A Thrill of Hope — 12.02.18 Sermon

Opening the Christmas series A Thrill of Hope , this message begins honestly: for many, the holidays carry grief and hard memories as much as joy. Danny Cox defines biblical hope as confidence anchored in God's word, then traces it through one of Scripture's most familiar stories. Israel's 400 years of bondage in Egypt mirrors the 400 years of prophetic silence before Christ; Moses the deliverer foreshadows Jesus the deliverer; and the Passover lamb, its blood on the doorposts, points forward to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world . The throughline is that Jesus was never an afterthought but God's plan from the beginning—and that the lights and gifts are meant to point to that hope, not replace it.