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We are surround by crises. Mid-life crisis, quarterlife crisis, financial crisis, national crisis, global crisis, values crisis, job crisis, marriage crisis, Christmas shopping crisis, all of these crises fill us with fear and fear without hope leads to despair. Sometimes the holidays just serve to exacerbate these problems…our crises get bigger at Christmas. More stress, more family, more money…maybe it’s the first holiday without – well you know who’s missing at the table. No crisis is funnier than Billy Crystal’s meltdown in front of his son’s class in City Slickers.

1. Crises fill us with despair.

• Oddly enough Christmas was born in crisis. Jesus came in the midst of a housing crisis – there was no room. Joseph had a crisis of faith – what’s Mary been up to? Mary had an identity crisis – beloved daughter, questionable wife with a pregnancy to prove it. They both were in the midst of a national crisis – a foreign power occupied the country and a national crisis of faith – it had been 400 years since God had spoken to them.
• We remember their crisis with the season of Christmas. Christmas is traditionally celebrated in the church by four weeks, in some churches they call this season Advent meaning to arrive, or the coming of Christ. Four weeks is very symbolic, because between Old and New Testament there are 400 years.
• The story of the mother and her seven sons is found in the Apocryphal book of 2 Maccabees 7:1-42. This mother watches sons 1 – 6 be literally fried to their death. All the while Anitochus Epiphanes is arguing that if she could talk some sense into them their lives would be saved.
• It’s in dark crisis like these that we pray a prayer with the Psalmist in Psalm 40:11-12, “Do not, O Lord, withhold your mercy from me; let your steadfast love and your faithfulness keep me safe forever. For evils have encompassed me without number; my iniquities have overtaken me, until I cannot see; they are more than the hairs of my head, and my heart fails me.
• If only we had God with us, if only we had that light! Then the crisis would end. This is what the Jews prayed for when they wanted Immanuel to come – Immanuel literally means, “God with us.”

2. Despair darkens our hope.

• But God doesn’t show up, it’s not been 400 years but over 2,000. We have given up on hope. We believe that this is it and we’d better get used to it. We live in a time of darkness so to talk about hope is to talk about light – a light in the darkness. To talk about hope is to talk about a revolution of light in the midst of dark despair.
• A journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau takes an apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall. Every day when she looks out, she sees an old Jewish man praying vigorously. So, the journalist goes down and introduces herself to the old man. She asks, “You come every day to the wall. How long have you done that, and what are you praying for?” The old man replies, “I have come here to pray every day for 25 years. In the morning I pray for world peace and then for the brotherhood of man. I go home, have a cup of tea, and I come back and pray for the eradication of illness and disease from the earth.” The journalist is amazed. “How does it make you feel to come here every day for 25 years and pray for these things?” she asks. The old man looks at her sadly. “Like I’m talking to a wall.”
• Perhaps you can relate, perhaps you’ve been talking to a wall or a ceiling and your prayers don’t seem to go very far. We’ve given up hope on have God with us.
• Finally the mother of the seven sons sees her youngest son being led up to be executed. Antiochus Epiphanes reasons with her saying don’t let your family line be stamped out here. You’ve watched all your other sons die, why watch him die. Despair, darkness all creeping over this poor woman. She motions her son close to her and speaks to him in their own language so that no one else can understand. A conversation of hope in the midst of total darkness.
• It’s in situations like these that we question the existence of God, or the action of God. Why would God allow this to happen? Where has he been? We give up hope on Immanuel – “God with us.”
• If you’ve ever felt this way perhaps you can relate to the Psalmist who writes in Psalms 22:1-2, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.

3. Our hope is rekindled by Christ.

• Galatians 4:4 tells us that just when the darkness was overwhelming, when the time was full with anticipation God sends his Son. This doesn’t make everything easy, but it gives us perspective and it gives us hope. Hope is the strength to face despair and crisis – knowing that something better is coming.
• The mother comes to her son, her last son, son seven, and in their own language says to him as he faces a painful execution, “”My son, have pity on me. I carried you nine months in my womb, and nursed you for three years, and have reared you and brought you up to this point in your life, and have taken care of you. I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed. And in the same way the human race came into being. Do not fear this butcher, but prove worthy of your brothers. Accept death, so that in God’s mercy I may get you back again along with your brothers.” (2 Mac 7:27-29)
• This is the perspective you can have in dark despair when you see God’s light. Isaiah wrote about a people of hope when he said in Isaiah 9:2-4, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness- on them light has shined. You have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as people exult when dividing plunder. For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.”
• And now with the Psalmist we triumphantly proclaim, Psalm 73:16-17, “But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end.
• It’s the kind of hope the withstands reason – a childlike faith in what is to come. Christmas doesn’t look back to the good old days, it looks forward to the bright new days. The days when Christ will come and we will have Immanuel with us. Not as a baby – but as a king.

We find ourselves in a dark time, a time of violence – if you’ve watched any of the Mumbai story. A time of doubt, a time of restlessness, periods of pain – just like labor pains preparing for birth. It gets worse before it gets better. I sometimes feel like we’re waiting for something a little bit better.

Henri Nouwen’s parable of the twins in the womb is from his book Our Greatest Gift (available by clicking here), it is quoted by David McKenna and available to view for free on Google Books here.

(I’m sorry this is so late in posting but my family and I have recently moved…our internet access has been hit and miss at home – which is where I normally post from…)

We’ve been glued to the TV this week watching the stocks decline and the pundits speculate on how far the DOW can drop. I know it’s left many wondering, “Is anything for sure?” That coupled with the two recent incidents involving local law officers in domestic violence and murder is enough to shake anyone’s sense of security. There is no sure bet and no sure security.

Unfortunately for us Jesus’ words don’t offer a lot of hope as far as security.  In Matthew 8:20 Jesus said, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” While Christ makes no promise for wealth gain, physical security or even safety Hebrews 6:18-19 does promise that our souls will not be lost in any temporal storm. The author states, “We who have taken refuge might be strongly encouraged to seize the hope set before us. We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain.”  This spiritual security, anchored in Christ, can weather any storm.

This Sunday we’ll be looking at the cities of refuge Joshua established (Joshua 20) and how they are a prototype of the church.  We’ll look at where true hope and refuge can be found.  We’ll discover that in this uncertain time there is security.  It’s not the type we expected or wanted – but it’s exactly what we needed.  See you Sunday!

There are three key application questions that jumped out at me from Romans 8:18-3. I was convicted of these as I read the text: 1. “What are you waiting for to change the world?” 2. “What are you hoping for that only God can do?” 3. “What are you waiting on to be like Christ?” Essentially it’s the same question written three ways, with a slightly different emphasis in each.

I don’t journal often, but often enough to say I do. Journaling is particularly helpful and attractive to me during times of transition. When I’m tempted to wait on the world, journaling forces me to wait upon the Lord. It allows me to ask God, “What’s next?” then write it down. I then will revisit that entry and add to it for months until the path becomes clear. Perhaps you are at a crossroad, perhaps you are in transition. Use this time in your life to start waiting on the Lord, go buy a 99 cent journal and allow God to speak to you. Do whatever you need to wrestle with those three questions in order to move beyond waiting.

Waiting takes many different shapes. Waiting for the Indiana Jones movie…waiting on the plane with SkyMall…waiting in the doctors office…

Wait and its derivatives occur about 35 times in the New Testament, but there’s a nice cluster here in Romans 8. The only three times it occurs in this book are right here in this chapter.

John Mayer’s “Waiting on the World to Change” (view Sunday’s version here) is essentially a defeatist approach to revolution and redemption.

Read Romans 8:18-22, here we see something different. We see that the world is in fact waiting on us. This is the picture of the song “Wait Upon the Lord.”

1. The world waits (18-22)

a. Look at the world it’s in pain. There are wars ravaging African and Asian nations. There are famines in Myanmar and in Ethiopia. There are earthquakes in China. These are birth pains.

b. Jesus says in Matthew 24:6-8, “And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”

c. If we understand this shouldn’t we have a better solution than government?

d. The church waits sometimes with a near-sighted hope on several levels:

i. Global level – We have bought into the lie that the true power lies in government, not in the Holy Spirit.

ii. Local level – Transition, new personalities at our church.

iii. Personal level – We wait to get serious about Jesus until we’re a little bit older.

iv. We need to stop waiting on the world because the world is waiting on us!

2. The church hopes (23-25)

a. The world may wait, wait defeated, as a bystander watching a crime helpless to stop it. The church hopes. Notice the change in the language. Before creation, that is the natural created order, waits for what for us!

b. The world is waiting for you and the world is waiting for me. Because the world was solely made for you and for me, for the sons and daughters of God. When we are not who we are supposed to be creation can not either.

c. Waiting is waiting, hope here means confident expectation. Confident that God who has started this work inside of us will be faithful to complete it! Confident that these birth pains are not in vain! Birth pains signal birth and they give hope. They fill us with expectation.

3. God works (26-31)

a. Our role is minimal really, the world may wait and we hope, but God works. Even prayer is an initiative by God.

b. God-sized hope/God-sighted hope (8:28-30)

i. Jeremiah 31:31-34

ii. “A large family” (8:29)

iii. “Desires everyone to be saved” (1 Timothy 2:4)

c. Listen to what Paul says here in verse 29-30: God foreknew you, God knew you before you knew him. Knowing that he called you to himself. He loved you enough to not have you remain the same, but decided that you should become like his son Jesus. He called you and since you couldn’t come to him, he came to you and justified you. It wasn’t enough to save you, he wants to glorify you…making you eternally like Jesus.

d. Access information about the ministry of Scott and Kathi Parish and Asian Access here.

Conclusion -

“The world is waiting for you to become like Christ.”

So what are you waiting for? God has already given you the victory…Romans 8:31, “What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us?”