Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / December 23, 2020 | A Thrill Of Hope - Christmas Eve Message

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December 23, 2020 | A Thrill Of Hope - Christmas Eve Message · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Merry Christmas Eve.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: How are you?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um I confess that uh we didn't celebrate as a family when I was young.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't I never came to a Christmas Eve service.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, you know, if back in Noah's day they didn't have them, or uh, you know, or maybe we just didn't go.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe having ten kids made them reconsider, or whatever.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: But um uh now they've become one of my favorite uh Christmas traditions.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: So pretty exciting.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: In the past few years, Melody and I have also developed a couple new uh Christmas habits.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: One is watching her favorite, and now one of my favorites, Christmas movie, White Christmas.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sister, sister.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um so and the other is because we like lots of syrup on our pancakes, is watching a Hallmark uh Christmas movie.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing says sweet, syrupy Christmas, like eating a whole tin of caramel popcorn while you work your way through a Hallmark movie.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: We watched a syrupy sweet Hallmark movie this month called The Christmas Cottage.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the movie came to that place that all good Hallmark movies get to, where a wise older woman sits down with the younger woman, the romantic lead, and dispenses uh wise counsel to this poor, confused, struggling lead actress about love and about life.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And in the Christmas cottage, the uh the romantic lead actress confesses to the older woman, she says, Coming back here to the Christmas cottage, or to the cottage at Christmas, makes me think about different things, different paths that I might have taken.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the wise older woman then squeezes her hand and says profoundly, there's something about Christmas that always makes people re-examine their lives.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: We see the choices that other people make, and we wonder if we're going down the right path.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if that's true, that Christmas is a good time to re-examine our lives, to check and see if we're going down the right path, then there's no place that you could be better than where you are right now, whether you're here in the auditorium or you're on screen.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because, like a wise old woman, my goal in life, I suggest that you, I'm going to suggest tonight that you re-examine your life in terms of the best phrase in our favorite Christmas carol that we just sang.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Phrase that we've made our theme for this month, the phrase, a thrill of hope.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: But the phrase was concocted by a French writer about 150 years ago, and it's beautiful even in the original, which I'm going to butcher, but it's still really pretty.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Tresie d'Espérance.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that is the phrase, a thrill of hope, but it expresses something special.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: That phrase tries to describe a feeling that we have of longing and or desire for something that's just on the horizon that we believe is coming, but we don't quite have it yet.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: This thrill of joy.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, C.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: S.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Lewis, the Oxford professor, long after that, would write stories that are centered on this theme of this desire, this longing, this thrill of hope.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: The writer of the Narnia Tales actually confesses that he converted to Christ out of atheism because he discovered this feeling in himself as he took walks, looked at flowers, and so forth, and he knew that this feeling had no, that atheism, his religion of atheism had absolutely no explanation or solution for this uh this sort of feeling, this sort of phrase.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: He said, you know, later on he would write lots about it, and he would say, we give different names to it that don't really capture it.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: We we sometimes call this feeling nostalgia, we sometimes call it romanticism, we sometimes call it beauty with a capital B, but he said it's much more than that.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: So, the next 10 minutes, let's reexamine our lives in terms of this question.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: What thrill of hope do I have?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: What thrill of hope do I have?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now, obviously, hope is a major theme of every Christmas, and maybe especially this Christmas, because kids are hoping that they're gonna get some of what they put on their Christmas list.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And parents are hoping that the kids will be satisfied with what they get.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Most of us, or at least many of us, are hoping that our sick friends will get well, while all of us are hoping that the vaccines will put a stop to this COVID nightmare.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: And most important of all, Chiefs fans are hoping for another Super Bowl in our stocking.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So now, back at that first Christmas, Joseph and Mary, I'm sure, were hoping that the next day when they arrived in Bethlehem, they would be able to find a place to stay so that Mary could have her baby in a warm and dry place.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, interestingly, when historians look back at that day, when they looked back at that Roman world, they are agreed that it was a world without hope.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Historian Matthew Arnold puts it bluntly when he says, in that hard pagan world of the ancient Near East, life was a living hell.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: That world lacked many things, of course, that we take for granted, but most of all, it lacked hope.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: There's this line in my favorite books, Lord of the Rings, where darkness is covering, starting to cover the whole world, and one of the most, one of the best characters says to others, do not trust in hope.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: It has forsaken these lands.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I suspect that's kind of what people in Jesus' day before he came were saying about the world of that day.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's why Jesus, partly why Jesus came when he did.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because what did he bring into the world of his day?
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: He brought to them almost above everything else hope to a hopeless world.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: And 2,000 years later, today, what is it that we find people lacking as much as anything else?
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Hope.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know it's true, because you try to cheer people up and it doesn't work.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Cheer up, you tell people.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's all gonna get better.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And they almost angrily sometimes say back to you, you don't know that.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing will ever be the same again.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: But listen, okay, hope is one of God's favorite words, and therefore it's been a favorite word of God's heroes in every generation.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: One of the greatest of those heroes was named the Apostle Paul.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you think his favorite three words are faith, hope, and love.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: But he captures this whole thrill of hope thing in one sentence when he says to a younger guy named Titus, he says, We are looking for that blessed hope, the appearing, glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Titus 2.13.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Paul is saying a couple important things there.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: He's calling Jesus Christ, notice both God and Savior.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: But the other thing he's saying is that Christ's first coming brought hope, but Christ's second coming is a blessed hope.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: Or a thrill of hope, which is why, you know, the songwriter in that song we just sang, Oh Holy Night, which is why the songwriter sang, a thrill of hope, a weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morning.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yonder meaning still not here yet.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: On the horizon, maybe over there in the southwest, close to where those two planets are that we're looking at this week, you know, yonder breaks a new and glorious morning, meaning the morning of Christ's coming, which is there on the horizon.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's not here yet, but we know it's coming, that morning of his return to make us a whole new world full of health and prosperity.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, listen, having that thrill of hope or not having that hope makes all the difference in the world.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: What's it like if you don't have that hope?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: I like to think that it's sort of like being a cruise.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Being on a cruise ship where the captain calls everybody together into the stateroom or I mean the auditorium in the morning, he says, Listen, I've got good news for you, I got bad news for you.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Tell you the bad news first.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Me and the crew have decided that, you know, since they're running us around the Pacific Ocean and we're not able to dock at a lot of places, we've just decided we're never gonna dock.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: We've just decided we're gonna keep circling around here, uh cruising around until our fuel is gone in a couple of weeks, and then I'm gonna sink the ship.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the good news is, good news is we got a lot of five-star food, we got drinks free from now on, everything's gonna be the same.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna play games, we're gonna have shows at night, we're gonna have dances, pools are gonna be open.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: And he walks off.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe for the next couple of days things do look normal on board, but can you imagine how life would change for you if you were on that cruise ship?
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because one thing, the most important thing, would be different.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: You would have lost hope.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: The captain's speech would have completely erased any thrill of hope that you had.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: And before long, I would expect that you'd see passengers jumping over the side, hoping that they could swim to the shore somewhere without the thrill of hope.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now imagine just the opposite.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine that you were sort of in uh in Hallmark movies, uh made a retake of the Charles Dickens movie, but Charles Dickens or Christmas Carol, where maybe let's just say an angel came and grabbed you and took you far into the future and said, This is going to be your future, and you saw, of a certainty, your future.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_00: You saw everything that your heart, your deepest secret longings have always desired to have true in your life.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: You saw that those things were going to actually become true.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then you came back to this world.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Can you imagine how your life would be different with that thrill of hope?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is it would be totally.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: No matter what happened in life, this stupid, crazy, quirky smile might just cut across your face even at the worst of times, because you would know, you would know what was waiting for you, what was coming just over the horizon.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: You'd have a blessed hope, you'd have a thrill of hope, you would know that great things were going to happen.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Listen, let me say this: the two comings of Christ, the first coming and the second coming, are linked together in Scripture.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: And those two comings of Christ are also linked together in your own life.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: You can't know, listen to me, you can't know the hope of the second coming until you understand and know the reality of the first coming.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Where you know you see this baby whose little hand is clutching at the wood of the manger grows up to shape wood in his father's shop, but in the end to grasp the wood of a cross to die for all who believe in him to give them eternal life and a certain hope.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And knowing that about his first coming makes you ready for the blessed hope of the second coming.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Those two things are linked.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you don't have that hope, if this Christmas you can't yet say that you have that hope, that's cool.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: But to be honest, you're a little like Leslie, who was a really sharp, young Jewish woman, true story, and she didn't have that hope at Christmas.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And to make things worse, she had just gotten the worst possible news.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: The doctors had just told her that she was dying, that perhaps she had another month to live.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: My good friend, our good friend Avi Schneider, her good friend, Avi, I don't know if you remember the short guy who flew here from Eastern Europe uh last year and spoke to us, very dramatic, very fun guy.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Avi, uh got in the hospital and he was sitting at her bedside in the hospital room.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: And they were just chatting away, and then Leslie challenged him.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: She said, Can your Jesus heal me?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Avi said, Well, sure, if he wants to, but you know that's such a minor miracle.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Leslie was startled.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: She said, How is that a minor miracle?
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: I'm expected to die in a month.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because said Avi, because you're eventually going to die anyway, and I'm going to die too, but there's another miracle, a major miracle that Yeshua, Jesus, always performs to whoever asks him.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: What miracle is that?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: She asked.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Avi said.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: He will give us the gift of eternal life if we ask him.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he went on to explain how Jesus was the Messiah prophesied by the Hebrew prophets in the Old Testament and Moses, you know, all that Jewish stuff.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that he was the Messiah that had been promised, that he would come and die for our sins and rise from the dead.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: And then Avi told her, so you see, if you believe in him for eternal life, then he'll give it to you.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Then if you ask him to heal you, perhaps he will give you another 40 or 50 or 60 years.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Live for him your whole life.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: A nice long life.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: But perhaps he won't, and you'll die soon.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you die soon, I'll be jealous.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Leslie was startled again.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: She said to Avi, and why would you be jealous?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: And Avi said, Because then you'll see him before I do.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: So Avi leaves the room, and Leslie lies there in her bed, and she thinks about what he said, and she thinks about minor miracles, and she thinks about major miracles, and she thinks about what she's really hoping for.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: And as she lies there in the hospital bed, she puts her faith, she puts her trust in the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: And she prayed and entrusted herself into his care.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And Jesus chose not to heal her.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: And the next month she was with him.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: And her thrill of hope turned into a thrilling reality.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is the wise old Hallmark woman right?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Is Christmas just the perfect time to reexamine our lives and to see if we're going down the right path?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you're open to that, then I would urge you to re-evaluate, re-examine your life up against this question.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: Do I have the thrill of hope, the blessed hope spoken of in Scripture?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because I know the reality of the hope that Jesus Christ brought as a baby, as a savior, that first Christmas.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: I I really hope that you have that thrill of hope.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: Pray with me.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: Our Father, we're so happy that you put that longing inside of us, that uh that that hope, that desire for perfect joy, and then promise to satisfy that one day.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: For all who would put their faith in you, we just can't thank you enough.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: That the whole story, in a sense, starts this week.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: It starts at Christmas with the baby who would grow up to make sure that all who believe in him would have that hope.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I pray for anyone listening, watching, who um longs for that hope but has not yet accessed that hope.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_00: I pray that you would flow into their lives, give them an understanding of the wonder of your love.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Enable them, Lord, to believe in you for eternal life.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.