Hope

Luke 2:8-20

Have you ever felt hopeless? Years ago, when the ministry position I had held for 10 years was suddenly eliminated, I experienced true hopelessness. It felt like I had lost everything, like a huge part of my identity had been cut away. The voices in my head kept telling me that I was too old to start over, that I would never have a job as good as the one I lost, and that we would never recover from the loss of income. Hope seemed to be gone. I struggled to get up in the morning, I struggled to pray, and breathing seemed like a chore. The song "The Rain Keeps Falling," by Andrew Peterson, became my anthem. The opening lines said it all,

I tried to be brave, but I hid in the dark. I sat in that cave, and I prayed for a spark, To light up all the pain, That remained in my heart. And the rain kept falling.

The prophet Malachi proclaimed this message from the Lord: “But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall.” (Malachi 4:2) This prophecy is one of the last given in the Old Testament; for the next four hundred years God was silent. I wonder how many in Israel lost hope as those centuries of silence slowly and painfully slipped by. Years spent waiting for a Messiah that never seemed to show up. Generations came and went as multiple foreign nations conquered the Promised Land, and more and more of God’s chosen people fled to foreign lands. I imagine that hope must have become a precious commodity.

The New Testament opens with Israel occupied by its latest conquerors, the Romans, who had installed a corrupt puppet king to help enforce compliance. This is the setting that the shepherds mentioned in Luke 2:8-20 find themselves in. They were of the lowest class of people—poor and considered so untrustworthy that their testimony wouldn’t even stand up in a court of law. If anyone was hoping for a Messiah, it would have been them. They likely didn’t expect much that night, just business as usual, keeping an eye on their sheep. In an instant, everything changed: angels, proclamation, a baby, hope reborn! Luke 8:20 tells us what happened after they encountered the baby in the manger, “And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.” Nothing had changed; they were still the same lowly shepherds they had always been. At the same time, however, everything had changed; the silence was broken, and the promised salvation had come at last! The world’s hope is built on circumstances that can often fail; for the Believer, hope is based on the person of Jesus Christ, who never fails.

Living in hope,

Mike