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Christmas: The Birth of our Hope

#1 · December 15, 2004, 11:53 am

Quote from Forum Archives on December 15, 2004, 11:53 am
Posted by: henkf <henkf@...>
Christmas: The Birth of our Hope

HOPE WINS!

Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23

The scene is a church camp in Illinois with about 100 kids and various counselors. Jim, the camp director, and Frank, the maintenance director, are away from the camp on business. The next day they return to camp to find everyone gone. Everyone. Gone. There are no campers or counselors anywhere. Empty kayaks float out on the camp lake. An electric typewriter is left on. In it is a sheet of paper. It looks like someone has stopped typing in mid-sentence. But the strangest thing is the clothes. Everywhere they look there are small piles of clothes. It looks as if the wearers of the clothes have evaporated into thin air, leaving their apparel behind them.

Jim and Frank don't know what to think. Though neither of them will say it, the word "rapture" is going through their minds. (Rapture is a term used by many Christians to refer to the time of Christ's return when believers will be taken immediately to Heaven.) Then, out from the woods comes a lone camper, a junior-high boy who has not yet made a commitment to Christ. Now Frank and Jim are worried. If the rapture has occurred, then it would make sense that this boy is still around. To calm their fears, they call Jim's wife. Her secretary reports, in puzzled tones, that she had been in the office just a moment ago, but is no longer there. Now the men are concerned.

After a half hour of intense searching of the camp, from somewhere comes the sound of a bell, and at that sound, kids come pouring out of the woods. Soon, Frank and Jim are surrounded by elated junior-high campers. It turns out that two of the camp counselors had planned this whole thing to trick Frank and Jim. They had set up the camp to make it look like everyone had suddenly disappeared. Then all the campers hid around the camp and waited for Frank and Jim to return. (Doug Peterson, MANY ARE CALLED, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), pp. 82-86. ) It was all a trick, but it was one Frank and Jim would always remember.

That's one story. Let me tell you another. This one comes from country comedian Jerry Clower. Jerry tells about a man back home in Mississippi named Kirk who was running down the road. A neighbor, Mr. Halley, saw him coming and knew something was bad wrong. Mr. Halley got out in the middle of the road and bear-hugged Kirk when he came by. "Slow down, Kirk. What in the world is happening?"

Kirk said, "Mr. Halley, it's Judgment."

"Why would you say that, Kirk?" Mr. Halley asked.

"I saw it wrote in the sky." Kirk said. "God's done wrote it up there."

Mr. Halley said, "Kirk, that's Pepsi Cola."

"Sir?" replied Kirk.

"That's Pepsi Cola, Kirk," said Mr. Halley. "An airplane wrote that up there. The airplane's been gone for several minutes, and you just saw that writing."

"Oh, Mr. Halley, you know that ain't no Pepsi Cola," said Kirk.

"Yes, it is," Mr. Halley replied. "That plane wrote it and has done gone. You just calm down, it ain't Judgment."

The next morning Kirk came down to Jerry's father's house. They were standing out in the backyard and Kirk was telling Jerry's father this story. Jerry's father asked him, "Kirk, what would you have done had it been judgment?"

Kirk said, "I was just gonna keep running till Judgment overtook me." (JERRY CLOWER STORIES FROM HOME, (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1992).)

We all want to know about the future, don't we? We want to know what's in store for us.

I read somewhere that the Masai people in Africa have no word for future. They have no vocabulary for talking about things that might happen tomorrow. We, on the other hand, are obsessed with the future. It has often been noted that the Eskimo people have 52 different words for snow. We have twice that many words in our vocabulary that refer to the future. There is even an entire profession--called futurists--who look into their crystal balls and make predictions about what life will be like for us in the years ahead based on advances that are taking place right now. And why shouldn't we want to know about the future?

THE FUTURE HOLDS SO MUCH PROMISE.

For example, there is a biotechnology company in Florida that is growing the inside of an orange--no peel, no pulp, no seeds, no tree--just the cells that produce the juice. To think, if this catches on, oranges will be grown in laboratories. A multilevel building will take the place of several thousand acres of citrus groves. Plus, there would be no worry about early frosts, blight, pesticides and herbicides, or droughts. (Daniel Burrus, TECHNOTRENDS, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994).)

Or how about this: Bar-code-reading toll booths. No need to have people in little booths collecting coins on toll roads anymore. Each of us could have a sticker on our car with a bar code. As we move by the toll booth a bar code reader like those in grocery stores would read our code and automatically charge our account the proper amount.

Or how about this? Pigs, cows, and goats may soon become living drug factories. Researchers already have successfully transferred into female pigs a gene that causes them to produce large amounts of protein in their milk. Now scientists plan to insert genes for other economically and medically important compounds into a variety of milk-producing animals. In the future, a single goat may produce enough blood-clotting factors to treat all the world's hemophiliacs. ( OUTLOOK '94, Mar/Apr '93, p. 5. Cited in THE FUTURIST, Nov/Dec 1993, p. 5. )

"Over the next 20 to 40 years we will have the potential for eradicating the major diseases that plague the World’s population," declares Leroy Hood, the Lasker Prize-winning California Institute of Technology biology chairman and physician who specializes in inventing high-tech machines to find and decode genes. "Our goal is not to help people live forever," Hood says, "But we will let them stay healthy and productive through the entire natural lifetimes."

No wonder we are excited about the future. The future holds much promise.

OF COURSE, IT IS ALSO FRAUGHT WITH DANGER.

Have you noticed that people's fear of the future has changed. Once people feared that they would die too soon. Now they fear that they will die too late--they will have outlived their assets and will spend their last years in poverty. The future can be scary. I am reminded of something author Kurt Vonnegut once told a university graduating class about his lifelong philosophy. "Regardless of how bad things are today," he believes, "they will be worse tomorrow." There are many who share Vonnegut's view. And, perhaps, with good reason. Humanity is presently spewing nearly a billion tons of pollutants into the Earth's atmospheric envelope every year. In Africa 29 trees are being cut down for every one planted.

Environmental crises are very real. For example, the earth does appear to be in a warming trend. Devastating floods ravaged Europe the last few years as unseasonably warm weather and unusual amounts of moisture prematurely melted snow caps. Are these precursors of the much debated greenhouse effect? Scientists are divided.

And what about the specter of international terrorism? And the problems of violence, drugs and the breakdown of the family? It's easy to get excited about the great promise that the future holds but it's also easy to become quite fearful. There is much that is wrong in this world. There is an awful deterioration in societal values, the result of which is yet to be determined.

What can we say about the future?

HOPE MIXED WITH FEAR. THAT IS ABOUT ALL WE CAN SAY ABOUT THE FUTURE.

UNLESS WE OPEN OUR BIBLES.

And there in the book of Revelation we read these magnificent words:

"And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need for sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of the Lord is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb."

I have good news for you concerning that mixture of hope and fear that we all feel with regard to the future: Hope wins. Hope wins. Carve it in granite, etch it in stone. Hope wins. Because God wins. Nothing in this world is surer. When your children ask about the future, teach them to sing those words that have inspired millions, "This is my Father's world, Oh, let me n'er forget that though the wrong is oft so strong, God is the ruler yet." Hope wins.

John's vision on the Isle of Patmos has many interpreters. Christians have many different views concerning the nature of the world that is to come. A Sunday School teacher was telling her class of youngsters about the "crowns of glory" that await people who believe. "Now tell me," she said at the close of the lesson, "Who will get the biggest crown?" There was a silence for a moment, then one bright youngster piped out, "The one who has the biggest head."

That youngster probably knows as much as any of us about the shape of that which is to come, but we know this: God will win and Christ will reign triumphant. Christ's glory will light up the universe and his love will light up every heart. That is a consistent promise throughout the New Testament.

In 1914 Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, an English explorer, led an expedition to the South Pole. As the ice began to close in on his boat, he had to leave some of his men stranded on Elephant Island as he went for help. He secured another ship on South Georgia Island and returned for his men. After several unsuccessful attempts, the weather finally permitted him to sail through to where the men were, pick them up, and then get out before the ice closed up again. Shackleford asked his crew why they had their things packed and standing by when he came back. They said, "Sir, when you left, you said you would come back for us, so we never gave up hope. Whenever the weather looked favorable, we would pack up our things and say, Maybe Shackleford will return for us today.' We were always ready for your coming." (Donald F. Ackland, THE INTERNATIONAL BIBLE LESSONS FOR CHRISTIAN TEACHING, (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1988).)

We don't know what the future holds, but we know Who holds the future. There is One who is returning for us. We are not forgotten. There is one who has gone to prepare a place for us. An African-American poet once put it like this:

There's a king and captain high, And He's coming by and by,

And He'll find me hoeing cotton when He comes.

You can hear His legions charging in the regions of the sky,

And He'll find me hoeing cotton when He comes.

There's a Man they thrust aside, Who was tortured till He died,

And He'll find me hoeing cotton when He comes.

He was hated and rejected, He was scorned and crucified,

And He'll find me hoeing cotton when He comes.

When He comes! When he comes!

He'll be crowned by saints and angels when He comes.

They'll be shouting out Hosanna! to the Man that men denied,

And I'll kneel among my cotton when He comes. (William Barclay, THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957; Edinburgh, Scotland: The Saint Andrew Press, 1957), p. 351)

The future holds much promise--but the greatest promise is this: Hope wins because God wins!

And This Christmas season we celebrate the Birth of that Hope!

.....
  ************************************  Weekly messages of hope and comfort for those who want to learn more about Jesus and His glorious plan for our lives.  To find out more about our ministry go to : worldoutreach.ca/sotn.htm  visit our "Ultimate Bible Quiz Site"  folsom.sk.ca/k4j/BQuiz/Quiz.html  *************************************                                                                              --  To unsubscribe, send ANY message to: [email protected]  

Posted by: henkf <henkf@...>

HOPE WINS!

Revelation 21:10-14, 22-23

The scene is a church camp in Illinois with about 100 kids and various counselors. Jim, the camp director, and Frank, the maintenance director, are away from the camp on business. The next day they return to camp to find everyone gone. Everyone. Gone. There are no campers or counselors anywhere. Empty kayaks float out on the camp lake. An electric typewriter is left on. In it is a sheet of paper. It looks like someone has stopped typing in mid-sentence. But the strangest thing is the clothes. Everywhere they look there are small piles of clothes. It looks as if the wearers of the clothes have evaporated into thin air, leaving their apparel behind them.

Jim and Frank don't know what to think. Though neither of them will say it, the word "rapture" is going through their minds. (Rapture is a term used by many Christians to refer to the time of Christ's return when believers will be taken immediately to Heaven.) Then, out from the woods comes a lone camper, a junior-high boy who has not yet made a commitment to Christ. Now Frank and Jim are worried. If the rapture has occurred, then it would make sense that this boy is still around. To calm their fears, they call Jim's wife. Her secretary reports, in puzzled tones, that she had been in the office just a moment ago, but is no longer there. Now the men are concerned.

After a half hour of intense searching of the camp, from somewhere comes the sound of a bell, and at that sound, kids come pouring out of the woods. Soon, Frank and Jim are surrounded by elated junior-high campers. It turns out that two of the camp counselors had planned this whole thing to trick Frank and Jim. They had set up the camp to make it look like everyone had suddenly disappeared. Then all the campers hid around the camp and waited for Frank and Jim to return. (Doug Peterson, MANY ARE CALLED, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1992), pp. 82-86. ) It was all a trick, but it was one Frank and Jim would always remember.

That's one story. Let me tell you another. This one comes from country comedian Jerry Clower. Jerry tells about a man back home in Mississippi named Kirk who was running down the road. A neighbor, Mr. Halley, saw him coming and knew something was bad wrong. Mr. Halley got out in the middle of the road and bear-hugged Kirk when he came by. "Slow down, Kirk. What in the world is happening?"

Kirk said, "Mr. Halley, it's Judgment."

"Why would you say that, Kirk?" Mr. Halley asked.

"I saw it wrote in the sky." Kirk said. "God's done wrote it up there."

Mr. Halley said, "Kirk, that's Pepsi Cola."

"Sir?" replied Kirk.

"That's Pepsi Cola, Kirk," said Mr. Halley. "An airplane wrote that up there. The airplane's been gone for several minutes, and you just saw that writing."

"Oh, Mr. Halley, you know that ain't no Pepsi Cola," said Kirk.

"Yes, it is," Mr. Halley replied. "That plane wrote it and has done gone. You just calm down, it ain't Judgment."

The next morning Kirk came down to Jerry's father's house. They were standing out in the backyard and Kirk was telling Jerry's father this story. Jerry's father asked him, "Kirk, what would you have done had it been judgment?"

Kirk said, "I was just gonna keep running till Judgment overtook me." (JERRY CLOWER STORIES FROM HOME, (Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1992).)

We all want to know about the future, don't we? We want to know what's in store for us.

I read somewhere that the Masai people in Africa have no word for future. They have no vocabulary for talking about things that might happen tomorrow. We, on the other hand, are obsessed with the future. It has often been noted that the Eskimo people have 52 different words for snow. We have twice that many words in our vocabulary that refer to the future. There is even an entire profession--called futurists--who look into their crystal balls and make predictions about what life will be like for us in the years ahead based on advances that are taking place right now. And why shouldn't we want to know about the future?

THE FUTURE HOLDS SO MUCH PROMISE.

For example, there is a biotechnology company in Florida that is growing the inside of an orange--no peel, no pulp, no seeds, no tree--just the cells that produce the juice. To think, if this catches on, oranges will be grown in laboratories. A multilevel building will take the place of several thousand acres of citrus groves. Plus, there would be no worry about early frosts, blight, pesticides and herbicides, or droughts. (Daniel Burrus, TECHNOTRENDS, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994).)

Or how about this: Bar-code-reading toll booths. No need to have people in little booths collecting coins on toll roads anymore. Each of us could have a sticker on our car with a bar code. As we move by the toll booth a bar code reader like those in grocery stores would read our code and automatically charge our account the proper amount.

Or how about this? Pigs, cows, and goats may soon become living drug factories. Researchers already have successfully transferred into female pigs a gene that causes them to produce large amounts of protein in their milk. Now scientists plan to insert genes for other economically and medically important compounds into a variety of milk-producing animals. In the future, a single goat may produce enough blood-clotting factors to treat all the world's hemophiliacs. ( OUTLOOK '94, Mar/Apr '93, p. 5. Cited in THE FUTURIST, Nov/Dec 1993, p. 5. )

"Over the next 20 to 40 years we will have the potential for eradicating the major diseases that plague the World’s population," declares Leroy Hood, the Lasker Prize-winning California Institute of Technology biology chairman and physician who specializes in inventing high-tech machines to find and decode genes. "Our goal is not to help people live forever," Hood says, "But we will let them stay healthy and productive through the entire natural lifetimes."

No wonder we are excited about the future. The future holds much promise.

OF COURSE, IT IS ALSO FRAUGHT WITH DANGER.

Have you noticed that people's fear of the future has changed. Once people feared that they would die too soon. Now they fear that they will die too late--they will have outlived their assets and will spend their last years in poverty. The future can be scary. I am reminded of something author Kurt Vonnegut once told a university graduating class about his lifelong philosophy. "Regardless of how bad things are today," he believes, "they will be worse tomorrow." There are many who share Vonnegut's view. And, perhaps, with good reason. Humanity is presently spewing nearly a billion tons of pollutants into the Earth's atmospheric envelope every year. In Africa 29 trees are being cut down for every one planted.

Environmental crises are very real. For example, the earth does appear to be in a warming trend. Devastating floods ravaged Europe the last few years as unseasonably warm weather and unusual amounts of moisture prematurely melted snow caps. Are these precursors of the much debated greenhouse effect? Scientists are divided.

And what about the specter of international terrorism? And the problems of violence, drugs and the breakdown of the family? It's easy to get excited about the great promise that the future holds but it's also easy to become quite fearful. There is much that is wrong in this world. There is an awful deterioration in societal values, the result of which is yet to be determined.

What can we say about the future?

HOPE MIXED WITH FEAR. THAT IS ABOUT ALL WE CAN SAY ABOUT THE FUTURE.

UNLESS WE OPEN OUR BIBLES.

And there in the book of Revelation we read these magnificent words:

"And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need for sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of the Lord is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb."

I have good news for you concerning that mixture of hope and fear that we all feel with regard to the future: Hope wins. Hope wins. Carve it in granite, etch it in stone. Hope wins. Because God wins. Nothing in this world is surer. When your children ask about the future, teach them to sing those words that have inspired millions, "This is my Father's world, Oh, let me n'er forget that though the wrong is oft so strong, God is the ruler yet." Hope wins.

John's vision on the Isle of Patmos has many interpreters. Christians have many different views concerning the nature of the world that is to come. A Sunday School teacher was telling her class of youngsters about the "crowns of glory" that await people who believe. "Now tell me," she said at the close of the lesson, "Who will get the biggest crown?" There was a silence for a moment, then one bright youngster piped out, "The one who has the biggest head."

That youngster probably knows as much as any of us about the shape of that which is to come, but we know this: God will win and Christ will reign triumphant. Christ's glory will light up the universe and his love will light up every heart. That is a consistent promise throughout the New Testament.

In 1914 Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, an English explorer, led an expedition to the South Pole. As the ice began to close in on his boat, he had to leave some of his men stranded on Elephant Island as he went for help. He secured another ship on South Georgia Island and returned for his men. After several unsuccessful attempts, the weather finally permitted him to sail through to where the men were, pick them up, and then get out before the ice closed up again. Shackleford asked his crew why they had their things packed and standing by when he came back. They said, "Sir, when you left, you said you would come back for us, so we never gave up hope. Whenever the weather looked favorable, we would pack up our things and say, Maybe Shackleford will return for us today.' We were always ready for your coming." (Donald F. Ackland, THE INTERNATIONAL BIBLE LESSONS FOR CHRISTIAN TEACHING, (Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman Press, 1988).)

We don't know what the future holds, but we know Who holds the future. There is One who is returning for us. We are not forgotten. There is one who has gone to prepare a place for us. An African-American poet once put it like this:

There's a king and captain high, And He's coming by and by,

And He'll find me hoeing cotton when He comes.

You can hear His legions charging in the regions of the sky,

And He'll find me hoeing cotton when He comes.

There's a Man they thrust aside, Who was tortured till He died,

And He'll find me hoeing cotton when He comes.

He was hated and rejected, He was scorned and crucified,

And He'll find me hoeing cotton when He comes.

When He comes! When he comes!

He'll be crowned by saints and angels when He comes.

They'll be shouting out Hosanna! to the Man that men denied,

And I'll kneel among my cotton when He comes. (William Barclay, THE GOSPEL OF MATTHEW, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957; Edinburgh, Scotland: The Saint Andrew Press, 1957), p. 351)

The future holds much promise--but the greatest promise is this: Hope wins because God wins!

And This Christmas season we celebrate the Birth of that Hope!

.....

  ************************************  Weekly messages of hope and comfort for those who want to learn more about Jesus and His glorious plan for our lives.  To find out more about our ministry go to : worldoutreach.ca/sotn.htm  visit our "Ultimate Bible Quiz Site"  folsom.sk.ca/k4j/BQuiz/Quiz.html  *************************************                                                                              --  To unsubscribe, send ANY message to: [email protected]