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!
4 Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy, and I will praise you with the lyre, O God, my God.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.
Although this Psalm consists of only five verses, it is packed with some very practical instruction for how to deal with our despair. And here is the main idea we’ll be developing from this Psalm today:
Jesus gives me hope in exchange for my despair when I seek Him, not just a solution
Like most of us are prone to do, the psalmist begins by seeking a solution to his problem. And his problem is certainly one that most of us can relate to. He wants God to give him relief from the ungodly, deceitful and unjust people who oppose him. That might not be a whole lot different than some of our prayers today, nearly 3,000 years later:
• I think most of us have probably prayed for an end to the COVID pandemic.
• The large majority of prayer requests that get shared in our church involve health issues and our prayers tend to focus on asking God to bring physical healing.
• There are obviously a lot of people in our country, including a lot of Christians, who believe the answer to our problems is a change in our political leadership.
• And I think we’d all like to see God bring down gas prices, right?
So like the psalmist, we tend to think, at least at first, that the way for us to have hope is for God to solve our problems or change our circumstances.
And when that doesn’t happen, we tend to get even more frustrated. That is certainly the case for the psalmist. Although he knows intellectually that God is his refuge, because God hasn’t answered his prayers in the way he wants by changing his situation, he feels like God has rejected him. So he goes moping around, complaining about the continued oppression by his enemies. I think if we’re honest, we often feel like that too, don’t we?
By the end of the Psalm there is not one shred of evidence that God does anything to change his circumstances. And in some ways, not even his feelings have changed. Instead God changes his perspective. Rather than finding a solution to his problem, the psalmist finds God Himself. And it is only once he has done that that he is able to exchange his despair for hope.
We are probably all a lot more like this psalmist than we realize. When difficulties come, our first tendency is to do what he did and pray for God to change our circumstances. And we see here that it is not necessarily wrong to do that. So go ahead and pray for God to heal your cancer or to provide you with a new job or to provide for some need in your life or for Him to remove you from a difficult situation.
But we also learn here that even when God doesn’t answer those prayers in which we ask Him to change our circumstances, it is still possible for Him to turn our despair into hope. So let’s take a look at the specific actions the psalmist took in order to exchange his despair for hope.
› Application
HOW TO LET JESUS EXCHANGE MY DESPAIR FOR HOPE
• Live according to God’s Word
Once he gets past his initial prayer in which he asks God to change his circumstances, the first thing the psalmist prays is:
Send out your light and your truth, let them lead me...
The psalmist is in a dark place, so he needs God’s light and truth. But it’s clear here that he knows it’s not enough to just know God’s truth intellectually. He needs to let that truth guide the way he lives his life.
When Pontius Pilate was interrogating Jesus, he ended with a question that Jesus never answered, at least not to Pilate: “What is truth?” Apparently that is a question that Americans are still wrestling with today. In a May 2020 survey, nearly 60% of the people surveyed believed that there are no moral absolutes and that it is up to each individual to determine to determine what truth is. What is even more troubling is that almost half of people who attend evangelical churches hold that same belief.
Jesus made it clear that truth is more than just a concept or idea. It is a person. That is why Jesus declared “I am the truth” to His disciples shortly before His crucifixion. And we are exposed to the truth that is embodied in Jesus in God’s Word - the Bible. Right after Jesus declared that He is the truth, He prayed these words to His Father:
John 17:17 ESV
17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.
When we are dealing with despair, we often don’t feel like spending time in God’s Word. But that is when we need it the most. But it’s not enough to just read the Bible. We have to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to help us understand it and put it into practice in our lives. And sometimes that will mean that we have to obey God’s Word even when it doesn’t make sense to us.
Living according to God’s Word may not change our circumstances, but it will change us. It will allow us to see things from God’s perspective. And that makes it possible to have hope even in the hardest times.
• Spend time with God’s people
When we’re in despair, we often have a tendency to become withdrawn and isolated. But isolation actually tends to make our despair even worse. Most of us have experienced firsthand the isolation that has been forced upon us due to the COVID pandemic. I certainly know that I really enjoyed getting together with our extended family for Thanksgiving again this year after Mary and I celebrated on our own last year.
The isolation that has been forced on us as a result of the pandemic hasn’t been a good thing for most people. It has led to a significant increase in substance abuse, depression and anxiety over the last two years.
That shouldn’t be surprising since God created us to live in community with others. At the very beginning of creation, God declared that “it is not good for man to be alone”. The psalmist seems to understand that here. The references to God’s holy hill and His dwelling are clearly referring to the temple, where God’s people gathered for corporate worship. He longs to be there and to worship God with his fellow Jews.
I am so grateful that almost all of our church family is able to be together in person again. To be honest, I’ve been really worried that some of you would get so comfortable sitting at home in your pajamas watching church on your devices, that you might choose to continue doing that. But I’m glad that those fears have proven to be unfounded. There is something about being together in person that creates hope in a way that just won’t happen when we choose to isolate ourselves.
• Praise God even when I don’t feel like it
Twice in this passage, the psalmist writes about praising God. In verse 4, he tells us that one of the reasons he wants to participate in corporate worship is so that he can praise God through music. And then in verse 5, he declares that he will praise God again in the future, which implies that has been his practice in the past.
Notice that he has made a choice to do that even though his emotions have not yet changed. He still feels like God has abandoned him. His soul is still in turmoil within him. But in spite of those feelings, he will, by an act of his will, give God the praise that He deserves.
Because I’ve experienced the same thing myself, I’m pretty sure that all of you have had some Sunday mornings where you come to church and you didn’t really feel like praising God. Maybe you had a tough week at work. Maybe you just got some bad news from your doctor. Maybe you were struggling in your marriage or in some other relationship. Maybe you even had a fight on your way to church that morning.
But I’m also confident that if you genuinely began to praise God once you arrived here, in spite of your feelings, that all those other problems began to fade away. Focusing on the greatness of God has a way of putting our problems in perspective.
And we can do the same thing throughout the week in our individual lives. Make sure to take some time each day to praise God, even when you don’t feel like it and I guarantee that God will change your outlook even if He doesn’t change your circumstances.
• “Re-gospel” my soul frequently
Verse 5 is rather interesting. The psalmist is essentially having a conversation with his own soul. The Hebrew word that is translated “soul” in that verse has a wide range of meanings, but here and most other places in the Old Testament it refers to the very essence of a person. While that includes both the physical and the spiritual aspects of one’s life, it is primarily focused on the inner being. So it would include what the New Testament commonly refers to as both our spirit and our soul. The Old Testament doesn’t generally distinguish between the two and lumps the immaterial parts of our person together into one part that is called the “soul” just like the psalmist does here.
As we’ve discussed before, in the New Testament the human spirit is our place of God consciousness. It is that part of us deep inside where God’s Holy Spirit communicates with us. The soul is comprised of our mind, will and emotions and is our place of self consciousness. We see both of those aspects of the psalmist’s soul involved here. He is aware that his soul is in turmoil. There is a disconnect between what he knows about God and what he is feeling right now.
And the way he deals with that is to command his soul to hope in God. The verb “hope” there in verse 5 means “to wait expectantly”, or as we have often described it before as “confident expectation” and not just wishful thinking. And it is in the imperative form, which means that it is a command.
We have talked about this idea of “re-gospeling” before. It means that I often remind myself of what Jesus has done for me and the glorious future lies ahead of me because of His sacrificial act of love on the cross. That means that when I am in despair, instead of focusing on my circumstances, I choose instead to dwell on the tremendous grace and mercy that Jesus has demonstrated toward me by dying on the cross for my sins. I remind myself that because of what He has done for me, I can have a personal relationship with a holy God and come boldly before the throne of grace right now. And I remind myself that no matter how bad things might get here on this earth, I have an unimaginable future to look forward to - one lived eternally in the physical presence of Jesus in a place with no more sin or sorrow or despair.
• Make Jesus my personal God
To the psalmist, God is not just a God, He is the Psalmist’s personal God. Look how he refers to God in verses 4 and 5:
…God my exceeding joy
…my God…
…my salvation...
…my God.
I think the biggest reason that so many people in this world are living in despair, without hope, is that they haven’t taken this step. Many of those people would actually say that they believe in God. Some of them would even say they are Christians. They might even pray to God when they are in trouble. But they have never taken the step of making Jesus their personal God by putting their faith in Him alone.
Jesus gives me hope in exchange for my despair when I seek Him, not just a solution
› Action
Although we live in a world that provides us with so many reasons to live in despair, none of us need to live there. Jesus became Emmanuel - God with us - to make it possible for every one of us to have hope. He is more than willing to take our despair and give us hope in return.
There may be some of you joining us today, either in person or online, who have never made Jesus your personal God by putting your faith in Him alone. If that is the case, then if you really want to have hope in place of despair, you need to make that decision today.
Jesus loves you so much that on that very first Christmas, He humbled Himself and left the glory of heaven to come and live as a human. He lived a sinless life and then He willingly gave His life on the cross as payment for your sins. But in order to receive that gift, He requires that you quit trusting in what you can do to earn favor with God and trust in Him alone.
Many, if not most of you, have already made that decision. But some of you are still needlessly living in despair, when Jesus wants you to have hope instead. If that is the case, then you likely need to take one or more of the steps that we’ve talked about this morning so that you can exchange your despair for hope.
Finally, some of you have great hope in your life. In spite of your circumstances, you’re living according to the truth and keeping your eyes on Jesus instead of your circumstances. If that is true of your life, then you need to thank God for that because you didn’t do that on your own. It is only because He has given you both the motivation and the power to live like that that you are living that way.
› Inspiration
As disciples of Jesus, there is absolutely no reason for us to live in despair. If we will seek Jesus Himself rather than constantly looking for a solution to our problems, He will take that despair from us and give us the gift of hope.
