DEVOTIONAL THOUGHTS

Having High Hopes

Optimism: to have high hopes. No more mass killings. Political parties work together. Climate change stops changing. Inequality equalizes. “So any time you're gettin' low / 'Stead of lettin' go / Just remember that ant / Oops, there goes another rubber tree plant.” So sang Frank Sinatra in a popular song from 1959. He recorded a version of “High Hopes” to be used in the 1960 presidential campaign of John Kennedy.

The song describes an ant trying to move a rubber tree plant by itself, and a ram punching a hole in a billion dollar dam. It’s a song to bring hope: your troubles and sorrows are like balloons; the problem has gone away when the balloon is popped.

Well -- the truth is that life in a sinful world doesn’t work like that.

So where is your hope to be found when you are depressed, lonely, hurting and afraid? Not in what you try to do or with your self-manufactured emotion of “high apple pie, in the sky hopes.”

We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love you have for all the saints-- the faith and love that spring from the hope that is stored up for you in heaven and that you have already heard about in the word of truth, the gospel that has come to you. (Colossians 1:3-6)

That’s how I feel about the congregation I serve as pastor: Thank you God for giving them faith, hope and love. I see how, by God’s grace, they show love for each other which is produced by the faith which God gave them through the gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is the faith which declares, “I know Jesus is God who became my savior. I know that he kept all of God’s laws for me. I know that he shed his blood, his life, to pay for all my sins. I trust as true when God says that now he has declared me holy in his sight and will receive me into heaven when I die.” That’s the highest hope of all, and it WILL happen. You just have to wait until it does.

If you don’t have this faith which comes from the Gospel, you will not know love or do love. When your faith wavers and your love withers, listen to the hope which Jesus’ Gospel brings to you. The despairing gloom of sin’s dark clouds which overshadow you and this world in which we live, are swept away to let in the light of Jesus, because he has given us hope. Now, nothing, not even death can steal our bright, certain future, because our hope is stored up for us already in heaven. Maybe an ant can’t move a rubber tree plant, but our Lord Jesus still does the impossible! IN him, we have received the HIGHEST of hopes.

Come, worship with us on Sundays at 10 am.