Guest User 12/24/19 Guest User 12/24/19

Wonderful Anticipation - The Spirit of Hope

Pastor Robbie concludes our Christmas series, Wonderful Anticipation by speaking about the Spirit of Hope out of Luke 2!

This past Sunday we concluded our Christmas series called Wonderful Anticipation, a series that followed the Church’s tradition of Advent. There are many different things that Advent represents. Pastor Robbie spoke about the Spirit of Hope, speaking from Luke 2. If you were not able to make it to our Gathering this past Sunday, know that we missed you and hope to be able to see you this upcoming Sunday!

Where in your history does Christmas and hope collide? Has there ever been an explicit connection between Christmas and Hope in your mind? Christmas, the day we remember the birth of the Messiah, should have a very defined sense of hope assigned to it. From the earliest times in Scripture, we see God promising that He will send a solution to the severed relationship between Him and mankind. Throughout history, we see God maneuvering events, people, and actions all of which were needed to lead up to Jesus of Nazareth, from the line of David, to be born of humble means to live a perfect life, die, and then conquer death itself. Because of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, we have life, and we have a relationship with the Lord and Creator of our world; all of which, begins at Jesus’ birth - on Christmas, the day we celebrate this event. The fulfilled Hope of the Messiah coming is the greatest hope of all!

Reading from most, if not all of Luke 2, Pastor Robbie speaks immediately to the actuality of what this Hope is, saying, “You see, this wonderful thing happens in the Christmas story. God our Father, in all of his awe and majesty, sees us in our weakness and He decides to crouch down, to come down on our level, and He gets down and He sends his Son into this world to look us in the eye, to affirm us. Then He does something right there, He decides to give us hope...and it’s not just this delusional hope; it’s not this hope that is focused on self-centered desires, this is a hope that can only be fulfilled in an all-consuming God. It is a hope to give us strength in the middle of our mess. And when we receive this hope into our lives, something happens. That hope is only in the person of Jesus Christ. Something happens in us and we change. It’s a change that comes within us. It is not a change in our circumstances, but it is a change in the way we perceive our circumstances.

The process that families go through to have children, is very simple, while equally complicated - this is true for our time and in the time of Mary and Joseph. In Luke 2:22-24 we learn that Mary presents 2 turtledoves for part of the necessary cleansing rituals for having a birthing a child; we learn uniquely that Mary would have been of humble means, to put it kindly - she and her husband would have been quite poor. I think a lot of us here find ourselves in the place where we are ashamed or embarrassed because we don’t feel like we are living up to be the person that we could or we should be. We feel like our life is insignificant and we come to this moment in Scripture. We come to this instance when the woman with the least to give gives the greatest gift of all; when the woman with little or no means gives the greatest meaning to the world. I don’t want to stop short on this point right here, this is a powerful point. The greatest gifts in our lives are not the biggest gifts, are they? All of us can attest to this idea.

There are three things that we can learn specifically about Hope from Luke 2, and several other passages addressed in this sermon. 1) Hope Always Brings Peace; 2) Hope Fulfilled Usually Comes in a Different Form than Hope Prayed For; 3) Hope Always Starts in the Infancy Stage. All of these points bring about a unique sense of tension in Scripture because Hope ‘realized’ is different than Hope ‘to come’ - they’re not contingent on each other. Is. 43:19 says ‘See I am doing a new thing…Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” While 1 Peter 1:3 states “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…” In the first verse speaks to what is to come, the hope of the Christ that is coming - while the second is a come to pass truth, the fulfilling of the hope actualized into salvation for many.

True Hope has no end, and the hope that we have been given through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most eternal hope available to us. As we spoke about earlier, many of us may not think of ourselves as hopeful or ‘Christmas’ to be most pleasant of times, however, The point is this – all of us, when confronted with the presence of hope and the presence of Jesus Christ, our challenge is to rebuild hope within us. Then we are challenged before God to actually hope, that hope is deferred, but if we are willing to hang on, there can be this explosion of life. Christmas is coming, and a celebration of hope is necessarily what this day is about - not family, or presents, but the arrival of the Messiah!

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays - You Are Loved!

SOME KEY TAKE-AWAYS

Wonderful Anticipation - The Spirit of Hope: The primary culmination of Christmas itself, is the anticipation of the Christ-child that will bring about hope for a renewed relationship with God, available to all people.
Main Scripture Passages: Luke 2; Isaiah 43:19; 1 Peter 1:3
Hope Always Brings Peace: Hope without assurance for something to come, it not peace at all - peacefulness comes from Hope, especially the Perfect Hope of Christ.
Hope Fulfilled Usually Comes in a Different Form than Hope Prayed For: The People of Israel long thought that their Messiah would be a military leader, to save them from their enemies - Christ came for different reasons, but saved them and us nonetheless.
Hope Always Starts in the Infancy Stage: The Peace that Hope brings is not always immediate, dwelling on God’s promises allows us to lean into what the Holy Spirit desires for us to know - the seed of Hope is powerful and can develop into something unwavering.

If this topic piques your interest or if you would enjoy listening to this sermon in more depth, check out Legacy City’s Podcast, available here, or on Spotify and Itunes.

To keep up to date with Legacy City Church and everything that God is doing in our community, please follow us on social media:

Facebook: LegacyCityGWD
Instagram: LegacyCityGWD
Twitter: LegacyCityGWD

Join us next Sunday as we Celebrate our 2 Year-Anniversary!

We’re saving you a seat, and know that You Are Loved!

Guest User 12/3/19 Guest User 12/3/19

Wonderful Anticipation - The Spirit of Peace

Pastor Robbie kicks off our Christmas series, Wonderful Anticipation by speaking about the Spirit of Peace surrounding the coming Messiah in Isaiah 11!

This past Sunday we started our Christmas series called Wonderful Anticipation, a series that will be following the Church’s tradition of Advent. There are many different things that Advent represents, and some things that we should not associate with it. Pastor Robbie began by speaking about the Spirit of Peace, as told in Isaiah 11:1-9. If you were not able to make it to our Gathering this past Sunday, know that we missed you and hope to be able to see you this upcoming Sunday!

Coming up on the Holiday season, and particularly the Christmas season, the day celebrating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, gets closer and closer. For some of us, this can be an incredibly joyous time, while others of us wish everything wasn’t so busy and stressful. The celebration of Jesus’ birth is important, and something that Christians have been doing throughout the centuries. The problem is, in our culture, that in our rush to celebrate the fun stuff and even to celebrate the Birth of Christ, we want to hurry up and get to the big day. The church, historically, has used this time not to speed up, but to slow down, to slow down and to actually feel the angst and the longing, the anticipation of the coming Christ. Historically, this time has not been an overly busy one for believers, but the exact opposite in-fact. Ps. Robbie stated that ‘the most descriptive word I could use to describe this season is anticipation. That’s really one of my favorite aspects of Christmas, it’s the anticipation, the wonderful anticipation. You look forward to it and that really is at the core of what Advent is. The word literally means coming. It is an anticipation of the second coming of Christ by us reflecting on the first coming of Christ, or Christmas.

Most of the sermon specifically surrounded Isaiah 11:1-9, but some context is needed to really be able to appreciate what’s going on here. At this point in the people of Israel’s history, split up into two nations (Israel and Judah) and both of them are being judged by God for their continued sinfulness. Both of these nations will eventually be taken in exile by either Babylon or Assyria and God’s wrath and judgment will come upon them for their injustice and faithlessness. From the earliest book of the Bible, multiple covenants with God have been made, and even though the people of Israel are being judged and taken into exile, this does not mean God does not intend to fulfill those promises! The Messiah is still coming, and the unique expression of the ‘Spirit of the Lord’ surrounding this coming figure is unlike anyone before it.

Isaiah and many other prophets talk about the nature of the coming Messiah, but the book of Isaiah, in particular, gives us a unique insight into God’s character and the Servant’s also. The Spirit of the Lord is described by ‘And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.’; these traits, when acted on perfectly bring about true and genuine peace - this would have been a tremendously encouraging promise to those living in exile! Isaiah 11:5 says this ‘Righteousness shall be the belt of his waist, and faithfulness the belt of his loins.’ - the Messiah is literally clothed in that which is righteous and faithful to God, peace necessarily comes through this figure! Jesus quite literally produces peace through everything that he intends to do - this isn’t always the most clear, but this always comes out to be true! Psalm 34:14 reiterates this idea as something that each and every one of us should be pursuing for ourselves saying, ‘Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.’ The power of the Holy Spirit in us calls us forward, away from evil and into good, away from chaos and into peace!

Ps. Robbie powerfully concludes with, ‘Peace is not so much about a state of affairs that we live in. It has everything to do with the state of being that you rest in. The Holy Spirit is the true spirit of Christmas and He is the Spirit of Peace. He brings peace to us and as we reflect and as we elevate and celebrate the character of Christ and we ask the Holy Spirit to conceive that character within us, as we rely on the power of God to bring together those things that don’t belong together; as we allow our lives to point to Christ, we may be able to see a window of that peace that is promised.’