A Hope That Never Disappoints

I usually don't post blogs on Tuesday, but I want share a post from my dear friend and brother in Christ, David Lambert who is a bit of a mentor to me and the Farmer. I met Dave and his wife Pam over forty years ago when they were part of my late father in law's congregation. They were also close friends with my parents, visiting our home as we shared meals, board games, and many fun times together. Precious memories. I'm grateful for the wisdom in these words:


Today's Morning Greeting.


Good morning! What are you hoping for this morning? The apostle Paul had something to say about hope to the people he was writing letters to in Rome. Remember, they didn't live in a representative democracy like we do in the United States - they lived under Roman domination, the enforced Caesar cult. Paul wrote to them about hope but what were they hoping for? This morning, let's consider that question as we read today's passage together:


Now that we have been put right with God through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. He has brought us by faith into this experience of God's grace, in which we now live. And so we boast of the hope we have of sharing God's glory! We also boast of our troubles, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance brings God's approval, and his approval creates hope. This hope does not disappoint us, for God has poured out his love into our hearts by means of the Holy Spirit, who is God's gift to us.
Romans 5:1-5


Paul writes here of being "put right with God through faith" and having "peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ". I like that, don't you? Following that, he begins to write about hope, saying, "And so we boast of the hope we have of sharing God's glory!" So far so good, right? He then writes of the process that creates hope: "We also boast of our troubles, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance brings God's approval, and his approval creates hope." He says that trouble is productive. It produces endurance which brings God's approval and that God's approval creates hope in us. Many Christians today might find this process disappointing. They don't want a gospel that says that trouble is good for us; they want a trouble-free gospel...but that's not really the gospel at all. Instead, Paul writes that real hope emerges from trouble, saying, "This hope does not disappoint us, for God has poured out his love into our hearts by means of the Holy Spirit, who is God's gift to us."


Even though they lived under the rule of the Caesar cult, those Christians had hope; in fact, they were boasting about it! It wasn't hope for better government or a better economy; it was the expectant, joyful hope that Jesus would always make good on His promises. Are you experiencing trouble this morning? Because of that trouble, do you feel hopeless? Let me encourage you today. Allow your trouble to be productive. Thank God for His peace. Thank Him for His love and mercy. Thank Him for His promise of eternal life, and for His welcoming you into His family. God will continue to pour out His love for you now and into eternity...and that's very God News!

Archive photo of me and the Farmer 1981 ( : 

T.G.I.M. / Part 2 The Severity of God / Redemptive Mercy

"'Behold therefore the goodness and severity of God,' writes Paul in Romans 11:22. The crucial word here is 'and'. 

The Christians at Rome are not to dwell on God's goodness alone, nor on His severity alone, but to contemplate both together. Both are attributes of God - aspects, that is, of His revealed character. Both must be acknowledged together if God is to be truly known." ( J.I. Packer; Knowing God ) 

When I share my faith with others, I've found people to be generally accepting of Jesus. As long as I'm focusing on his love, his easy teachings, his good deeds and miracles, the conversation usually runs along quite smoothly, for the most part. 

It's when I get around to things like sin, the wrath of God, judgment, hell, and the difficult passages of the Old Testament that people begin to squirm or change the subject. 

And yet, if we are not sharing these concepts, the bad along with the good, we are not sharing the true gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Honestly, I used to work up a major sweat whenever I felt I should be sharing my faith with someone until I discovered the reason. When I began to peel back the fearful layers, the root revealed the hard fact that I didn't know the Gospel myself. 

It's said that to truly understand the Gospel, we first must grasp the truth about ourselves, precisely that we are sinners in need of a Savior. Every other Gospel truth builds graciously upon this one. 

The Good News is actually good, bad, and good:  

God created us good in the beginning. Our first parents sinned - disobeyed the only rule they were given. This sin nature was passed to all of Adam's descendants. He was mankind's federal head. Not only do we all sin, but we are born sinners. That's the human condition. 

A thrice Holy God can't allow sin to go unpunished or he wouldn't be good. ( If one of your children were brutally murdered would you seriously want the judge to let the killer off without penalty if they stood in court promising not to do it again?? No, we would cry out for justice. That judge allowing criminals to go free without punishment would not be a just judge. ) 

Sin has to be paid for if God is good. God's wrath demands it. The law must be fully obeyed in all points if we are to be deemed holy and acceptable to God, and no one can do that. ( Romans 3 )  

But Jesus can and did. 

Jesus became the new and better Adam. 

The law shows us our sin, but the Gospel shows us our Savior. 

The unfathomable debt must be absorbed, and the perfect life Jesus Christ lived and the punishment he received on the cross are imputed to us when we believe in him, trusting him as Lord and Savior. Colossians 2:14 mercifully tells us that "Christ canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross." 

"Behold the goodness and severity of God." They can not be separated; we must hold them both in our hand together. ( Romans 11:22 ) And this is a good thing. 

The more I read the Bible, the more I understood this amazing grace and the more comfortable I felt in sharing the true Gospel. The more I prayed, the bolder I got in sharing it because I was growing in my understanding of the grace and mercy Christ had on me and growing in my love and concern for others to know it too. And please be hopeful and not discouraged in your evangelism because this developed in me later in life. Learn from my mistakes. 

We don't have to be renowned theologians to share our faith and explain the gospel; we need to be consistent students of the Word and people of prayer, and the desire to help others grows alongside of our faith by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Which brings me to my final point: We can't save anyone. 

"What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building." ( 1 Corinthians 5-9 ESV ) 

Don't you love all of the earthy metaphors used in Scripture? 

I'm convinced it's because the good life God created began in a garden.

Now, go plant and water! 

Happy Monday! 

What Can Be Known

"But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the LORD has done this? In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind." ( Job 12:7-10 ) 

"You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews. You have granted me life and steadfast love, and your care has preserved my spirit." ( Job 10:11-12 ) 

As Skipper and I walked in the crisp morning air this week, the smokey fumes from the neighbor's chimney floated across our leafy path which runs parallel to the cow's field. The trail of smoke lifted above our heads as I looped the leash firmly around my wrist since Skipper was quickly pulling me along behind her. 

Skipper is one of those salt of the earth Great Pyrenees who could handle the farm with one paw tied behind her fluffy undercoat. When I do the morning rounds, I give her a break from the flock; she more than deserves it even though Skipper loves to work.  

In fact whenever I bring Aslan with me during chore time, if he gets to acting too goofy around the sheep, she pins him to the ground, yeah, as big as he is. It always cracks me up. Skipper runs a tight ship. That day Aslan stayed up at the house with the ducks and geese, so it was just me and my girl. 

And I soaked in our surroundings. I haven't always engaged in this activity as deeply as I should, but I'm learning. 

In the first chapter of Romans, we are taught right out of the gate that "what can be known about God" is plain to us because God has shown it to us. "For his divine attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse." ( 1:19-20 ) 

When I meditate on this thought, it becomes exceedingly comforting. 

Seeing the truth about God in nature is known in theological terms as "general revelation." And when we refuse to acknowledge him and his greatness through what we see around us, the Scriptures go on to explain that we "have become foolish in our thinking" and are "suppressing the truth" that God has revealed to us. ( Romans 1:18-32 ) 

In Christ, even though we now believe not only in God, but in Jesus Christ whom he has sent for the remission of our sins, we must never stop gazing at the things that God has made because in the created order we find hope and hints of the life to come if we indeed have eyes to see and ears to hear. 

Last week after returning to the farm from a full morning of errands, I unloaded a few items from my truck and rested briefly while nursing two cups of coffee before heading back out with the dogs to check on the sheep. After I finished filling up the cow's water trough and walking back up the hill to the house, I felt out of breath, and that was unusual for me.   

I used one of the Farmer's many medical devices to check my oxygen and found my heart rate to be 177. Figuring it to be dehydration, I then drank a boat load of electrolytes to right my body, but it wouldn't get back in line. My heart felt like one of those top loading washing machines when the clothes inside are off balance in the spin cycle and it causes the machine to jump around in all directions at 100mph. At any moment you expect the thing will break free from the laundry room and out the back door. 

So I ended up in the emergency room watching my heart on an ultrasound. Even in the craziness of the pounding beats, I could imagine the intricacy and the divine order the heart was created to follow. 

We too are a part of creation, and I could see the hand of a divine, glorious God. 

Acknowledging that every step, breath, and beat is a gift from God is not just a "wake-up call," but a deeper understanding into the goodness and greatness of our Sovereign Lord. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, these treasures are a very small sliver of the life to come. ( Psalm 115:3 ) 

In the fallenness of creation, including our human bodies, God allows hopeful glimpses of what he has in store for those who love him. Creation is just a glance of what's to come; imagine that. ( 1 Corinthinas 2:9 ) 

God never promised to give us a perfect life until heaven. "God has not promised us candy." (1) Much frustration and confusion can arise when we cling to promises that God never made. 

True rest is found only in the true promises of God. 

God has left his children here for a time in a broken world, and we are going to have to trust him with his sovereign decree. After all, he did send his perfect Son into a sinful humanity. He did not spare him. Our command is to serve with gladness as we go about our Father's business because we are no longer slaves to sin, but to righteousness, to God, praise be to Christ! ( Romans 8:32, Psalm 100 ) 

What He HAS promised is to never leave us or forsake us in the sanctification process. ( Deuteronomy 31:8, Hebrews 13:5, John 14:16, Philippians 2:12-13 ) 

Listen to this precious promise in Ephesians 1:13 that we have in our Lord Jesus:

"In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation and believed in him were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory." 

"Until we acquire possession" 

It's that tension thing again. In this life, we live in the knowledge that our Lord Jesus has secured all spiritual blessings for us on the cross, ( Ephesians 1:3 ) but we do not acquire possession of it until the next life. 

And yet, we already have them. 

I know, just stand in the truth. Let it be. 

We have them already, but not now, and by faith we walk in this mystery trusting our Father. 

How do we know? That's a fair question I think. Abraham asked it. The verse told us how we can know. 

"the promised Holy Spirit" 

He is the guarantee. We are indwelled by the Holy Spirit when we repent of our sins and put our trust in Christ. Every believer in Christ Jesus is a "Spirit-filled" believer, all of us, John tells us in 1 John 2:18-29, are anointed by the Holy Spirit, not just a select few, and He lives with us forever. ( John 14:16 ) Without the work of the Holy Spirit, we wouldn't be joined to Christ in salvation. 

He guarantees us - sort of like a promissory note signed however in Christ's blood - that one day Jesus will return for his bride. Are you going to not believe this promise when the Holy Spirit himself promises he's going to make good on it? It's a done deal. Signed, sealed, delivered. Jesus said so from the cross and backed it up when he raised himself from the dead. 

Friends, He's coming for us. He's sealed the deal. ( Revelation 1:7 ) 

And for now, these delicious morsels we see in creation give hope to our groaning appetites of the fully satisfying banquet that awaits us at the wedding supper of the Lamb. 

I can't help but think that God is working something extraordinary in these ordinary, normative, every-day walks of faith. They are opportunities to trust him that are preparing something. ( 2 Corinthians 4:17) 

We can't realize all that our Father is working here within us, but we can rest assure that having faith in Christ for our homeland above, like the cloud of witnesses who've gone before us, and clinging to his promises as we face suffering, has an enormous, eternal purpose and weight of glory that can't be fully understood until the life to come. 

Our sovereign Lord has chosen to do it this way. 

When we come to Christ, we must not stop gazing at the created order and marveling in it because God has purposely made it known to us. But more comforting than this is the fact that we get to know the "artist," not by looking at his masterpiece, because that only takes us so far, but by gazing into the Gospel of Christ. This is "special revelation" - God revealing his Son to us. 

We never get beyond the fullness or to the bottom of the grace and beauty of Christ because there has never been anything greater to behold. 

Everyday as we read the Scriptures and meditate on what they reveal, we must turn the truth of the gospel over and over and behold the majesty and splendor as one would marvel at a multi-faceted jewel. 

If it were heavenly conditions now here on earth, we wouldn't need faith, but we do because it isn't. This faith in Christ and his Word is creating something beautiful beyond all comparison within us, something not of this broken world. And yet, the brokenness plays a vital role in the glory. 

As Elisabeth Elliot famously wrote, "Suffering is never for nothing." 

I believe suffering and the uncertainty that confronts us in this life are actually the lenses that bring our sight. One day, in some mysterious, upside down manner, we're going to be glad and understand its existence and value. And not want to be standing before God without it. I believe then we will understand and marvel at the tension. 

I think of the cross. 

Our life here in Christ does not consist of doing all we can to survive another day, although at times I know it seems this way, but it is about always looking into the beauty of what Christ has done on our behalf in his sacrificial atonement. 

Remember his grace and mercy, and glory in that knowledge as we gladly serve him surrounded by a creation that refuses in its groaning to be silent about the eternal power and divine nature of the One to come.  

"In his hand is the life of every living thing and the breath of all mankind." ( Job 12:10 ) 

Who holds our breath and heart in his hands. 

His nail scarred hands. 

Soli Deo Gloria

💜

"For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." ( Romans 8: 22-25 ) 

(1) "God has not Promised us Candy." sermon by Chris Rosebrough