On Wednesday nights we’ve started the DVD study by John Ortberg entitled, The Me I Want To Be. In that study he relates a medical term, a three-letter acronym: F.T.T.
It gets entered into the chart of an infant who, often for unknown reasons, is unable to gain weight or grow.
“FTT” means failure to thrive. I checked in the book the DVD series is based on, and there I found this additional information.
Psychologists have begun to speak of what is perhaps the largest mental health problem in our day. It is not depression or anxiety, at least not at clinical levels. It is languishing – a failure to thrive.
Languishing is the condition of someone who may be able to function but has lost a sense of hope and meaning.
No, I’m not doing a commercial for Wednesday night Bible study; though you are welcome to join in at any time. I want to focus today on one of the words in Ortberg’s statement of what we have lost: Hope.
Let’s read a familiar verse:
So these three things continue forever: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13 NCV
I made a brief statement about this verse in my last sermon, five weeks ago. I didn’t have a lot of time to expound on my thoughts without straying from the topic of that sermon, so I put my musings down a little more in a blog post a few days before. Let me read some of that for you:
[Paul] tells us about three elements of our lives that supersede all others: faith, hope and love.
Love cannot truly exist apart from faith. It is God who teaches us what real love is, based upon His own love demonstrated toward us. Faith is needed when accepting who God is and what He teaches us. Love is, therefore, dependent upon faith.
Faith is likewise dependent upon hope.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for…
(Hebrews 11:1 ESV)
…If we do not have hope, we lose the basis of faith. If we lose faith, we cannot truly know and give out love. How then are we to enjoy “the greatest of these”?
Think of faith, hope and love as a pyramid where each layer is dependent upon the strength of those below it.
• Paul told us that the greatest of these is love.
• John tells us that God is love (1 John 4:8). So to experience the truest love you must have faith in God.
• The writer of Hebrews tells us that faith requires hope to exist.
In order to have faith and love, we must first have hope. If we lose our hope, we lose the foundation for the greatest works, experiences and gifts we can lay hold of in this life.
If you take the time to look closely at our world, our community, and maybe even our church, you can put down the diagnosis of FTT, failure to thrive.
Why aren’t we growing? Why aren’t we living an abundant life? Why can’t we seem to get ahead or achieve victory? We have lost our hope.
How did we lose our hope?
1. We have no expectation for good things to happen.
Listen to how Webster’s defines hope:
A desire of some good, accompanied with at least a slight expectation of obtaining it, or a belief that it is obtainable.
The key to hope is expectation.
Did you notice that I didn’t say that we lack an expectation for bad things to happen?
We’ve come to expect dissatisfaction with our lives. We don’t have to look any further than our prayer lives to see it in action. What do you expect to happen when you pray?
We believe that those we pray for will be healed, but we’ve also got the sense to do the math. How many people have I prayed for? How many have been healed? Will this person really be healed if I pray for them?
Expectation is the issue because if we don’t expect God to heal, we prove that we really don’t believe God will heal, at least not at our request. Sure God can heal, and He might do it for some, but He won’t use me to do it. What we think is belief is actually head acknowledgement of what God said. It isn’t faith that He will use the foolish things of the world (that’s us) to confound the wise.
What are your expectations for other areas in your life?
• What do you expect to happen to your children when they go off to school?
• What do you expect to happen when you pull into the parking lot at work?
• When you’ve gone to work for the day or out running errands, what do you expect your spouse to have done while you were gone?
We have lots of bad expectations. We just don’t expect good to happen in our lives.
When something good does come our way, we question it. It’s too good to be true. It can’t be for me. I think you’ve called the wrong person into this meeting because I know you don’t want to give me a raise. You can’t possibly want to be friends with me, I’m too ordinary, unimportant. And these are just some earthly “goods” in our lives.
When God says He loves us, we reply with, “But you don’t know who I really am. You don’t know what I’ve done.” God tells us He’ll forgive us and forget our sins, we think, “Yeah, but only until I mess up again when You’ll make me relive it all over again.” When He says He loves us we say, “But there’s nothing worth loving here.”
And God must think that we have no idea of what God is like. (Maybe we don’t.)
We’ve lost hope because we’ve resigned ourselves to living a life that has no bright side, no value. And we’re supposed to be a light to the world.
2. We’ve confused hope with our own wishes and desires
Webster’s definition continues…
Hope differs from wish and desire in this, that it implies some expectation of obtaining the good desired, or the possibility of possessing it. Hope therefore always gives pleasure or joy; whereas wish and desire may produce or be accompanied with pain and anxiety.
According to this definition we have one of two options.
1) Hope-able dreams
2) Personal wishes and desires
Our hope-able dreams are those things that spur us on to continue in all of the ins and outs of life. We believe that all we do will be worth __________ after it is over. Hope-able things bear pleasure and joy in our lives, even before we receive them. It is the sheer possibility, and our belief in that possibility, that bring us joy. It is there. It is ours. We may not have it yet, but its future existence in or application to our lives makes our current state more liveable.
On the flip side, personal wishes and desires often cause frustration, unhealthy desire, and lead us to sin in the light of unrealized dreams. When you work hard for months or years to get to a position or receive some sort of recognition in your workplace, only to see the new guy get it ahead of you, what is your response. Is it joy? Hardly. Instead you are likely to be hurt, angry, covetous, jealous, and hard-hearted. Doesn’t sound like there is a lot of good coming out of that, does it?
So we find ourselves in what might be a difficult situation. How do we separate hope-able things from our personal wishes and desires?
Those dreams and desires that are able to be hoped for are those that are promised by God. Everything else is self-seeking.
At times we confuse our personal desires with God’s promises to us.
Let’s go back to the topic of healing and prayer. We are told in Scripture to lay hands on the sick so they will be healed. We are told that those who come to the elders for prayer will be healed. These are promises of God. So why do we pray and not see people healed?
Well, if you were the one seeking healing, why did you come forward for prayer? Did you desire healing so that you could be without pain or discomfort, to find relief, to better your life? If you were the one praying, were you praying for the person for those same reasons? Were you hoping to be the one God used to heal someone? Did you come forward or did you pray because you wanted God to be magnified by the healing of the sick? Which attitude in prayer do you think is more likely to bring the promised results?
Only the promises of God are hope-able. The reason leads us to the third issue with hope…
3. We have misplaced our hope
The Old Testament gives us many examples of how God’s people misplaced their hope, resulting in disaster.
Isaiah 20 is a declaration of judgment by the Lord against Egypt. Egypt formerly held the people of Israel as slaves, but they were guilty of something far worse. They worshiped false gods. At the time of the Exodus God brought down plagues to show His superiority over the major gods in Egyptian religion. But the victory of God through Moses did not end the reign of false gods in Egypt.
That was around 1446 B.C. Fast forward about 700 years to the time of Isaiah. Egypt was still worshiping its false gods. And, ironically, God’s people made a treaty with Egypt. The Assyrians were on the move, and the northern Kingdom was about to fall. Egypt was strong, full of warriors and chariots. God’s people thought they could find safety from the Assyrians by trusting in the Egyptians. Here in Isaiah 20, God declared that Egypt would fall to the Assyrians.
“Then they shall be dismayed and ashamed because of Cush their hope and of Egypt their boast. And the inhabitants of this coastland will say in that day, ‘Behold, this is what has happened to those in whom we hoped and to whom we fled for help to be delivered from the king of Assyria! And we, how shall we escape?’”
Isaiah 20:5-6 (ESV)
Are you placing your hope in the promises of God, or in what looks like the best solution?
Are you ready to go back one more time to the concept of prayer for the sick? When you pray for someone to be healed, or ask to be healed, where is your hope focused?
Is it focused on the person praying? You focus on how they’ll be used by God to do a miracle, they will pray the right words to get His attention, or that they will be the one that can get the results.
Are you focused on the act of prayer itself? Scripture says to pray; it doesn’t say a whole lot more than that. You pray, believing, including the elders of the church. So when the prayer is done you say, “Okay, did it work?”
When we pray are we to be focused on what is being said or what the results will be? Not at all! When we pray we should be looking to God. Only He can deliver what we need. Not the pastor or the elders or our accountability partner. It comes from God. Sure we start off with, “Heavenly Father” or, “Dear God” and we finish with, “in Jesus name.” But did we really put our hope in God?
Many of us refuse to place our hope in God. Maybe it’s not quite that. Maybe we refuse to put our hope in that Body that God has chosen to serve as His ambassadors to this world: the Church.
But Chris, you don’t know what happened when I put my hope in the Church. Someone hurt me. No; but you know, what? I’ve been hurt by the church, too. And I know that God has not exempted me from His spiritual chain of authority, from ethical conduct in my own ministry, or from the consequences of my stepping out of His safety net just because someone in the church hurt me. It is that knowledge, that trust in God that enabled me to pick up the pieces, turn from my own wishes and desires, and put my hope in God.
We’ve decided that Church will not do as our source of hope and purpose, so we turn from it and put our energies elsewhere.
• We pump our time and talents into our schools because we place our hope in our children; that they will turn out, that they will accomplish something, so that the effort we poured into them will not be wasted.
• We make time with our families on vacations, getaways, or just hanging around town instead of choosing to plan the church into our schedules. You might argue, We don’t want to have regrets in the future. We don’t want them to feel unloved or left out. But it’s okay to rob them of the presence of God in shared fellowship with His people. We forget that God said that we are to love Him more than family. How will we explain to our children why we’ve separated our lives from the church when they read their Bibles and figure out that God called us to be an vital, active slice of it?
What happens when – not if – those efforts that you’ve made turn out to be personal desires instead of promises of God? When you end up discouraged, hurt, angry, and frustrated, to what will you turn then? Or will you give up on it all?
Altar
Where is your hope?
• Does it exist?
• Is it set on the hope-able promises of God, or on your own wants, wishes and desires?
• Where have you placed your hope? Is it in the works of your hands, the accolades of this world, the accomplishments of future generations? Or is it in God? He is the only One who will lead you to that whole, joyful, powerful you that He had in mind when He created you.
We cannot continue without hope. A deficiency in hope will lead a deficiency in faith and love. We cut the foundation out of that pyramid of life.
As we open these altars today, there are some things I need to tell you:
• There is hope that your marriage will last.
• There is hope that your children will learn truth, discard evil, find life in Christ and live whole-heartedly for Him.
• There is hope when the bills are piling up and the creditors are calling.
• There is hope available for you today…
