Continual Hope :: Psalm 71

By

How many of you are filled with hope this evening? How many of you are filled with peace? How many of you are filled with praise? Continually? Never wavering? Never failing? Hope, peace, and praise? Or do your doubts sometimes overwhelm you? 

We have before us a great text for the Advent season, this season of the church year when we turn our focus in life away from ourselves, toward hope, when we turn around to faith in Christ, and praise from what he has done. 


Psalm 71, which is the basis for our meditation tonight, is a marvelous prayer! It is a reflection of continual hope and continual praise, even in the midst of overwhelming despair ... Tonight we get to hear again how our Lord continually comes to us and continually gives us hope, and continues to make all things new. 

Listen to the Psalmist...

For you, YHWH, are my hope ... My praise is continually of you ... My mouth is filled with your praise, and with your glory all day ... I will hope continually and will praise you yet more and more. My mouth will tell of your righteous acts, of your deeds of salvation all day.


What is hope? Webster lists seven definitions of hope. They’re all centered around the idea of expecting some desire to be fulfilled. Hope is wanting something to happen. It is cherished desire. ... anticipation. ... something we dream of. 

Hope is a favorite subject of evangelical preachers in our world. I can hardly imagine how many books have been sold talking about hope. But I know today tens of millions of people in our country listen to preachers every week who focus their entire ministries on hope. They preach about a hope that fuels faith, a hope that becomes the anchor of your life, a hope that makes all things better. Hope ... Don’t look back, they say. Hope. 

What is this hope they speak of? From where does it come?


It’s easy to get our hopes up. That makes it easy for Christians to succumb to all kinds of false hope, a kind of hope that is mere optimism, the belief that everything is going to be OK. This type of false faith is quickly dashed when the rough calamities of life come. 

I was amazed to hear a story this week about a preacher who is asking for your prayers to resurrect her child in three days. That’s right, her child died, so she decided to put her hope in your prayers. If you pray hard enough, she reasoned, she could have hope.

Be wary of such notions of hope ... hope that is founded on your good deeds, on your interior sincerity ... hope that your hope will someday pay off. Hope in yourself is destined to fail. Hope that is not seen is destined to fail. To hope in yourself is to make yourselves into god, which is the worst sort of idolatry. With false hope we will always end up hopeless. We might be sincere, but we will be sincerely wrong.


So how do we find hope? Where do we find hope?

Our psalmist tonight does something very right. 

Hope is not a pacifying wish of the imagination which drowns out troubles, nor is it uncertain. Hope is the solid ground of expectation for the righteous. As such it is always directed towards God; it always turns us toward God. Not only does hope bring relief from present problems, hope in God’s ultimate salvation will bring to an end all distress. 


In the New Testament, hope ... ἐλπίς ... always finds its grounding in our Lord Jesus Christ. The word appears nearly 50 times, beginning in Acts. Apart from Christ, hope is nothing. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Therefore, Christian hope is not simply a wish. Christian hope is complete confidence and sure conviction. That sure conviction leads us to wait ... to wait for the Lord, to wait for his coming. Because we know he’s coming. He has promised. This is most prominent expression of hope in the Old Testament.  

That’s what our psalmist is expressing tonight. He doesn’t turn inward, looking to the power of positive thinking. 

He begins our Psalm the right way. In you, YHWH, do I take refuge. In your righteousness deliver me. 


When you listen to this psalmist, you will hear something remarkable. You won’t hear him speak about self-righteousness, like our world does. You won’t hear him speak about the power of positive thinking, like our world does. Upon you, I have leaned ... from before my birth. You are he who took me. and gave me hope, he declares. 

With true hope, with the hope of the Psalms, you must look outside yourself ... you must look to God and his mighty acts and promises ... you must look to his scriptures. Only here will you find such words of comfort, such hope. That’s why the psalmist, when he begins his prayer, he begins with the only true source of hope: Yahweh and his promises. For you, O Lord are my hope, my trust, O LORD, from my youth. 


Life is filled with all sorts of unexpected troubles, things that we never imagined. Every trouble you have in life ... be it with money, family, health, relationships, or the unnamed accusations and persecutions our psalmist faced ... they all stem from a fundamental malady ... the total depravity that mars every human relationship. Original sin sickens and destroys every human body. It warps and twists every human mind ... it poisons and destroys faith and hope in our God and Father, the creator of heaven and earth, because it always turns us away from God. It turns us inward ... to the idol of me, myself and I. 

And it does that by attacking the source of hope, God’s promises. In many and various ways, God spoke these promises and we wrote them down to he heard and spoken again. These promises were given us to give us hope. ... You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?

Quite literally ... there is no God like the one true God, the God who delivers, who rescues, who listens, who saves. 

That is a main point of this psalm. 

What God do you know loves you so much that he was willing to give up everything to come to us to be our Emmanuel ... quite literally two Hebrew words that mean God with us. God came to be with us to fulfill all righteousness, setting us free from sin, death, and the devil, by living for us, dying on a cross for us and rising from the dead so that he can comfort us by all who believe these promises an eternal life in heaven. This hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who grounds us in hope. 


My lips will shout for joy when I sing praises to you; my soul also, which you have redeemed. And my tongue will talk of your righteous help all the day long, for sin death and the devil have been put to shame.

In the midst of the most hopeless life, the Lord’s promises give us reason to hope. He promises to raise you from the dead with Christ. That hope is not just wishful thinking. It is sure and certain. You who are baptized are born again into “a living hope” (1 Pet 1:3), a hope that frees you to arise daily to eternal life, to confess your sins knowing that he will forgive your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness. 


So what should you do with all this hope?

Join the psalmist declaring that even to old age and gray hairs, you too will proclaim his might to another generation, his power to all those to come. 


Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in faith, hope, and love by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Popular posts from this blog

The Good Shepherd Comes to Rescue and Restore - Ezekiel 34:11-16

By
  For thus says the Lord Yahweh, “Behold, I myself will search diligently for my sheep and I will seek them. As a shepherd seeks out to care for His flock in the day he is among His scattered sheep, so I will seek out to care for my sheep, and I will rescue them from all the places where they were scattered on the day of cloud and thick darkness. 500 years ago today, Martin Luther answered the Roman Catholic Church and the Roman Emperor who questioned his teachings. If he were to recant and take it all back, the Diet of Worms would barely be a blip in history. If he did not recant, he would be putting his own life in absolute, mortal danger. Being held captive by the clear Word of God as found in Holy Scripture, Luther stood up before the authorities of the church and the of world and gave his famous “Here I Stand” confession. He rested his case on Jesus as his only Shepherd - not the leaders of the Church or the Government. He relied solely on the Good Shepherd who promised neve...
Read more

Mutual Consideration :: Psalm 41:1-2

By
We prayed Psalm 41 in place of the Introit for the Day. Psalm 41 will be the focus of our attention for the entire season of Lent. David said in the opening words of that psalm, Blessed is the one who considers the poor! In the day of trouble, Yahweh delivers him; Yahweh protects him and keeps him alive; he is being blessed in the land; You do not give him up to the will of his enemies (Ps 41:1-2). Those words from David are like a man who painted a portrait of his friend, and then the two switched places, and his friend painted a portrait of him. Here is what I mean ... 1.  Blessed is the one who considers the poor! David’s word, “considers,” can also be translated as “pays attention” ... or “focuses upon” ... or “thinks about intently.” When you paint someone’s portrait, you must first look intently upon that person, studying his or her features very closely. When David said, Blessed is the one who considers , he was talking about someone who gives careful, attentive thought to ...
Read more

Whose Side Are You On? :: Luke 11:14-28

By
We live in a world filled with deep division. Everywhere, it seems, people are divided by ideology and theology, politics and economics. But there is not a bigger divide facing all humanity than the one we face today. It is more significant than whether you are a Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, man or a woman, adult or child.  Jesus said, Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters (v 28). It is the great divide.  So whose side are you on? Are you with him, or against him?  Are you a Christian, or are you an enemy of Christ? Are you with the Lord, or do you serve Satan? Brothers and sisters in Christ, there are no shades of gray here. Are you gathering or scattering? WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON? That’s the question of our Gospel this morning, and our theme.  Our Gospel reading from Luke 11 this morning illustrates that truth for us rather plainly. A house divided cannot stand. Those who are against Christ call evil g...
Read more

The Eyes Have It :: Luke 10:23-24

By
What do you see? What do you hear? These are the questions of the day on this Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity. What do you see? And what do you hear?  Before we get ahead of ourselves by jumping to conclusions and declaring you can see and hear just fine ... you need to know ... not everybody sees what you see or hears what you hear. Every week your pastor gives three sermons: the one I write, the one I preach, and the one you hear. And each of you might be hearing a different sermon than the person next to you. More than that, some of you may be seeing one thing and others may be seeing something completely different. And some of us will just fall asleep not seeing or hearing anything at all.  As Jesus tells the disciples ... For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to witness what y’all see and they didn’t witness it, and to hear what y’all hear and they didn’t hear it (v. 23-24). That is to say they longed to see Jesus, living, dying, rising, ascending. They long...
Read more

The Mind of Christ :: Philippians 2:5-11

By
The next day, the large crowd that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming into Jerusalem, took the branches of palms and went out to meet him and began crying out: Hosanna! Blessed is the one coming in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel (Jn 12:12-13). No story has ever had a bigger buildup to a greater letdown than this one. The Jews were all of the same mind: They had been looking forward to this day for more than a millennia. And here he came! Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee (Mi 5:2)! The prophet like Moses (Dt 18:15)! The son of David (2 Sm 7:12)! Our Messiah (Is 61:1) ... Here he came, riding into Jerusalem on a donkey (Zec 9:9), fulfilling the scriptures. Zechariah, Micah, Isaiah, Deuteronomy, Samuel, the Psalms. This is the day the Lord has made! Let us rejoice and be glad in it (Ps 118:24). ... These things are written so that you will believe Jesus is the Christ, the son of the Living God and that by believing you will have life in his name (Jn 20:31...
Read more

Joy of a Living Hope :: 1 Peter 1:3-9

By
Can you imagine what life would be like without hope?  It’s good to have hope. We all need more hope.  Researchers have discovered that you are three times more likely to live LONGER THAN eight years after a heart attack if you consider yourself to be a HOPEFUL person. If you’re a pessimist ... I should warn you that 21 of 25 of the hopeless died within eight years of their first heart attack.  It’s good to have hope. We all need more hope. According to one psychologist, hope reduces feelings of helplessness, boosts happiness, reduces stress, and improves our quality of life. Students with high levels of hope are more likely to succeed at school, more likely to have high-quality friendships, and less likely to suffer anxiety and depression. Hope improves your immune system, reduces stress, reduces joint pain. Hope is the voice inside that says, “Yes, I can.”  It’s good to have hope. We all need more hope.  So ... what is hope?  Technically, hope is an optim...
Read more

Fearing the Lord :: Jonah 1:4-16

By
The day we first receive our call to follow Christ, we face the temptation to run away. That is true on the day of our Baptism. It is true on the day of our confirmation. It is also true for us pastors, on the day of our ordination into the Holy Ministry. Sometimes we all want to run away. In fact, the older we get I think the more we want to run away. Of course, we’re not the first ones who’ve ever been tempted to do this. Adam and Eve fled their shame and the voice of the Lord. Moses fled Egypt for 40 years, afraid of the wrath to come for beating a man to death. Elijah fled Jezebel, fearing her wickedness. Even Jesus’ own disciples fled the Jews after our Lord was betrayed, afraid they too would face the same wrath. They locked the doors of the upper room in fear.  Fear. We all fear. Sometimes within moments of confessing that we believe in the One True God, the maker of heaven and earth, who has redeemed us, the lost and condemned, not with gold or silver, but with his holy pre...
Read more