It’s easy to believe in God and have hope when I can see an answer to whatever situation I might be experiencing:
• If I go to the doctor and he or she prescribes some medicine and assures me that medication will take care of whatever health issue I’m experiencing, it’s easy to believe that God will heal me.
• If my finances are a little tight, but I know that I have a large bonus coming at the end of the month that will cover my expenses, it’s easy to believe that God will provide for my needs.
• If I’m having some difficulties in my marriage but my spouse and I have been seeing a marriage counselor together and we’re starting to see some positive changes in our relationship, I can have hope that God is going to restore and strengthen that relationship.
On the other hand, when I can’t see an answer, it’s not nearly as easy to have hope:
• If I go to my doctor and he or she tells runs all kinds of tests, but still can’t figure out what is causing my health issues, it’s not easy to believe that God will heal me.
• If my bank account is just about to be overdrawn and I’m unemployed and there just aren’t a lot of job possibilities out there, it’s hard to believe that God will take care of my needs.
• If my spouse just decides that he or she no longer wants to be married and is unwilling to even go see a counselor, it’s pretty hard to trust that God is going to bring something good out of that situation.
My guess is that most of us here this morning are facing at least one situation right now that looks hopeless because we just can’t see any answers to that situation anywhere on the horizon. In order to make sure that this message is really practical for all of us, I’ve left some space for you to write down one such situation that comes to mind. I’ll give you a moment to think about that and write it down.
A situation that looks hopeless to me right now is ____________________ ____________________________________________________________________
I want to begin this morning by praying for you and asking God to use the message this morning to help you find hope in the midst of the hopelessness that you’re facing.
[Prayer]
The good news for all of us this morning is that no matter how hopeless my situation might look right now, God provides the ability to have hope even if I can’t see any possible solution to my problems right now.
Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to Romans chapter 4 and follow along as I read beginning in verse 18:
In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.” But the words “it was counted to him” were not written for his sake alone, but for ours also. It will be counted to us who believe in him who raised from the dead Jesus our Lord, who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification.
(Romans 4:18-25 ESV)
Before we begin looking at this passage this morning, I want to let you know that I’m not going to have time to cover verses 22-25 in this message. That is absolutely not because they aren’t important. So, as I mentioned earlier, we’re going to use the “Connections” time after this gathering of worshipers to cover those verses in some detail and I hope that you’ll stay and take part in that discussion.
Paul begins this section with something of an oxymoron when he writes that “in hope he [Abraham] believed against hope…” What Paul is doing here is to use a Hebraic kind of expression to contrast two different kinds of hope.
On one hand, there is the kind of hope that most of us are familiar with – hope that is really nothing more than wishful thinking. We approach hope from that perspective quite often in our culture:
• Someone buys a Powerball ticket and says “I hope I win the big jackpot” even though the odds of doing that are only 1 in 292 million.
• Before last weekend, I hoped the Cubs would win the World Series this year, just as had been predicted in “Back to the Future II” back in 1989. But that obviously didn’t work out like I wished.
• Every day when I drive through the 8 mile construction zone on Oracle Road, I hope that they will actually finish the work and get the speed limits back to normal. But again, that’s nothing more than wishful thinking.
But Biblical hope is much different than that. The Greek word that is translated hope means something more like “confident expectation” or “the expectation of what is sure”. And since Paul and the other New Testament writers who used that term were Jews, they would have been thinking of “hope” from a Hebrew mindset which viewed hope as being tied directly to the promises of God. Eugene Peterson captures that view of hope quite well in his paraphrase of verse 18 in The Message:
Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do.
(Romans 4:18 The Message)
In other words, Abraham had Biblical hope even when he couldn’t see any possible way for God’s promise to be fulfilled. Here is how we could summarize what it means to have Biblical hope:
Biblical hope is a matter of
trusting that God’s promise
is greater than my predicament
Before we look at the principles we’re going to draw from this passage. I want to give you a sense of the power of Biblical hope by considering the dramatic difference it made in Abraham’s life.
For the first 86 years of his life, every time Abram met someone, he was reminded of the hopelessness of his situation. Just think about it. His original name – Abram – means “exalted father”. So imagine what the conversation must have been like very time Abram met someone:
“Hi, I’m Abram. Good to meet you.”
“Good to meet you Abram. I see your name means exalted father. So tell me, how many children do you have?”
And Abram, with great embarrassment, would answer “none”, even though God had promised to give him a multitude of heirs who He would form into a great nation that would bless all the nations of the earth.
But at the age of 86, as a result of his adultery with one of Sarai’s servants, Abram finally had a son named Ishmael. So, for the next 14 years or so, Abram, the conversation would be only slightly less embarrassing as Abram could now claim to be the exalted father of one son.
When he is 99 years old, God comes to Abraham and promises him that he will have another son, the one who is going to fulfill God’s promise that had been made many years earlier. And God changes his name from Abram – exalted father – to Abraham – which means “father of a multitude”. That name had to be even more embarrassing for Abraham for the next 9 months as people asked the man named “father of a multitude” how many children he had and he could still only answer “one.”
So I have to imagine that as Abraham looked at his situation from his own point of view, his life was very hopeless. But, as Paul points out here, even in the midst of that worldly hopelessness, Abraham somehow developed Biblical hope that allowed him to persevere through long years when he just couldn’t see any answers to his problems. Let’s see how he did that and see how we can apply the principles that guided him to our own lives.
HOW TO DEVELOP BIBLICAL HOPE
1. Consult God’s Word
Originally this was the second principle in my message, but as I looked at this passage more carefully, I realized that it actually needs to be the first thing that I do.
Near the end of verse 18, we see these crucial words, which we could easily overlook if we’re not careful:
…as he had been told…
As we’ll see in a moment, Abraham did give careful consideration to his situation, but before that, he first considered the promise that God had made to him. In other words, before he looked at his circumstances through his own eyes, he first took a look at them through God’s eyes. God had made a promise to Him and Abraham chose to make that that promise, and not his own thinking, the foundation for his hope.
There is an important lesson for us here. When I’m going through a situation that seems to be hopeless, the very first thing I need to do is to go to the Bible and reflect on the promises that God has given to me in His Word that might be applicable to my situation. Let me give you just a couple examples of how I might do this:
• Let’s say that I’m having some health issues. What are some of the promises of God that might apply? First, I think it’s important to point out, that, at least as far I can determine, there is not a promise anywhere in the Bible that God will heal his children from every physical ailment that we have. But there are some other promises that would apply here:
o In Romans 8:28-29, God has promised that all things work together for the good of conforming us to the image of Jesus. So God has promised that He can use my health problems to make me more like Jesus. That particular promise can certainly apply to almost any outwardly hopeless situation we face.
o God has promised in 1 Corinthians 15, that His children will one day get a transformed resurrection body that will never get sick. So God has promised that whatever health issues I am dealing with are only temporary. So even if God never heals me while I’m here on this earth, I can have hope in the promise of that future resurrection body.
• What if you’re experiencing financial difficulties? What are some promises from God’s Word that might apply?
o In Matthew 6, Jesus promised that if we seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness, God will provide food and clothing for us.
o In Philippians 4:19, we find the promise that God will supply my every need.
Obviously this first step requires that I am constantly spending time in God’s Word, so that I can be aware of these and other promises that might apply to my particular situation. Only after I’ve take the time to do that am I ready to take the second step.
2. Consider my circumstances
Abraham did not turn a blind eye to his circumstances. In verse 19, we see that he considered the deadness of his own body and the bareness of Sarah’s womb. The verb “consider” conveys the idea of giving careful consideration to something. Today we might say that Abraham “faced the facts”.
Even though people certainly lived a lot longer in Abraham’s day, at 99 years old, Abraham was certainly past his prime child fathering days. And at 89 years old, Sarah had gone through menopause and was physically no longer capable of bearing children. If you’re using the ESV translation you’ll notice a footnote for the word “barrenness” in verse 19 that indicates that it is literally the word “deadness”, another form of the same word that described Abraham’s body as “dead”. We’ll see the significance of that in a moment.
We see here that faith and hope do not, as we have often been lead to believe, require us to deny or ignore the facts of the situation. We see here that it is not in any way “unspiritual” to carefully consider our circumstances. Abraham didn’t just give casual thought to his circumstances. He carefully considered them. And he came to the correct conclusion that from a human perspective there was no way that he and Sarah could have a child.
By the world’s definition, there was no hope. And yet in the midst of that worldly hopelessness, Abraham still developed the kind of Biblical hope that lead him to believe God. How did he do that? He didn’t just stop at that point and have a pity party for himself. He moved on to the next critical step that we see in this passage.
3. Contemplate God’s power
In verse 19 we see that Abraham “did not weaken in his faith” when he considered his circumstances. And then in verse 20 we see that “no unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God”. That verse in particular caused me to stop of think about what Paul has written here. As we’ve pointed out over the past several weeks, Abraham’s faith was far from perfect. There were undoubtedly times in his life when his unbelief had caused him to waver.
It seems to me that what Paul means here is that looking at the overall pattern of Abraham’s life, and certainly at the final result, Abraham exhibited consistent faith in the promise of God. That is unquestionably demonstrated when Abraham is obedient to God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, the son who was the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham.
As Abraham considered his dead body and Sarah’s dead womb, He remembered that he had a God who, as we saw last week in verse 17, “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.” Even though Abraham couldn’t bring back to life the deadness in his body, God could. And even though Sarah couldn’t bring new life into existence out of the barrenness of her body, God could.
Recently a well know pastor released a book titled “The Power of I Am” in which he claims that we can basically control our lives by making positive “I am” statements. The foundational principle in his book is this: “Whatever follows the ‘I am’ will eventually find you.” He goes on to suggest that if you say “I am old” that wrinkles will come looking for you, but that if you say “I am young and healthy” that is one of the most effective anti-aging treatments ever. I kid you not! And based on the number of books that are being sold, it is obvious that a lot of people are buying into that kind of false hope.
Abraham was not merely an optimist who practiced positive thinking. He didn’t figure that if he and Sarah just said “I am pregnant”, they would succeed in having a child. Their faith was solidly God-centered rather than man-centered. Abraham didn’t believe in himself or the power of his words. He believed in the power of a God who could do whatever was needed to fulfill the promise He had made.
And as we saw last week, when Abraham exercised faith, it was not merely belief in what God had promised, but it was complete confidence in the character of a God who is 100% faithful to do what He had promised and who has the power to fulfill those promises. Abraham had hope because He was plugged into God’s power, not his own.
4. Contribute my part
Although the birth of Isaac happened because of the supernatural intervention of God, the fulfillment of God’s promise required the participation of Abraham and Sarah.
In verse 21, we see that Abraham was “fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.” That is a perfect definition of the kind of faith that Paul has been writing about in this section. And because he was fully convinced that God was able to carry out His promise, Abraham responded with obedience.
Unlike the conception of Jesus, which was accomplished without a physical union between Mary and Joseph, the birth of Isaac took place through the normal human process of conception. Although we don’t find any details about exactly how that occurred in the Scriptures, the resulting birth of Isaac confirms that Abraham and Sarah both did their part.
There are two important things to note here. First, we often find that in order for God to accomplish His purposes in our lives, we have to join in the work that He is already doing and do our part.
The other thing we need to note is when our action is to enter into this process. We tend do this backwards from what we see in this passage. When we come to what seems to be a hopeless situation, our natural tendency is to just jump in and act before we ever consider what God may want to do through our circumstances. And then we just ask God to bless what we’ve already decided to do without seeking His will at all. But as we clearly see here, we are only to act after we have first consulted God’s Word, considered my circumstances and contemplated God’s power.
Once again, let me give you a couple of examples of how this might work. I’ll use the same situations we looked at in the first principle:
• If I have a health issue, after I’ve taken the first three steps, contributing my part to what God wants to do might take several different forms:
o It very well might include things like going to the doctor, getting tests and taking whatever medication or going through whatever treatment the doctor might prescribe.
o It might mean making some adjustments in my lifestyle in order to take care of my body.
o In some cases, it may mean accepting that there is no known cure and submitting to God’s will and using my circumstances to be a witness for Jesus and give glory to God like we’ll discuss in more detail when we get to the next principle
• How about financial problems? Once again there are several things that I might need to do to contribute my part:
o Perhaps I might have to be obedient to God and give the firstfruits of what God has entrusted to me to Him as an offering.
o I might need to be a good steward of the resources that God has provided by cutting back on my spending in some areas. While God has promised to provide for my needs, He never promises to give me everything I want.
o I might need to increase my income by changing jobs or taking on some other part-time work or by going to work if I’m not already working.
Obviously God is capable of doing whatever He wants without me. But we see consistently in the Bible that God chooses to work through people and that He often invites us to join in the work He is already doing and contribute to that work. And the only way we’re going to be able to discern what part God wants us to play in that process is to seek Him in His Word and through prayer.
5. Confer glory on God
Let’s look at the last phrase of verse 20:
…but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God…
The verb “grew strong” means “to put power in”. It is a form of the Greek word from which we get our English word “dynamite”. But what is difficult to see from this particular translation is that the verb is in the passive voice rather than the active voice. That means that it is not Abraham who is doing the action, but rather someone else, in this case God, who is doing the action to Him. So literally we could translate the first part of this phrase like this:
...but his faith was empowered [by God]…
This is so encouraging! Whenever we face a situation that seems hopeless to us, God is at work in our lives to strengthen our faith. That is consistent with the idea that we have stressed continually in this section of Romans – even our faith is a gift from God and not merely something that we can develop on our own. And once we recognize that, the only logical response is to give glory to the one who both gives us our faith in the first place and who continues to empower that faith.
Notice here that giving glory to God is not primarily a matter of our words. While we certainly can and should give glory to God by singing songs of praise like we did earlier this morning and honoring Him with our words, giving glory to God is more a matter of how we live than of what we say. I went back through the accounts of God’s repeated promises to Abraham in Genesis this week and I could not find even one instance where Abraham gave glory to God with the words he spoke. But what I did find is that Abraham consistently gave glory to God by living his life in a way that demonstrated his complete confidence in the promises of God and in the character of God.
At the beginning of this message, I encouraged you to write down some situation that seems hopeless to you right now when viewed from a human perspective. If you couldn’t think of something right of the top of your mind then, I can pretty much assure you that even if you’re not in that position right now, you’re going to face a number of situations like that in the future.
But this morning’s message is really good news for us any time we face those kinds of circumstances in our lives. When we understand that…
Biblical hope is a matter of
trusting that God’s promise
is greater than my predicament
…and we apply the principles that we’ve learned this morning, then God can turn our hopelessness into hope. He certainly did that for Abraham and He wants to do that for you, too.
