have come true to me. So I have hope. But I also have hundreds, if not thousands of stories of other people over, over the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, time of my life where God has showed up and that creates more and more and more hope, right?" [00:18:45] (40 seconds)