Give Jesus My Despair, He'll Give Me His Hope Series

NOTE:

This is a manuscript, and not a transcript of this message. The actual presentation of the message differed from the manuscript through the leading of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is possible, and even likely that there is material in this manuscript that was not included in the live presentation and that there was additional material in the live presentation that is not included in this manuscript.

› Engagement

My guess is that most everyone here today has participated in a gift exchange at Christmas time before - maybe at your office, or with your family or even with a group from church. When Mary and I lived in Albuquerque, the young married group at our church had a white elephant gift exchange every year. The fact that we were part of a young married group tells you that this was quite some time ago.

As with most white elephant gift exchanges, many of the gifts that people brought were gag gifts of some kind, although once in a while someone would bring something really nice that people would steal or fight over. But what I remember most was this set of black ceramic swans that seemed to show up year after year. So for the person who ended up with those swans at the end of the night, the challenge was to try and wrap them in a way that no one would know what was in the package the following year.

Fortunately Mary and I were never stuck with those swans, but to be real honest, I can’t remember even one of the gifts that I ended up with over the five or six years we took part in that gift exchange. And my guess if that most of us remember very few of the Christmas gifts we’ve received over the years.

As we were reminded earlier, the fact that “God is with us” changes everything. This year for our Christmas sermon series, we’re going to focus on four ways that Emmanuel - God with us - can change our lives by giving us lasting gifts in exchange for us giving him our problems, struggles, fears and doubts. So we’re calling this series The Great Gift Exchange.

So we won’t be looking at what most of us would consider to be “traditional” Christmas passages like the accounts of the angel coming to Mary and Joseph in Matthew or the account of the birth of Jesus in Luke. Instead we will be studying four different passages that give us some important insight into the eternal gifts Jesus wants to give each of us - gifts that were made possible when Jesus came to earth to be God with us.

› Tension

We’ll begin this morning by talking about how Jesus wants to give us hope in return for our despair. That is something I think all of us could use right now. There are certainly a lot of legitimate reasons for despair right now.:

• We’ve been dealing with the COVID pandemic for almost 2 years now and that has not only caused some dramatic changes to the way we live our lives, but it has also led to a lot of conflict in our culture. And Christians and the church haven’t been immune to any of that.

• The holidays can be a particularly difficult time for those who have family members who are no longer with them.

• Inflation and supply line issues and businesses that are short-staffed have taken a toll on all of us.

• In the latest poll, only 20% of the people in this country feel that we are on the right track, the lowest number in quite some time.

But, as we’ll see this morning, there is good news. Jesus wants us to give Him that despair, and in return, he’ll give us hope.

Truth

Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Psalm 43. This is actually a Psalm that we looked at earlier this year in our series on Praying the Psalms, but we’re going to approach it from a different perspective today. Perhaps you remember that we said then that Psalms 42 and 43 were likely one Psalm that was split into two separate Psalms at some point. So we looked at both Psalms together in that message. But this morning we’re going to limit our attention to Psalm 43. Since it’s only 5 verses, let’s go ahead and read it out loud together:

Psalm 43:1–5 ESV

1 Vindicate me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people, from the deceitful and unjust man deliver me!

2 For you are the God in whom I take refuge; why have you rejected me? Why do I go about mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

3 Send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling!