Living for Tomorrow
Pastor Hank Malone
Advent 2 / Romans 15:4-13
For Alexander the Great at 29 years of age there were no more worlds to conquer so he grieved his future and died at the age of 30. He latterly cried in his beer and died. No future – no hope! A similar mood hangs over many people of the 21st. century. A sophisticated technological age often robs many of a sense of personal identity or worth. Children are able to accomplish what their parents and grandparents are unable to do with a computer. A kind of hopelessness permeates our lives. We feel like many old computers are, useless, out of date and unable to relate to new programs.
When hope disappears, there is small reason for us to be concerned about “living for tomorrow.” When hope is shattered, there is little room left for faith. When tomorrow totters on the brink of destruction, tomorrow’s children turn to destructive activity like drugs and sex to grieve life and kill pain. In the process they kill themselves. They have no hope.
The coming of Jesus has something to say about “living for today.” Thank God His coming has a great deal to say about “living for tomorrow.” Christ came not only to fulfill the promises of the past and to redeem life for the present, but He came to bring us hope – confidence and peace as we live also for tomorrow.
Hope is a gift. St. Paul is a realist. Even at his time the Lord seemed to be slow, dragging His feet, in answering prayer and dispelling doubt. Many were weak in faith, second-guessing and wondering if their choice to follow a Savior was wise. To many it seemed questionable to live for tomorrow when the challenges of living for today defied the best effort they could produce. They, even as we, needed reassurance, strength to disentangle from complete preoccupation with the present or utter despair over the future. Hope was what they, and we, have needed! Hope strengthens the weak and confirms the strong in their faith. In the battle against doubt and despair Paul points his readers to God’s Word. He suggests that the Scriptures are given to communicate what God has done and is doing so that we might have hope. Hope is a gift of God! We learn to know this as we look back at the evidence, as we look around in the church, and as we look ahead then in hope.
Look Back at the Evidence. For all those words which were written long ago are meant to teach us today. When we read in the Scriptures, we see the endurance of men and of all the help that God gave them in those days. We are encouraged to go on hoping in our own time. One of the great blessings of the Bible is the evidence it records. It is a history of the mighty acts of God in time. It records God’s intervention in the lives of His people to accomplish His good and gracious purposes. The Scriptures verify and vindicate the wisdom and way of the Lord our God. Sacred history is never merely the transmission of facts about figures of the past, but “these are written that you might have hope.” --“that your whole life may be radiant with hope!”
As the glory of Solomon and David receded and only tarnished memories remained, the Jews patience wore thin. Generations of faithful had come and gone. Slowly a rigid ecclesiastical system cut them off from personal communion with God. Gradually a zealous and demanding religious aristocracy erected walls between the privileged and the poor, between the Jew and the Gentile.
Into this dead and darkened world of despair came Jesus Christ as the message and messenger of the Father. He carried the light of true life and made God’s love for us known. Promise and prophecy gave way to fulfillment and concrete reality. Christ took their eyes of themselves, lifting them once again to God. Hope is removed as far as possible from earthly utopia. “God, who gave to our forefathers many different glimpses of the truth in the words of the prophets, has now, at the end of the present age, given us the truth in His Son.” (Heb. 1:1-2) Christ restored hope to the believing Jew.
Gentiles too look back. Hopelessness was apparent also among the Gentiles. It is much like our day with rampant immorality, where lives are bought and sold in the open market. Their live-span was only thirty or forty years, as ours has been expanded so has our hope from this age been drained. Life here and now was inadequate and brief. Was this life all there was? Where were they, the “outsiders,” to find hope? There seemed to be no room for them in the Jewish religion. Much like the non Christian and unchurched feel today. Feeling powerless within themselves and knowing no divine answer to their despair, the Gentiles -- modern mankind – tend to live only for the day and fatalistically ignore the future.
But Jesus the Word made flesh brought hope to those sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death. Here is a God and Savior who is more than a national deity, more than a mere puppet in the hands of a proud people. Jesus the Christ came that the world might be saved. He came to enable the Gentiles to praise God for His mercy. Hope surfaced as God reached beyond the ranks of the Jews to embrace all people with His grace and mercy through His Son Jesus. Paul reminds us that in Christ Jew and Gentile find common ground and purpose, common faith and hope.
Look Around at the Evidence of God in this world! Looking back using the Scriptures, we learn of God’s faithfulness among His people in years gone by. We appreciate the meaning Jesus brought to their lives, establishing hope and confidence in their trustworthy God. God continues to encourage and to inspire, to give meaning and power as we live for tomorrow. We see evidence of God at work among us.
“May the god who inspires men to endure… give you a mind united toward one another because of your common loyalty to Jesus,” writes Paul. This fellowship of Christ’s people is a manifestation of our shared hopes. Our relationship to Christ is not so subjective, so personal, that it obscures the horizontal expression of the community of faith in Him through His body the church. Paul cites unity in common loyalty to Jesus Christ, worship that springs from the heart in praise of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus, and Christian sensitivity to one another as evidences that God is at work among us.
Hope begets unity and joy; despair and doubt breed grumbling and sadness. It is hope that blends the resources of God’s people in behalf of mission: to reach others with God’s love through words and works. It is hope that lifts the church above her caustic critics “to be about her Father’s business.” It is hope that frees God’s people from seeking an earthly kingdom and rather to rejoice that we are strangers and pilgrims in this barren land. Christ points us away from laying up treasures on earth to lay up treasures in heaven. It is hope that takes Jesus’ advice in the Sermon on the Mount: “Don’t worry then at all about tomorrow. Tomorrow can take care of itself!” We live for tomorrow free from all the anxieties of the day that would question or doubt the providence and fatherly concern of God.
Our hope finds its roots in the record of what God has done in the past, of what God is doing here and now, and it is also taking Him at His Word regarding the future. We look ahead confident that the fulfillment of life itself is in God’s hands. A deep and underlying joy and peace permeate our lives today as we live for tomorrow in the grace of God today. He gives us a sure hope. A hope that is given substance by what God has done for us in Christ, by what He is doing now for us in Christ, and by what He still holds in store for those who entrust themselves to His faithful and unchanging love.
May the God of hope and love fill you with joy and peace in your faith, that by the power of His Holy Spirit your whole life and outlook may be radiant with the power of His love and forgiveness in Christ Jesus our Lord. Go in peace and hope to serve the Lord!