Hope Has a Future!

Sermon 3 in “HOPE:  Studies in the Prophets” Series

November 17, 2013

Isaiah 65:17-25

Scripture

17For I am about to create new heavens

    and a new earth;

the former things shall not be remembered

    or come to mind.

18 But be glad and rejoice forever

    in what I am creating;

for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,

    and its people as a delight.

19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem,

    and delight in my people;

no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,

    or the cry of distress.

Sermon

            In the fall of 2000, I had it all.  At 31, I had become a Southern Baptist resort missionary living and ministering at the beach.  I had my seminary degree.  I was happily married with a three year old daughter and another one on the way.  I owned a new house.  We had 2 cars. 

Ten years earlier, I only had a hope for a future.  At 21, I was starting my last year of college with no girlfriend, no job prospects, no graduate degree, and no clarity in ministry calling.  I simply knew I was called to ministry and would graduate in May.   The future appeared in my mind like a black hole that absorbed my prayers and vision.  I walked forward into that last year of college hopeful and anxious – what would the future really hold me? 

When we are young, the future stands starkly before us.  One of the favorite questions we like to ask our preschoolers is – “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  The question invites our children to imagine a future as a firefighter or police officer or country music star. 

As our kids grow, we engage their future imaginations by asking the same question in more elaborate ways.  Middle schoolers take aptitude tests to learn their strengths and passions.  High school freshmen log on to college 411 to imagine a college experience which will help make their future a reality. 

By the time, our preschoolers become college freshmen the “what do you want to be when you grow up” transforms to “what’s your major?”  We engage our children with these future questions even though we know that most preschoolers won’t be firefighters and over ½ college students who declare a major will change it before they graduate. 

            So why do we ask these questions:  To engage the future with our imaginations.  Our imaginations drive our future.   Although our futures may change from what we imagine – using our imagination allows God’s future for us to emerge.   

Yet, as we grow older, we gradually lose our ability to imagine a future like the adults in the Polar Express no longer hear the sound of Santa’s bell.  We stop imagining our futures and instead work hard to stop counting birthdays or spend more time looking back at special memories or events in our lives.  Think for a moment:  When was the last time someone invited as an adult to look forward by asking, “how do you want to be living your life and maximizing your time, health and energy in 5 years?

            This is the question, I found myself asking in the fall of 2000.  I had everything I had imagined just 10 years before.  Yet, I had another 35 years before I retired if I was lucky.  What kind of future imagination would drive me for the next three ½ decades of my life?  Frankly, I wasn’t prepared to imagine a future, so I didn’t. 

I began focusing less on the future and more on the day to day.  Instead of looking ahead I began to look back.   Rather than living with a hope for God’s future for my life, I began to take life as life came at me. 

            I would bet, this experience is not unique to my life.  How many of us have lost our future imaginations as we worked our way through adulthood?  How many of us have failed to look up from life to see where God might be leading?  How many of us have lost our hope for a future in the in the course of the grind of life?

            For those of us who have lost our imagination of God’s future – Isaiah 65:17-25 invites us to lift our eyes from the grind of life to see the hope of God’s coming future.  Our hope has a future!

Movement 1:  God is about to do something.

            This hope for a future is possible because God is about to do something.  In v. 17, the Lord says “For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth;” God does not say – “I’m doing this or remember when I did that.”  Instead, it’s I’m about to create a new heaven and a new earth.  God directs our attention forward to a future when all that we know will be made new. 

We see two things in the verse – 1.  God is future orientated.  God does not look back – God lives in the future and invites us to join him there.  The Bible is always moving forward like a giant glacier to the world’s final consummation.  2.  Because God is future oriented, God has our future in his hands.  While we may not know the future, we can imagine a future because God is there.  

Our Future imagination is built in the nature of God. 

The name of God reveals the nature of God.  When Moses stands before God at the burning bush in Exodus, he asks God’s name.  God says YHWH – which we call Yahweh.  Yahweh is a form of the “to be” verb.  Literally, God says his name is “I am who I am” and “I was who I was” and “I will be who I will be.’  This is simplified by simply saying “I am.”  Tell the Pharaoh that “I am” sent you.

At the end of the Bible in the first chapter of Revelation, John the Revealer before he engages our imaginations about the future describes the nature of God who we can trust with the future.  This is how John describes God:  “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”  Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet; The Lord God Almighty which is how translators often translate Yahweh.  I am becomes:  the one who is and who was and who is to come. 

Because God lives in the future, we always have a hope for a future. 

Movement 2:  God’s future puts the past in perspective

God’s future orientation puts the past in perspective.  V. 17 continues, “The former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.”  When we allow God to direct our attention to the future, our past no longer binds us.  What has been - has been.  The past now becomes the foundation for the future God is about to create in our lives.  This future is so great that these former things shall not be remembered.  

Revelation 21 gets at this shift in perspective.  After the New Heaven and the New Earth descend from heaven, we hear these words:  “he will wipe every tear from their eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”  God’s future becomes so glorious that the past no longer can control it. 

When old Noah finally stepped off that smelly, dirty floating zoo, do you remember what God did?  God gave Noah a vision of a new future in the sign of a rainbow.  God said, this would be a promise that God would never again flood the earth.  The rainbow allowed Noah to put those bad days of ridicule leading up the flood, the trauma of the flood, and even the boring days caring for rowdy animals in the past.  The past would define Noah’s future. 

The same is true with you and me as we imagine God’s future.  God’s future releases us from our past mistakes or hang ups or sins and gives us the ability to receive what God is about to create in our lives.  

Movement 3:  God still creates

This is the Good News in this passage for us to day – God still creates.  V. 18 say:  “But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating.”

            We can have a hope for a future because God is still creating us.  Take that in.  God has not stopped creating you and me – no matter our age, our station in life – God is not done with us.  God did not stop creating in Genesis 2 – God is still forming us into the person, the people, the individuals God wants us to be.

            John Newton was nurtured by a Christian mother who taught him the Bible as he grew up in the mid-1700’s England.  When he was 7, though, she died, and Newton followed his father to the sea, leaving for his first voyage with his father at the age of 11.  

            He grew up to be arrogant and insubordinate, living with moral abandon at sea.  Eventually, he took up employment with a slave-trader named Clow, who owned a plantation of lemon trees on an island off of West Africa. Newton rose in the rates from mate and then served as captain of a number of slave ships – the ghastly transport of human cargo from port to port. 

Then, one day as he rode out a massive storm, Newton made a decision to follow Jesus.  He did immediately give up his slave trading vocation.  God was still creating him.  He continued to captain the slave ships hoping as a Christian to restrain the worst excesses of the slave trade by "promoting the life of God in the soul" of both his crew and his African cargo.

            Unable to do this, he left the sailing to others and worked for the traders on port – leading Bible studies in his home.  Eventually, Christ convicted him of the sin of the slave trade and he quit the business completely and was ordained into the Anglican Church.  It was in this role, that he eventually wrote these amazing words that we sing today:  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, That saved a wretch like me.  I once was lost but now am found, Was blind, but now I see.”

            The story of John Newton is the story of God’s continued creation.  Over and over again, God invites him to imagine a new future and over and over again, Newtown follows.  The same is true for us – God is still creating you and me into the person God wants us to be.  It requires us to be willing to allow his creation to take place.   

Movement 4:  God’s future brings Joy

When we allow God to create us for our future hope, God’s future brings us joy.  Look at v. 18.  “For I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.”  God is always working for the best in our lives.  When we realize this, accept it as true – the future God provides will be full of more joy and delight than we can ever imagine. 

Here’s the rub:  God is not working to make us happy or wealthy.  God is not working to take away suffering or bad days.  God is not working to give us the perfect middle class American lifestyle.  Instead, God is creating us to mirror the life of Jesus in this world – to become the person God imagines we can be.    

When we approach our future with knowledge God is working out our best, joy follows.  When we approach hard times, difficult times – times of tears or anxiety – there can still be joy – because God is creating us to be the best we can be.  When we feel like we can’t carry the burdens of our lives anymore and we cry out to God, “why me,” God can still bring us joy because God is working to create us for the future God desires for us. 

This week, I was talking to friend about a particularly difficult time in my life.  As we talked I remembered the pain and the difficulties of those days – the feelings of failure and anger, the questions of why me, God.  As I looked again at those moments and what I wanted from them, I could only give God thanks.  Instead of giving me what I wanted in those days, God gave me something even better. I could finally look back with joy for the grace God showed me during this time. 

Hope for the future brings joy to our present conditions because we can trust God with our future. 

Movement 5:  Our futures bring delight to God

Finally, not only does our future bring us joy, our future, also delights God.  V. 19 says, ”I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people.’  When we allow God to create us for the future he has for us – we bring God joy.  When we release the hold we have on our future and allow God to draw us into his future, we bring God joy.  When we submit ourselves to the will and purposes of God’s future, we bring God joy. 

Our relationship we have with our creator is reciprocal.  We bring delight to God.  This is why God gave us free will.  If we had no control over our lives and could only serve as puppets to God’s whims – there would be no joy.  We would be simply playing a part in a play.  Instead, God gives us the ability to choose our futures.  God gives us the ability to imagine a future where God is at work.  When we begin to us this imagination for God’s purpose and submit ourselves to his ways – God smiles. 

            This year I have been watching with amazement as a friend of mine battled brain cancer.  A Baptist missionary, Gina Wilson thought she had cancer beat over 2 years ago.  So, she returned to Scotland to serve an urban youth culture lost in secularism.  Last winter, though, her cancer returned to her brain and many thought Gina would die. 

            She returned to South Carolina to begin a dramatic chemotherapy treatment.  Because she had so many friends around the world, she kept a video diary on Facebook to update everyone about her condition.  Going back over a year to look at these videos is amazing.  Staring death in the face, Gina constantly speaks of God’s future – whether on this earth or in heaven.  She reads scripture with such a open and fun heart that it draws you in.  You actually feel the hope for the future that she has as you cry over her present condition.  This fall, Gina had her doctor on a video that announced that she was cancer free.  God had given her a future – and both she and God found joy and delight.  God smiled. 

Conclusion

What about you?  Do you have a hope for your future?  When was the last time you used your imagination to envision God’s future for your life?  On your sermon guide today, I’ve given you a way for you to do just this.  Bobby, will come forward to seeing a beautiful song called Revelation song.  As he sings of the One who is and was and is to come, let me invite you to imagine the future God has for you!

Future exercise

On Thanksgiving Day, November 22, 2018 (5 years from today), I will be _________ years old.

In 2018, what will be the most important aspect of my life (what will take up most of my time, money, and energy)?  

As my family and friends share Thanksgiving Dinner with me, what will they most notice has changed about me since 2013? 

Prayer of Gratitude:

Dear Lord,

For Thanksgiving 2018, I am most thankful that over the last 5 years …