the past few weeks we've been in the book of Hebrews and we've been exploring what that text has to say to us about who Jesus is, what Jesus has done for us and what Jesus is up to now. And we've been talking about that in light of what we're doing here on Sunday morning at ten o'clock in the gym, right? We're talking about all of that in light of what it has to do with worship. And so this week, our fourth week in the series on practicing the presence, we're going to do that once more.
And we're going to join together and look in chapter six and look at three verses in chapter six, like last week, just a few short little verses, but in those few short little verses, I think there's a lot for us to discover this morning. And so I hope you've had your morning cups of coffee or I hope this kind of brisk fall morning has woken you up because we're about to jump right in. So if you'll read with me, chapter six of Hebrews verses eighteen through twenty, we'll be on the screen or of course you can find it in your Bibles or just simply listen this morning. Reads like this, eighteen through twenty.
So God has given both His promise and His oath. These two things are unchangeable because it is impossible for God to lie. Therefore, we who have fled to Him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. His hope is a strong and it is a trustworthy anchor for our souls.
It leads us through the curtain into God's inner sanctuary. Jesus has already gone in there for us and He has become our eternal high priest in the order of Melchizedek. And also I just prayed a beautiful prayer, but if you'll join me in prayer, just for a second more. Now, may whatever words come out of my mouth this morning, may whatever it is that we hear together be the words that we need to hear be the words that I need to speak so that we can be the people that you need us to be.
So, Spirit, come, God do your work in our hearts and let us do all of this in your son's name who is the author and who is our living hope now and always. Amen. So, if we had to get together in small groups and like determine what the theme of these three verses were, I don't think there'd be much disagreement. It's pretty clear that the theme of these simple three verses is hope, right?
And so that got me to thinking about this idea, this notion of hope. And really quickly, I realize I use that word all of the time. I start my emails with it. I say hello.
I hope that this email finds you well, right? I close my emails with it in my text message conversations. Hope you have a great day. I hope that the weather is going to be better tomorrow.
I hope that something I ask someone to do is actually going to get accomplished, right? We hope, I use this word all of the time in everyday language and y'all probably do, too. But also realize there are times in life when we add more meaning to that word and we put a little bit more significance behind it. And we say things like, my hope is that the world would be a less broken place.
My hope is that the community in which I live would be a safer place for me to raise my children, right? Around Christmas, we like sort of show this hope and we put signs, literal signs of peace, joy, hope on our front doors and our Christmas trees, right? We put a lot behind that idea of hope. But I also know in weeks like this one, when we look at our phones and we look at the headlines and we see what we see and when we encounter stories of brokenness closer to our own homes, closer to our own lives, this notion of hope that I can seem empty, right?
I don't think that's just me. It can seem empty. And so when we realize that that sometimes happens and that we just sort of throw this notion of hope around in the everyday, as I was thinking about this, I sort of found myself perplexed. And so I did something I'm not always great at viewing, but that I'm getting better at.
And I asked for help. I asked some of my friends and some of my colleagues in ministry to just send me their thoughts on what their idea of hope was, specifically what our Christian hope is. And they'll have some good friends and they sent me back some good words that sort of helped reground me and what this idea of hope was, what our Christian hope was. Well, the most unusual answer I got back, but the most helpful answer I got back was a friend who said to me, I'm not going to tell you what hope is.
I'm going to remind you what our hope is not. And so I think that's a good place for us to start this morning. Let's think about what hope is not. And this person said to me, our hope is not just an intellectual conclusion.
Our hope is not just something that we think about and it is not merely a wish. Our hope is not some sort of vague sense that things might sort of turn out okay. Y'all, our hope is not those things because our hope is bigger than those things. And yes, our hope is bigger than those things because Jesus is bigger than those things.
And I promise I'm not just saying that because it is printed on a plastic cup in the lobby or on the back of our foundry t-shirts. Y'all, I'm saying that because I think that's what we've been talking about for the past three weeks. We've been talking about how Jesus is our eternal high priest, how he broke down the barrier between God and humanity, how he made a way, how he makes a way for us to enter into God's presence. When we keep our eyes on him, we can strip off everything that holds us back and enter into God's throne room.
And we've been learning that in God's presence things are different. Things can change in God's presence and in God's presence. We can see that our hope is so much bigger than some idea or some thought about something sort of being okay maybe in the future. So what we've talked about what our hope is not.
So what is our hope? Our text tells us this morning that our hope is a strong and it is a trustworthy anchor for our souls. That's not a very straightforward answer. But what I've learned in the past couple of weeks when walking with y'all through the book of Hebrews is that whoever wrote this book was a really smart person able to weave together all these different ideas and come up with these clever metaphors and ways of talking about Jesus that help us see him in new and important lives.
And so this is a metaphor we have this morning that our hope is an anchor and the metaphor goes kind of like this. The idea is that Jesus who goes before us into the inner sanctuary of God's of heaven, into the throne room, takes with him an anchor, like think of a literal anchor that holds a ship in place, right? And takes it and ties or fastens or somehow attaches this anchor to God's throne. And in doing that ties our hope directly into the character of God, directly into the promises of God.
And because our hope is now tied to those things our hope becomes strong and it becomes trustworthy, right? Well the thing about an anchor is it's really useless unless it's attached to something or it has something attached to it. And so the author talks about this cord of hope. And so the cord of hope is attached to the anchor of hope which is tied to the throne of God, right?
So imagine to drop down from God's inner sanctuary all the way down into human history from its very beginning into today and all the way into all the tomorrows that are going to be. The cord of hope is woven through our stories. And so this is what the author says when he says or she says we're to grab a hold of this hope to seize the hope that is set before us, right? So excuse me, the hope that is set before us.
And so we think about what this means, we think about what this tells us as far as hope is concerned. And I think that we learned three things. We learned that hope, our hope is rooted in who God is. Our hope is tied to the promises of God and our hope where our hoping is an activity.
So our first, our hope is rooted in who God is. I think the best way for us to think about this is how we talk about it all the time at Foundry. We say God is an active God. Our God is never a passive God.
And we're able to say that because of our scriptures, the story it tells us about God's dynamic relationship with God's people over all of time. But we also know that something special happened in Jesus and Jesus, God revealed to us God's activity, God's activity of healing and of making whole, right? Of speaking truth to love and to power and speaking truth in love. Jesus revealed to us God's activity.
And it's not that he just did that, but that he's still doing that. He is here. He is here with us in this place. He is here with us in this community.
And he is doing things and he is changing things. And we know that because of who God is, he's not going to stop. Jesus is going to keep, he's going to remain with us and keep doing things amongst us. And that is our hope.
Our hope is that in the darkest places of the world, God is going to keep shining the light. Good in confusion and in our chaos of the world, the Holy Spirit is going to keep bringing clarity. Y'all in the places of death and in destruction, Jesus is going to keep bringing life and showing us what resurrection looks like. Y'all, this is our hope because our hope is rooted in who God is.
Our hope is tied to the promises of God and our text reminds us that the promises of God are unshakeable. The promises of God, of a God who cannot lie, God's throne is not going anywhere ever. And our hope, our time to that promise, our promise, our hope because it's tied to that promise is forever. It is strong.
It is trustworthy. Y'all, we have an everlasting hope and our everlasting hope is this. That one day the work that Jesus has done, the one day the work that Jesus is doing will be complete. It will be finished.
And on that day there will be no more hatred. There will be no more pain. There will be no more brokenness. Y'all one day everything is going to be as it is supposed to be.
Y'all, and that is our hope because our hope is tied in to the everlasting promises of our faithful God. Y'all, our hope, I mentioned this earlier, is an activity. It's this activity of reaching out and grabbing hold of the cord of hope that is woven through our stories, right? But there is no literal cord.
It's not like something that's just lying around on the ground that we can pick up or accidentally trip over. So it begs the question, how do we grab a hold of hope, right? And in this world, how some days do we find that cord of hope? Because some days the hope seems really hard to find or uncover.
I don't think anybody's going to be too shocked by the answer to those questions. But the answer to how it is that we grab a hold, how it is that we find the hope that is woven through our story because of what Jesus has done for us is that we worship. And we worship, we grab a hold of hope. And in worship, we grab a hold of hope by telling a story, by telling the story of God's relationship with God's interaction with our world, a story that starts in creation and that is woven throughout our scripture.
Y'all, it's not a story just in this book. It's a story of all of those who have ever joined their lives to this great story. Everyone who has been incorporated into this story by baptism and by being a part of a Christian community. What I'm trying to say is the story that we tell in worship, it's our story, right?
It's a story by which we understand our world and it's a story that teaches us to live as people of God in particular places where we find ourselves. This is an important story. It's a powerful story. It's a complicated story.
But the thing about stories is this, an untold story doesn't have any power over anything. An unrehearsed story has no bearing over any situation. And so y'all, we need to tell this story. We need to tell this story to ourselves, to our children, to anyone who would walk through that door.
We need to tell this story and so in worship we tell this story in prayer and in practice, in praise, in song, in scripture, in sermon and in silence, we tell this story over and over and over again, right? But I don't think we just need to tell this story. I think we have to tell this story. I think we have to tell this story for the sake of the world because y'all, we live in a world where people are told that their stories don't matter.
Y'all, we live in a world where the stories were bombarded with often don't even make any sense. And we live in a world where the stories that claim to have power actually don't have any power or significance, right? Now, but our story, it means something. It makes all of our stories matter.
It shows us how everything is connected, how everything is under God's control. Y'all, this story is powerful. It has the power to change everything. And so we need to tell this story and we have to tell this story and we do this by grabbing a hold of the hope we have and we do this in worship, right?
This is what, this is the activity we engage in. And I keep saying we and I keep saying our hope because y'all hope is a communal activity. It is a collective activity. It's not my hope.
It's not your hope. It's not Chad's hope. It's all of our hope, right? And so it makes insane all of that.
It makes our gathering together essential, right? So essential in fact that I would take it so far as to say that I'm not sure that we can really hope unless we hope together. And so let's talk about it like this. At Foundry we talk a lot about creating environments for people to experience God, right?
And so I've been thinking about that a lot over the time that I've been here and you all have taught me so much about what that means. But the thing that keeps rising to the surface when I think about that is the main part of creating environments is the people who are present. And it's not just something that I'm learning in this season, but as I look back over my past and think about all of the times that I've experienced God in worship, I find myself not thinking about particular places but about specific people who were present with me. I mean I think of like four or five year old me with a giant bow on her head who's hoisted up onto the chair so that I could see the screen, right?
And be more eye level with the people that I was worshiping with, the people there at that my home congregation who taught me to worship. I mean I thought about the little too dark and little too damp chapel at my college where me and some of my friends and peers would gather on Monday evening and there we would open up the old dusty hymnals and get out the guitars and play the little out of tune piano. And my friends taught me the songs in that book, the songs of our faith, songs I didn't know, words I didn't know, but by their presence then their willingness to be there and to teach me. I learned a new way to see God and figure out what he was calling me to next.
Now I thought about a Christmas when I came back to Shreveport and gathered with some of my friends, some of my close friends, but also some of my friends without homes. And we gathered under a bridge, one Christmas season, around a tin gallon drum filled with fire and we sang simple Christmas songs. I have no idea what those songs were. I don't know where that bridge was.
I can't even remember what year that was. But I remember those faces and I remember those voices and how they showed me a little more on that night who Jesus was and what Jesus cared about. I thought finally about the congregation that I worshipped in in Atlanta, an old congregation in the heart of the city where a lot of the folks who worshiped there on a weekly basis had been there a very long time. But by their very presence, they witnessed to me what it meant to be a faithful follower of Christ in that place.
What I'm trying to say is that our presence matters. It makes a difference. Our gathering together allows us to create an environment for other people to encounter God in a way that we can't buy ourselves, allows us to create a space for us to encounter Jesus who is indeed our living hope. You also, when we gather and worship, we grab a hold of hope and I think we can do something when we do that together.
If you will, you can pull on that cord a little bit and we can bring heaven to earth for just a minute. Chad said the first week that in worship in the presence of God, we can bring the future into the now. And when we do that in the presence of God, things are different, things can change. We can so clearly see who Jesus is and that our hope is so much bigger than some big sense that things might work out okay.
So, y'all, before I make this last statement, I just want to give you all a little bit of a disclaimer. I mentioned I was having some conversations with my friends about this idea of hope or what our hope is. Well, after I sort of found myself regrounded in these ideas, I continued a conversation with one of my friends about our hopes for ourselves, our hopes for the world, our hopes for the church. And I said this thing that I'm about to say and he said, yeah, I agree with that.
But I just want to let you know, Allison, I think you may be filled with a foolish and a radical amount of hope. So I may be filled with a foolish and a radical amount of hope, but y'all, this I believe with every ounce of who I am. I believe that when we together grab a hold of the hope that has woven through our stories because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, when we do this as often as we can in worship, y'all then we become a people of hope. Y'all, and when we become a people of hope, we're able to see more clearly the sin that trips us up, the fear that holds us back, the indifference that stops us, and we're able to confront that and so many other things with the big hope of our big God.
When we become a people of hope, I think we stop being constrained by who we are right now, who we are as individuals and who we are as a community, and we're able to see what it is that we can become, what it is that God wants us to become. When we are become a people of hope when we worship together, I think we start refusing to settle for what is, for settle for the status quo, and we together start creating what can be. And maybe most of all, y'all, in a world where hope is hard to find, where it's hard to uncover, where it seems empty or we just throw it around here and there. When we worship, when we grab a hold of hope, when we seize the hope set before us, we become a people of hope for ourselves, for our communities, and for our whole world.
Let us pray. Jesus, you are the author of our hope. You're the one who goes before us, who makes a way this day and every day. And one day your work will be complete and we are thankful for that everlasting hope that we have in you because of who you are.
But in the meantime, we know that you are present. You know that your spirit moves among us, that heals our tired and wounded hearts, that brings us joy, and lets us see what it is that we can become. So as we continue to worship this morning, continue to be with us, continue to do your work in our hearts. We love you and it is in your son's name.
We pray. Amen.