Hope in Hard Times

Well, Hope Rising is our current message series. Hello and good morning. Good morning. Good morning balcony. Yeah, we got full balcony today. That's awesome. My name is Mark, one of the pastors, and I am so glad that you are here today joining us live, some of you on our live stream, wherever you are, we're glad that you are with us. And I just got to echo what Trent said, listening to your voices lifted up in worship, that is a blessing that we give to each other. So thank you for being a part of that. That was just spectacular.

Last weekend, we updated you on our exciting project, the Hope Center. This is a new home for ministries like our food pantry. That's half the bottom floor just for the food pantry. Plus space for our recovery groups, our grief and mental health support groups, our adult Bible study and adult education groups, and so much more. And last weekend, I told you that with building permit in hand, we were gonna begin the demolition on Monday of those 30-year-old modulars and they're gone. They just made quick work of that. Yeah, and we're grateful for just the efficiency of all that.

But I got to tell you, first of all, all of that debris went to a recycling center so that everything that could be recycled would be so there's still life ahead for the mods, at least partially so. And I say that because we're grateful for 30 years of ministry in those spaces. And yet now we're moving to a permanent platform for the ministries that have grown and flourished in that location. And if this is new to you, you'd like to partner with us, we would welcome that. You get more information by going to tlc.org/hope and read all about the Hope Center.

Well, we also celebrated Mother's Day last weekend, which was a ton of fun. Highlight for me was the baby dedications. That was so cool. We had over 30 babies, young kids that we dedicated over the course of three services. Of course, because of the way the timing worked and brunch and stuff, 9 a.m. was the most popular service for that. We had so many kids and parents coming towards the stage. At that time I thought, this is gonna take like a half hour. I mean, they literally, we had people shoulder to shoulder from that far edge of the stage to that edge of the stage. It was amazing. It was a lot of fun.

And then of course our friend Val followed with an awesome message, which was a blessing to each of us. And then we ended the service singing that beloved hymn, Great is thy faithfulness. And it was really a special moment. I was actually up in the back part behind the balcony, running the slides for Val, which she usually does for us. And I came out of the door up there right when we went into that song. And there's something about the acoustics right up there against that door in the back of the balcony, which is just amazing. And so I just, again, it was such a blessing just to soak that in, just to, just to, wow. So thank you, that was a gift.

And it kind of prompted me to share with you the, kind of go behind the music and share the surprising story that's behind that song. The words were written by a guy named Thomas Chisholm. He was born in 1866 in a log cabin and he was gifted. He was ambitious. At 16 years old, he was a school teacher. At 21, he was the associate editor of the local newspaper in the town he lived. And then at 27, he became a follower of Jesus. And soon he set his sights on serving the Lord as a pastor, which he eventually did at age 36. He was ordained, he was placed in a church again in his hometown. And in the same year, he married a woman named Catherine and was the love of his life.

And so you can imagine that Thomas and Catherine now, at this point, they're looking forward to starting a family, to serving the church, serving the Lord for many, many years to come. But right into that first year, very early on, he begins to suffer from recurring health issues. So much so that with only a year into his bachelorette, he has to step down. He's like, he cannot do the job that he loves, cannot do the job that he was called, that he felt called to do. And making things worse, his recurring health problems led to a pile of medical bills. He sold life insurance to try to make ends meet, but his finances and the challenge thereof would be an ongoing theme for him and his wife for many years.

One thing he did not lose was his skill as a writer. And so in his mid-late 50s, he writes a poem that he entitles, Great is thy faithfulness. And he sends it to a musician and pastor at Moody Bible Institute, who puts those words to music and well, the rest is history. You sang that song last week. And I want you to bear in mind, Great is thy faithfulness is not the testimony of a man who lived out his life's dreams. It's the testimony of a man who did not have health, did not have wealth, did not have a lot. And yet the anthem of his life, Great is thy faithfulness. So he had something much more valuable than health and wealth. He had hope. He had hope.

And just like Thomas Chisholm, just like he did not get the life he wanted, nobody gets the life they want. Not exactly. And yet today we are going to look at how to have hope in the life that we've actually got. Can you hear what I'm saying? Today's scripture is from the same passage that inspired Thomas Chisholm's hymn, Great is thy faithfulness. And it's found in a little book in the Old Testament called Lamentations. Yeah, Lamentations, that sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it? In Hebrew, Lamentations means the little book of bummers. I'm kidding, but that's really not far off. But it also shows us how to have hope. There's a lot of grief. There's a lot of lament in this book. I'll warn you, we're not gonna read the whole thing, but you'll get a sense. But there's also hope, especially hope in hard times.

So listen to me, if you're here today, and quite frankly, there is a burden that you are carrying, you've been carrying it for some time. Or there is a problem that you just can't seem to solve. There is a grief that you bear. If any of that is true today, and if it's not true today, it will be someday. But today especially, I want you to know, I believe that you are here, not by coincidence, not by accident, you are here because God wants to meet you here, in this time we have together. And God wants to give you hope. And so let's jump in.

Let me give you a little bit of overview of Lamentations. According to tradition, it was written by an Old Testament prophet named Jeremiah. And in 586 BC, the Babylonian army conquered and utterly destroyed the city of Jerusalem. Jeremiah would have seen this with his own eyes. Jerusalem, Solomon's temple, lying in ruin, gone. You may remember that during the CZU fire almost five years ago, our camp, Camp Hammer, was raised by those flames. And when I heard the news of that, I just wept. I sat down from René's office and I just wept. This ministry that touched thousands of lives, lives included in this church and specifically my own, I was the director for 10 years. And yet I think how much greater the grief that Jeremiah experienced. I mean, this was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

And I don't know all of your stories or what you would call your worst thing, but I know you have a worst thing. You probably have more than one, but there's probably something you're thinking of right now that you go, yeah, that was my worst thing. But again, I wanna remind you today that you can have hope, real hope. And so to begin at the top of your message notes, I included this quote by Desmond Tutu. It says, "Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all the darkness." And that pretty much sums up what we're gonna see today.

And so I wanna share with you three truths, three affirmations I'm calling them, because something that we might believe to be true, we can kind of keep at arm's length, but I want you to reach out and grab it, lean into it, and affirm that this is true and real in your own life because you can have hope even in hard times. And this first affirmation goes like this, that hope rises, and by the way, hope rises and falls, it's not a static, it's not a constant, but it rises when I remember that God is with me in my darkest moments. You might wanna write that down, my darkest moments.

With Jeremiah and the people in Jerusalem, in the surrounding area of Judea, the sad thing is that this darkest moment for them did not come out of nowhere. It was actually a self-inflicted wound. Now would any of you agree that many of our own wounds in Greece are self-inflicted? Am I the only one who's ever shot themselves in the foot? I don't think so. Well here's what went down with Jerusalem, and why it fell. Their society, their religious practice had become utterly corrupt. I mean it was worse than that. For example, in one of the other books that Jeremiah wrote, conveniently called Jeremiah, in chapter seven, he describes what's going on in his day. He describes how Solomon's temple, where the glory of God used to dwell in a part called the holy of holies, that temple was just stuffed with pagan idols.

And you might go, whoa, what's the big deal about that? Well meanwhile, the people would go out into the countryside in the hills and the valleys, and in worship to those idols, they would literally sacrifice their own children, their own babies. To those idols made of wood and metal. To those false gods. And this was not a recent development in Jeremiah's time. It had been going on for hundreds of years prior to Jeremiah. And for centuries, centuries, prophet after prophet after prophet would basically say the same thing, we have to turn back to God. We have to repent. This has got to stop. And Jeremiah's in that same tradition, and he's trying to wave his people away from the cliff, but it just falls on deaf ears.

Until the day when judgment comes in the form of the Babylonian army. And in the aftermath, Jeremiah laments. And he records that lament, as you'll see today. But he laments not just for himself. It's as if he becomes a symbol of his people. A symbol of the city of Jerusalem. A symbol by extension for you and for me and for all who grieve and lament the darkness around them. And the dark moments that we all experience at times. And so he cries out in chapter three, I am the man who has seen affliction by the rod of the Lord's wrath. He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light. Indeed, he has turned his hand against me again and again all day long. He has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead.

And it says if Jeremiah's pointing to heaven and he's saying he did this, he's the one that made me dwell in darkness. And if you've ever wondered if you can just be completely and brutally honest with God, Jeremiah's just getting warmed up. He continues, he says, "He has walled me in so that I cannot escape. He has weighed me down in chains." Probably inspired by that literal experience for those who were carried off to Babylon to be slaves. Like a bear lying in weight, like a lion in hiding, he dragged me from the path and mangled me and left me without help. Oh, and that's not all. He drew his bow and made me a target for his arrows. He pierced my heart with arrows from his quiver. I mean, wow, Jeremiah, tell us how you really feel.

But listen, this is the point. Because God is big enough to hear your honest grief, your honest lament. He loves you so much, he invites you to do it. That's why this is in the Bible. He invites you to pour out your pain, your confusion, your anger, and not just to him, but like Jeremiah, even at him. He can handle it. I mean, after all, it was God in the flesh who cried out on the cross, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Remember this. Remember Jesus who went to the cross, who went to the grave because there is no place he will not go to be with us. Which means strangely enough, you can have great pain and great hope at the very same time. You really can.

Many of you have heard me talk about one of our worst moments, by ours, I mean my wife, Laura and I. It was really our first worst moment. I mean, yeah, I'd been in relationships before I was married and they'd break up and it's sad or other things that were disappointments in life. But this was what you, it's kind of raised to the level of worst moment when we had our son, Jack, he was about a year and a half, and Laura was pregnant with our second child. It turned out he was a boy. And just two and a half weeks before we expected him to arrive, he died suddenly in Laura's womb. And it was a Sunday. I was at church in the morning and then in the afternoon I was in a hospital room watching Laura deliver a baby that we would not be able to take home.

There was a lot of grief in that moment. There was a lot more that followed. But in that moment, in the thick of it, I just remember this phrase from one of Paul's letters, 2 Corinthians 4:9, just flashes in my mind. I'm literally looking at Laura as she's laboring and the words, "We are struck down, but not destroyed." Just emblazoned themselves across my mind. And I went, "Yeah, we are struck down. And we have been struck down in other things since. But destroyed, nuh-uh, never." And why? Because he is with us and has been with us in our darkest moments. What I'm trying to say is these are not just wistful words. These are not just aspirational. This is our reality. This is your reality. When you have the Lord and he has you, and listen, this is so massive. This is so essential because suffering and loss can be bewildering.

It feels like your life has shattered. And without the kind of foundation that we have in Jesus, the confidence of knowing that God loves us and will always be with us, the confidence knowing that the day will come when God will take every sad and bad thing and he will turn it on its head for his glory and our everlasting gratitude and joy, and that unless we have this kind of solid, biblical hope, chances are we will buckle under the weight of our grief. Living lives of disappointment, disillusionment, despair, self-destruction. And so let me ask you a question. Where is your hope today? Where's your hope? Is it in your circumstances? In your resources? In your health? God offers you something infinitely stronger. He offers you himself.

So remind yourself today, no matter what, God is with me in my darkest moments. And that being true, we are human after all. And so it's hard to kind of just pivot on a dime, right? And so Jeremiah, he's pouring out his anguish. You know, you're a bear, you're a lion, you're using me for target practice, et cetera. But then there's a shift. If you read all of chapter three, there's a shift in the focus. And he seems to go from anger and shock to resignation and sadness, which leads to our second affirmation. God is with me in my deepest grief.

Jeremiah's gonna rest his case against God, at least momentarily. And then starting at verse 13, still in chapter three, he says, "I have been deprived of peace. I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, my splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord." I mean, wow, these are really sad words, right? I mean, some of you are thinking, "You know, Mark, I was actually doing pretty good until we got to the sermon." Hang in there, we're gonna pull out of this nosedive here. But for those of you who are grieving a loss, for those of you who are wondering, does anyone really know what I am going through? These words are speaking to your soul. These words are giving language expression to your honest, lived experience.

You know, I knew a man who was married for 50 years and not too long after they celebrated their 50th anniversary, his wife died suddenly, unexpectedly. He was plunged into a season of grief. And he's with the Lord now, he's reunited with his wife, but I remember talking to him about six months into that grief. And he said to me, "You know, Mark, I cannot tell you how many nights, lonely, lonely nights, I would sit by myself and I would wonder, is anyone even mindful of what I'm going through anymore?" 'Cause you know, it goes three or four weeks after the memorial, if not sooner, people just get back to their own lives. He felt lonely in that. Does anyone know what I'm going through? He goes, "And then I would remember." Yes, there is. Jesus knows exactly what I'm going through. Right now, every second, He knows all of it.

And so I just wanna assure you, not only is that true, but even when there are no words, He is with you. As promised in Romans 8:26, it says, "The Spirit Himself intercedes with us with groans that words cannot express." His Spirit groans with you in your deepest grief. And right now, I'm thinking of people who are seriously considering chucking their faith because they feel despaired. Or people who already have walked away from God because they've just concluded, "My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the Lord." But the Lord has not given up. The Lord is not gone. The Lord is still pursuing them, still pursuing you. Do you believe that? Amen. Do you believe that for the people that you long to see come back into the fold, as it were? Who you long to see come back into fellowship? Well, let me remind you that the Lord is with you on that.

The longest parable in the Gospels is in Luke 15. It's kind of a three-stage parable about lost sheep, lost coin, a lost son. And whether it's the shepherd or the owner of the coin or the father of the son, in every instance, they do not rest until what is lost has been found. They never give up. And Jesus tells that parable to give us a window into the heart of God who keeps pursuing and pursuing and does not rest. And so if you feel lost in your grief or your burden for someone who is, remember God continues to pursue them. God continues to pursue you so that you may have hope.

Remember this church. God is with you. He is with me in our darkest moments, in our deepest grief. And finally, God is with me always. Always. And if you've been looking for a little bit of sunshine in all this, we're getting there right now. Because this isn't just some kind of Pollyanna kind of happiness, you know? It's not just kind of happy clappy. We're just gonna pretend like we're all doing better than we are. No, no, no, no. Jeremiah has been brutally honest about his disappointment, his grief. And he kind of brings it home where he says, "I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them and my soul is downcast within me." Nothing, no pretense in that. That's just, here I am.

Now watch this next verse, just as honest. "Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have," what church? I have hope. Because of the Lord's great love. We are not consumed. "For his compassion never fail, they are new every morning." Here it is, let me hear you say it. "Great is your faithfulness." Bear in mind, the ground had collapsed under Jeremiah's feet. "Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope." I mean, your life, it has changed in ways you never imagined. "But because of the Lord's great love, you are not consumed." Well, what about tomorrow? What about the next day? What about my future? "His compassion's never fail, they are new every morning." If you believe this church, let me invite you to read this last verse, verse 24, and read it as an affirmation. Read it with conviction. Here we go. "I say to myself, the Lord is my inheritance, therefore I will hope in him." Hey, the darkness is not my inheritance. Is it yours? No. The grief is not my inheritance. Is it yours? The Lord is my inheritance. Is he yours? Let me hear you say, "Amen, church." Amen.

Now listen, here's the key. Because tomorrow, the next day, and the next, and the next, the key to living in this hope is to remember where it all comes from, to remember the source, to call it to your mind and affirm to yourself, "God is with me in my darkest moments, my deepest grief, he is with me always right now." And to help us remember this, I wanna close with a story, old book I discovered just this week. It's a book that reminds us that God is faithful in the dark. God is good even when the clouds of grief might obscure our view. It was written by a seminary professor named Jonathan Gibson.

And one night when Jonathan was sitting in a chair with his three-year-old son, Benjamin, he holds his little boy up to the window and his son says, "Look, the moon." And being a dad, and dad's like to kind of explain things, right, he tells his little three-year-old son, you know, the moon appears in lots of different shapes, but the truth is the moon is always round. Little did he know how central that lesson would be to him and his family. The moon is round.

By Jonathan Gibson. When I look up on a sunny day, the sky is blue and bright, and jet planes paint white lines on its canvas. When I look up on a stormy day, the sky is gray and dull, and clouds pour rain and flash and boom with lightning and thunder. When I look up on a summer's evening, the sky is red and orange and purpley pink, and the sun looks like it's falling from the sky on fire. When I look up on a clear night, the sky is dark and the stars twinkle and sparkle like diamonds, but the moon isn't always round.

Dad said, the moon is always round, even when you can't see all of it. When dad told me that I was getting a little sister, the moon looked like a banana, but dad said, the moon is always round. When the crib was put together, the moon looked like a slice of apple, but dad said, the moon is always round. When mummy's tummy began to look like a watermelon, the moon looked like a shriveled orange, but dad said, the moon is always round. Even when I was told that my little sister wasn't coming to live with us after all the waiting, dad said, the moon is always round.

When my parents left in the middle of the night for the hospital, and the next morning I went off to preschool, I thought, will the moon be round tonight? Dad said, the moon is always round. When I waited at the hospital to meet my little sister and we left without her, I asked, why daddy? And he replied, I don't know why, but the moon is always round. When we got home from the hospital, I looked for the moon before bed, it was a half moon, but dad said, the moon is always round. And when it was just the three of us and we went to the church to say goodbye, my dad asked me, what shape is the moon? I said, the moon is always round. And dad said, what does that mean? I said, God is always good. Psalm 100:5. For the Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever and his faithfulness to all generations.

I'd like to suggest an assignment for all of us this week. And it's this, some night this week, at least once, either go out and look up at the night sky or look through a window from your home and find the moon and be reminded that whatever shape it is in that moment, the truth of the matter is what? The moon is always round, which means that God is always good. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for this day, thank you for this time together, thank you for your tender mercies that are new every day. And so Lord, I pray for those especially that are here in our midst or within the sound of my voice who need a reminder that you are with them, that you will never abandon them, and that healing and hope is available to them.

And so I pray that even now the sweetness of your spirit and your presence in their life as you come alongside them and you enter into their pain and you groan on their behalf, would you bring healing, would you bring comfort, and Lord, would you bring hope? I trust that you will, for all of us, according to our need. We pray this in confidence and with gratitude today in the name of Jesus Christ, all God's people said. Amen.