Second Sunday in Advent 2009
Text: Romans 15:4-13
The Rev. Jerry Kistler
St. Stephen’s Reformed
Episcopal Church
“Prepared for Christ by the Word of Hope”
This second Sunday in Advent is known as “Bible Sunday” for as we heard in our epistle lesson this morning, “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.” And Cranmer’s collect for today captures, or “collects,” the essence of this message in, I think, one of the most memorable prayers in the prayer book:
Blessed
Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant
that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest
them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever
hold fast, the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in
our Saviour Jesus Christ.
We continue today in the Advent theme of being prepared for Christ’s coming. Last Sunday we talked about being prepared through love. But today’s special theme is being prepared through hope by the Holy Scriptures.
A question that I think a lot of people are asking these days is, “In a world like this, with its constant threat of terrorist attacks and a war that seems to be dragging on and on, with violence on the rise in our cities, with a continual decline in basic morality and human decency – how is it possible to have hope, a true and lasting hope? The answer the Scriptures give is “the Scriptures.” The Scriptures, the Word of God, is and can be the only source of enduring hop in a world like this, for as we heard our Lord say in the Gospel, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words shall by no means pass away.” The Word of God will endure forever, and so will the hope that it gives.
St. Peter writes in I Peter 1: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope.” From that passage we learn that it was God’s eternal purpose in regenerating sinners to give them a new and living hope, a hope which the world cannot give. St. James says that God gave us this new birth and this new hope “by the Word of Truth” – by the Holy Scriptures.
You see, the Scriptures, the Word of God, was written
ultimately that we might have hope. And it was the Word that actually birthed us
into this hope - the Word spoken over us in our baptisms which gave us new
birth to God, and the Word preached to us which gave new birth to our faith:
“Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” And so our epistle
lesson ended with that wonderful benediction of
If I can have you take away one thought today it’s this: that hope is the exclusive possession of the Christian. Have you ever thought about it quite in those terms? But it’s true. Hope is exclusively yours as a believer in Christ. Paul says in the letter to the Ephesians that those who do not have Christ do not have hope and are without God in the world. One could hardly imagine a more hopeless situation – to be without God in a world like this. Even if a person doesn’t happen to feel his hopelessness, nevertheless the Scripture says he lives in a hopeless situation.
Remember how it was when many of Jesus’ disciples began to leave Him because they were offended by his teaching, how He turned to the Twelve and asked them, “Do you also want to leave Me?” And it was Peter who answered, “Lord, where else would we go? Who else has the words of eternal life?” Hope is the exclusive possession of the believer.
You don’t have to look very far to see the hopeless state most people are living in from day to day in our modern culture. Most of the people who live next door to us, or who work right along side of us at our jobs, are living with a world-view that sees life and history as the products of a meaningless accident, a chance rising out of a primordial chaos, and one in which the future will most likely be simply a return to that chaos.
I’ve told this story before, but perhaps some of you haven’t
heard it. There is a strange custom in the
Is our modern culture really that far advance from this? Millions of people are living really under the same myth and the same fear: that life began from chaos and, at any moment, it could return to chaos. So modern man is still desperately trying to scare away the dragon, only now he’s go much better weapons. It’s a movie plot we see over and over: mankind saves himself from the return of chaos in the form of a planet-killing asteroid, or a gigantic city-annihilating flying saucer, by flying up into the belly of the beast and lighting off a couple of nuclear bombs. It’s a great movie plot, but you see, it’s the world’s message of hope.
The world wants us to place our hope in its power to save.
The world says hope will be restored when we finally capture Bin Laden, or when
the war is finally over, or when
Hope is the rarest and most expensive of all commodities, which only Christ has been able to purchase for us through his death and resurrection. It’s a hope that doesn’t rest on the relative peace and calm of our lives, but it’s a hope that can even embrace the chaos – the struggles, the hardships, the sufferings of life – as the means by which God shapes us and sanctifies us and transforms us to reflect more and more the image of Christ, and ultimately to be glorified like Christ was glorified. It’s only a real hope which can remain firmly intact, and even grow, through the chaos of life, isn’t it? And this is the hope that we have been born to through the Word of God.
But now, having been born to hope through the Word doesn’t
mean we’re guaranteed to always walk in hope. Hope is something we have to
struggle to maintain. As John Piper puts it, “When you’re born again, you are
born for battle – a battle to maintain the full assurance of hope to the end
(Hebrews
We are born again to a battle to maintain our hope, and the only way we can win this battle is to fight with the shield of faith in the one hand, and the sword of the Spirit – the Word of God – in the other. And so Paul writes in our epistle lesson from Romans, “Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we though patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.”
There are three important truths we need to receive from this text: First, that all Scriptures were written for our instruction. That means the Old Testament as well as the New. That means Philemon as well the Gospel of John. That means I Chronicles as well as I Corinthians. So the first thing we should take away from this text is that we need to maintain a steady diet of the whole Word of God, not just a snack on our favorite passages. Okay? You get it? We need to receive instruction from the whole counsel of God. And that takes some work. That takes a planned out systematic approach to reading the Scriptures. So read through the daily lectionary readings from the prayer book, or read through a one-year Bible. Find a good whole Bible commentary to help you understand what you’re reading. But read. And real the whole thing. That’s the first important message we need to take away from this passage.
Second, all Scripture is intended to give patience and comfort All Scripture is intended to minister to us “endurance and encouragement” is the way the NKJV translates it. What is the basic story of the Bible? It is that God has preserved a people for Himself through the most difficult and trying of circumstances, and that He came through for them on all His gracious promises, even though everything in the world told them to give up hope. All the stories of the Old Testament saints are witnesses of the blessing that comes through faithful endurance, the blessing ultimately of salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the Scriptures say to us, again from Hebrews, “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses… let us also run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking [like them] to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith.” Jesus himself is the ultimate example of the patient endurance that receives the promises of God. And so may His example, and the example of all the saints, encourage our own endurance. That encouragement comes by the Word.
The final point of Romans 15:4 is that all Scripture has this one goal: to sustain our hope. “There are stories of endurance in the scriptures. There are words of encouragement. But the way these stories and these words actually make a difference in our lives is by sustaining our hope. It’s hope that keeps us going through tough situations. Christian endurance is not just teeth-gritting will-power against all odds. We are driven and sustained by hope.” (Piper)
You know, hope has to have a goal to survive. If you know you’ll never get to where you want to go, you won’t keep striving to get there. Hope is like that. The strength to endure in hope comes from the certainty we have of the goal that is set before. And the certainty of the goal set before us comes from knowing and believing the Holy Scriptures.
And so as the voice called out to