Romans, the latter part there, chapter 15, Romans 15. We'll read verses 1 to 13, verse 13 being a particular focus, but we'll consider these verses as a whole. Romans 15, 1 to 13. This is God's Word. We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up. For Christ did not please himself. But as it is written, the reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me. Whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the scriptures, we might have hope. May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you such, or grant you to live in such harmony with one another in accord with Christ Jesus. That together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God. For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy as it is written, therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles and sing to your name. And again it is said, rejoice, O Gentiles, with His people. And again, praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples extol Him. And again, Isaiah says, the root of Jesse will come, even he who arises to rule the Gentiles, in him will the Gentiles hope. May the God of hope fill you all, fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope. God's holy word, may he bless it to all of us. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this word, and we wait upon you and look to you, the one who gave it to give to us, to fully embrace it, in Jesus' name, amen. Dear congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ, as a new year is soon upon us, do you have hope? Can you go forward, can we go forward only in despair, hope? particularly in a world filled with sin, despair, and darkness, is often that which is most needed but is most lacking. The world has a sense of this, right? The story of Pandora's box captures something of this. The need for but lack of hope that so pervades the world. You recall that story, the myth of this first woman, Pandora, who had a container, it's a box, a jar, it's variously described. She had this container that she was warned not to open. And you know in these tales of all when you're told not to do something, you're sure that's what's gonna happen. So she was warned not to open it. saying that it contained, though she didn't know it, all the woes of the world, which she did open it, allowing hunger, pain, death, and every sort of suffering to escape. And she tried to shut it very quickly, but all that had escaped before she recapped the vessel. But she did keep something inside, hope. All the bad stuff got out and hope remained in her box. So you see what the world is saying. The story is that which we so much need, particularly to deal with all of our misery, remains in Pandora's box or jar and is inaccessible to mankind in its desperation. You could say leaving us only with all of our attempts to alleviate pain. And you know how that is. Christians in the flesh can do it with food and drink and sex and a myriad of ways in which in postman's words we are amusing ourselves to death. Entertaining ourselves just trying to alleviate pain. Well here we see in Romans 15, 13 particularly that God does indeed bless us in and with hope There's a lot of talk about hope. Politicians promise it. Recent presidential elections, we heard it, but this goes way back. This goes back decades. There was a lot of talk at the time of the Great Depression about hope and who, which politician was going to give it. Or even a governor from Arkansas said, I believe in a place called hope. That was back in the 90s, right? You know something about this. Madison Avenue continually bombards us with products. That's the advertising industry. Bombards us with products said to engender hope. However, neither our portfolios nor our gifts, our hobbies, our interests or having a coke by this pool with pretty girls is really going to provide hope. Even human relations don't and can in fact dash our hopes more than anything. Maybe human relations haven't gone that well for you. It's God in him alone, the one styled the God of hope, who is the source and object of hope. who blesses us in and with hope. And we see that here as we look, of course, this morning we had the A's, tonight we have the B's. We look at the basis of our hope, the benefits of our hope, and the bounty of our hope. We'll think about hope, its basis, its benefits, and its bounty. Well, we begin by saying the basis of our hope is seen right away here in Romans 15, three, the person and work of Christ. Christ here is set forth as denying himself, as the one who, because you could say circumstantially, he gave up all hope. He says in the garden, Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me, the cup of suffering, the cup of wrath, nevertheless, Thy will be done, and he drinks to the bitterest dregs, that cup. And on the cross, in his straightened soul, he cries out, My God, why have you forsaken me? And so hope, you might say, is altogether darkened as he suffers and dies for us. He did not, and Paul is making a contrast here in the beginning of 15, he did not seek to please himself, right? Even as the Apostle has been encouraging, if you go back to Romans 14, what he's talking about there is the strong and the weak, and he's encouraging the strong to be loving and caring and sensitive towards the weak and to act accordingly. And so what he makes this You could say illustration, our ultimate example, that's the Lord Jesus. He said, all the reproach due us fell on Christ. He took that. That wasn't something that was pleasant. That wasn't something that was sought in a sense. He sought in his humanity to avoid that if possible, but it wasn't avoidable. And thus, because he so endured for us, We are given, verse 4 says, through endurance and the encouragement of the Scripture, we are given to have hope because He, as it were, gave that up and took upon Himself the consequences of all of our sin. There's no basis in this world for hope. This world is our problem, not the solution. And it's always interesting, I mean, as I say, the world will acknowledge, like with Pandora's Box, that there's a problem. Hollywood does this all the time. The Hollywood movies will acknowledge that there are relational problems and there are life circumstances problems. There's suffering, there's pain, there's all kinds of problems. But ultimately, as they go through it, what they point you to is ultimately to yourself. It's all one grand advertisement for Buddhism, it really seems. You say, Yeah, Buddhism. I mean, that's what you get in Groundhog Day. You keep doing it over and over again till you get it right. That's Buddhism. And Buddhism is also, if you went to see the Buddha and you said, where do I have hope? I come to you for hope, Buddha. And he would give you all kind of nonsense. Well, I really don't have any hope. If there is hope to be found, it's in you. So they point you to yourself. They do. All the movies do this. They ultimately try to tell you how to find this in yourself. Well, let me tell you something, that's really bad news. If my message tonight were, I know it's tough, I know it's hopeless, I know it seems impossible, but I'm going to tell you how you need to pull up, you need to gird up your loins, and you have within you the resources that you need. I will help you draw those out, the resources within you. I will help you get in touch with your Atman, in Hindi, understanding the Atman is the most interior self and what their conviction is is the Atman is Brahman which is to say God. So you need to go in and find you which is to say find God and again you're saying I mean, what are the alternatives? Either you're going to find it in the true and living God or you're going to do this kind of thing. If you're saying, that's crazy. Well, yeah, I don't disagree that it is because it's not there. But it's not crazy that people recognize you need hope from somewhere. You need it. Where are you going to get it? And so the Hindus have an answer. The Buddhists have an answer. They all have these supposed answers, which we understand are non-answers. What Jesus came and did is the only basis for hope. That's what we believe as Christians. That's why for years and years, this gentleman was prayed for. Because that's his need. Not just some band-aid, not just... It's like when people came to see me, I had different people in my last church who would recommend sometimes their neighbors who were having marriage problems, that they would come see me. And they were both non-Christians. And I would talk to them and ask, are you Christians? No. And they would say, oh, well, are you willing to study the word and become Christians? And they're like, no, we just want help with our marriage. And I said, well, my call isn't to help you have a better marriage on your way to hell. That's not the most important thing, isn't your marriage? And they would always say things like, well, we could go to some other counselor. And I'm like, you know, you can open the door. Yeah? We were right near a Methodist church and they would always say, we can go over to the Methodist church and get that. I'm like, it was a big huge church. Go to the Methodist. Is that a threat? What am I supposed to do? No, you need to come to Christ. That's the only place, that's the only answer, it always is. We might say then that the basis of all true hope is His love for us. You see it there the way Paul puts it in verses 1 and 2. He provides an example for us and a calling to us to bear one another's burdens as He bore ours. That's what Christ is saying. We who are strong, we have an obligation to bear the failings of the weak, not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good to build him up. And you say, well, why? Why should I take all that trouble? And he says, that's the way Christ acted, and that's what we're to do. We're to imitate Christ. We're to be as Christ to one another. And so we might say then the basis for all true hope is His love for us. and the resonance that that finds in our lives and our love for him and each other. His love for us is supposed to set the plate for how we love God in gratitude and how we're to love each other as he did us. What hope for a dark world there is in Christ and in those whose lives he sheds abroad this hope. Nowhere else can we get it and he imbues us with it. The only hope for this world is what we have in Christ, spreading and filling it. And we see here, this goes on in verses 5 to 7. Notice this, endurance and encouragement. That's what we need, right? We need endurance, we need perseverance, we need stick-to-itiveness, which is very much lacked in this age. People start something and they do it like five minutes and, well, that didn't work. You know, you tell people you need to pray, you need to read God's Word. Well, I read it one day this week and it didn't do anything for me, so. Hmm, well that's not the way you do anything. Endurance and encouragement. May He grant you to live in such harmony with one another. Now this is coming from 14 where He's talked to people about how to live among each other, the weak and the strong. And He says, live in harmony with one another in accordance with Christ Jesus, who didn't seek to please Himself, who in fact everything He did was for us. that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you." So he's saying, look what you have in God, look at the hope, and look even how that transforms your relations with each other. Welcome each other as Christ has welcomed you. So it's about God's love for us, and God's love for us in our hearts and lives. We answer to that with loving Him and loving each other. He loves us. and we love Him and we love each other. All of this comes about because of what Christ has accomplished for us. And that's appropriated, notice here, it's appropriated by faith, by faith. May the God of hope, verse 13, that's our main focus, the God of hope, fill you with all joy and peace in believing So how does this come about? How does this hope come about and the joy and peace? We'll talk about that in a minute. But how does it come about? In believing. It's by faith. That which Christ has accomplished, think of it this way, how does everything Jesus has done for us, how does that become ours? It becomes ours in and by the power of the Spirit. Remember, you've heard me quote this before. Calvin says, as long as Christ remains outside of us, he does us no good. Christ has done all these things for us. But as long as he's outside of us, as long as we're not in faith union with him, none of that does us any good. He says, but the Holy Spirit brings us to Christ and Christ to us. It's by the power of the Holy Spirit that you abound in hope. So notice then the latter part of the verse, May the God of hope, and you have this by believing, do this, and this is done by the power of the Holy Spirit. It's the power of the Holy Spirit. We know that the Holy Spirit manifests his power by and in the means of grace. I won't repeat what I said this morning because we had quite a little section on that. So much of the word, the sacraments, and prayer make much of them. Make much of them if you wish to abound in hope by the power of the Spirit. Spend time in the Word. Spend time in prayer. And you endure in this. And as you endure in it, you're encouraged. I mean, it's true with anything. It's like parents of small children. I don't know how many conversations I had, particularly when I was a full-time pastor for that decade. Many conversations, both with people in their homes and on the phone. Pastor, you just can't imagine how hard it is rearing these children. And I'm like, yeah, well, I have five, so you're right. I can't imagine. No idea. But you say, you know, you do these things and this is how you help them, this is how you love them, this is how you correct them, this is how you encourage them, you know, this is how you discipline them. But it's not working. Well, your child is what? Two. And you're like, well, yeah. I realized people apparently didn't have parents who knew the, you know, you can't say to people, I mean, I sometimes said to my wife, some people would ask such questions and act in such ways, I had to say, were they raised by wolves? What? But some people don't have parents who teach them anything. They really don't. They don't have parents who teach them anything. And that's sad. My wife and I were very grateful that we had parents who were not perfect. Many mistakes, but they sure taught us things, and they taught us how to live life and understand things. But you need endurance, and encouragement comes. Keep at it. Keep at it. That's no small part of the Christian life. I remember one of my professors in seminary was once asked by somebody, what's the secret of the Christian life, do you think? And he said, perseverance. Just sticking to it and looking to the Lord and being refreshed in the things of the Lord. But he said, it can seem like a slog at times. And you'll be attacked, you'll be tempted to go here and there and everywhere else. Just stick to it. Stick to it. So we know that the Holy Spirit does work through these means. All that we might be given and built in faith, verse 13, we're filled with hope in believing. That's how we're filled with hope. It's by faith, and I said this morning, what is faith? Well, there's many ways we can talk about faith. Knowledge, assent, and trust, right? Trust, you might say, is the very heart of it, but it's opening ourselves up to the Lord. It's receiving Him and what He says. I mean, the Scriptures has about a million metaphors. All of those things talk about faith. When it says, come to me, Jesus is saying, have faith. When he says, receive me, he's saying, have faith. It's all the same thing. Well, why so many different ways of saying it? Because we don't get it very easily. And so we have all these pictures, all these metaphors. Well, the basis of our hope is Christ and faith in Him. That's what we've been talking about. What about the benefits of our hope? That's a faith producing joy and peace. Verse 13, notice the benefit. May the God of hope fill you in believing with all joy and peace. I mean, you want this? This is Christmas season. People talk about joy to the world. We sang it earlier. And I've been singing it so much lately. I was gonna say, give you some other instances, but that doesn't matter. We sing it at this time, joy to the world. We sing about peace on earth, goodwill to our men. It's because we believe, right, it's faith. It's because we believe that we have hope and because we have hope that we believe. Think about the way those work. The faith that lays hold of Christ is both the basis and benefit of hope. Hope comes from faith and increases faith. Faithfulness leads to faithlessness, I should say, not having faith. Faithlessness leads to hopelessness and hopelessness leads to faithlessness. The reason that my wife Kathy had such hope as she was dying is that she had all of her trust in a great Christ. And there were so many times, so many lessons learned, but I'll never forget one time someone started to say to her, oh, you have such a great faith in the Lord. And she wouldn't hear it. She said, I have such a great Christ. You see, if we know Christ, what we make much of is the object of our faith, not our faith itself. We're not impressed by our faith. I remember once hearing a televangelist, I was quite young, and he was going on about his faith. And he said, I don't know if anybody has ever had so much faith. He was talking about himself. And I'm like, I wasn't a believer at that time, but I'm thinking this is definitely not right. I mean, this is nuts. I mean, really, it's sort of like saying, you know, just think if you really love somebody, and you say, I love you, I love you so much, I love you maybe even more than you're worth. No, if you really have this sense of love, you're like, I can't love you enough. I fall short. Well, how much more with God? We fall short of everything. And we're not impressed with faith, but how do you know that somebody has is laying hold of Christ by faith. It's they see Christ is great, not their faith. Faith does not make much of itself, but its object. The more worthy one sees Christ, the more one estimates one's faith as falling short. Walking in the joy that comes from faith and in the faith produced by hope leads to joy and peace. That's what I wanted to get us back to was joy and peace. Walking in the joy that comes from faith and in the faith produced by hope, this is all interwoven. leads to joy and peace. Joy and peace are the benefits of what Jesus has done and of our appropriating of it. The Holy Spirit in the means of grace, if we use those means of grace, if we endure in them, we will be encouraged in them. Because what he has done for us, what Jesus has done for us, secures our hope. And when we believe the benefits of that hope, we enjoy, we have joy and peace. Don't you want this for you and yours in the coming year? What is joy and peace? Peter says that we can have joy unspeakable and full of glory, 1 Peter 1.8. And we even in the Isaiah passage, a couple of places, there's the talk about joy joy, unspeakable. Now Peter, Peter says this, and let's stop for just a minute and remember what sort of epistle Peter is. It's often referred to as an epistle of suffering. Some of you were there on Wednesday nights a while back, a couple years ago, when I taught through, in that room over there, 1 Peter. We went through lessons in 1 Peter, and it's an epistle of suffering. And Peter, though, says, and speaks about joy inexpressible or joy unspeakable, full of glory. So joy doesn't come when trials have ended, but in the very midst of trial and difficulty because we're going to have trials in this world as long as we live. Think of this in the midst of your health difficulties, your crushing debt, your relational disasters, all sorts of problems. How? How do we have joy? Because we delight in, because we hope and believe in the Lord, even as Paul in prison. Again, Philippians is taken to be an epistle of joy. Now we said Peter is an epistle of suffering. Philippians is taken to be an epistle of joy. It's often referred to as that way. But Paul's in prison when he's writing this. So think about that. The joy of the Lord is our strength because he is our hope. So we have both joy and peace. Peace, again, you know, biblically that's not just the absence of conflict, but it means, think of the Hebrew word, shalom, it means wholeness. wellness, hope, peace that comes, though we're sinners in a dark world, because He has come and set everything to rights. Thus, we who were enemies are at peace with God. We speak of that being at peace with God. What Jesus did makes us to be at peace. Otherwise, He is at enmity with us. He is opposed to us in our sinfulness. Why is there so little true joy and peace in the world? Again, there's no hope. And there's no hope, there's no joy and peace. So we know something of the peace with God and we have the peace of God. That's also spoken of. The peace of God is heart state on Him. So it's not just being, you might say, justified and adopted, brought into a right relationship. That's peace with God. But we have inwardly, in the sanctifying work of the Spirit, we have the peace of God. Hearts stayed on Him that enables us to endure, again there's that word that we see earlier in the chapter, to endure the greatest hardships. And there have been a lot of things written about this. Some are very eloquent in how the Lord used this. Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag, he writes about peace. Our Moltmann as a prisoner of war, to have hope in the midst of it all because we have joy and peace in believing in the God of hope. Our God is a God of hope supremely. So I mentioned one liberal of a sort, Moltmann. Kahnenberg is of course often called a theologian of hope. Hope is a big theme in the work of many. Well thus we can speak, we've spoken about the basis for hope, the work of Christ and our faith in that, the benefits of hope, joy and peace particularly, and thus we can also speak of the bounty of our hope. the bounty of our hope, and that really is beautifully set forth here. The God of hope enables us to abound in it by the power of the Spirit. That's the last part of verse 13. So here's a prayer for us that you can pray for yourself and other Christians. Lord, let me abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. That's a good prayer for the coming year. Lord, let me abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. As you're going through your day, as you're in traffic, And you're like, this is hopeless, you know? And just laying a generous use of the horns is not really gonna help it. I have to keep telling myself that. That's not gonna do it. No, you need to look to the Lord. You need to pray this. Lord, let me abound in hope, which is that in the means of grace, the word, the sacraments, prayer, You will be filled with joy and peace in believing. So this is how it works. You're filled with joy and peace. This all goes together. It's a package deal. And you know and you grow in your apprehension of the God of hope. That's a prayer, as we say, for the year to come. And for the world. This is what the world needs. We saw that in the beginning. The world has some sense of this, but they don't know where to find it. Maybe better said, when we point out to them where it is, they say, no, not that. No, not that. We've talked about this, right? I will not have this man to rule over us. That's what Herod was saying this morning. I will not bow to this man. I will not bow to him who is king and who is God. But this is what the world needs. This is what your extended family, friends, co-workers need. They need to abound in hope. They need real hope. That which comes only through faith in Christ and the joy and peace that accompanies it. They need real hope. And it's this whole sin-benighted, darkened world needs this. Make this your prayer as you look out on this world. And you say, how are you tying this in here? Because Paul is. He says, I tell you Christ became a servant to the circumcised, to the Jews, to show God's truthfulness in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, in order that the Gentiles, so again Paul is reminding us this isn't just He's the apostle to the Gentiles. This isn't just for the Jews. This is going to go to the whole world. And then he gives lots of quotes here. He gives us a series of quotes which are basically saying, which are basically about the gathering in of the nations. All of this, and hope supremely, notice this, is not something for which we labor or which we can bring about. Just like we said this morning, that star guiding the wise men was not some natural occurrence, it was supernatural, showing that God works supernaturally and that he must supernaturally work in us to bring us to him. This too, everything we're talking about here, the hope that we're talking about is not something that we can bring about. It's a wonderful gift of God to be received in Christ alone, by grace alone, through faith alone, all to the glory of God alone. This is what we need to be supporting in missions with our prayer. So this is the whole, when I talk about the bounty of hope, I'm talking about the missionary thrust. What do you say? I'm saying this world that is so terrible and lies in wickedness and that lacks hope needs it and we're the ones to bring it. Nobody else is. Nobody else is going to tell them what they need to hear. And so as we support missions with our prayer, our pocketbooks, our persons, Remember what it is that we receive, Christ gathering and perfecting by the Holy Spirit of the Gentiles. We're beneficiaries of this. I'm assuming none of you are ethnic Jews. You could be, I don't know, but I think I know most of you. I don't believe you are. We're beneficiaries of this. These verses in Romans 15 gloriously attest to that, quoting Deuteronomy, quoting David in several Psalms, quoting Isaiah, verses 8 to 12. I won't read the verses again, but you can look at verses 8 to 12, and they show about this riches, about the joy and peace of the Lord, the hope of God going to the whole world, and the whole world is called to what? To believe, or another way to put it, is to receive it. This is a gift to be received. None of this is something we can cook up, we can make happen. This has happened, is happening, and will happen to the end of the age. How shall they hear, Paul says earlier in this book, without a preacher? How will they hear without missionaries? This is what the world needs more than anything. Are you feeling hopeless? Look at what God is doing in the world. Again, I refer back to this morning. These two are linked. And we see now, you know, I saw something the other day and somebody was criticizing something. It was some program I was watching. He said, well, he has only 12 followers. And the guy said, well, I know somebody who started with just 12 followers. There are 2.2 billion or so people who named the name of Christ in some fashion. That's the number generally. Now we don't think there are 2.2 billion people who really have a saving relationship with Christ, but it is the world's largest religion. It's a little more than a third. It used to be about a century ago, the percentage was about 35%. Now it's around 33%. of the world have this profession. And you say, well I thought it's all fallen off. Please don't think of Christianity simply as American Christianity. Please don't do that. It's silly. It's ridiculous. Understand the church throughout the world. And yes, it has fallen away in the West. There has been a decline in Europe, Europe especially. Europe especially, and America, there has been some decline, but they're still throughout the world. In Africa, in China, in Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State, in Cambodia, our friends the Ambroses are back. This is happening throughout the world and in spite of a world so troubled in which a child may worriedly question a parent and a parent fear for his child, we're called to abound in hope. Because what's going on in the worldwide work of God speaks not of a paucity of hope, but a bounty of hope. Be a vital part of it. There's a bounty of hope throughout the world, and it's the gospel going to all the nations. In all the coming days, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope. Our Father, we pray that you would be with us in the coming days. Be with us as we gather with family and friends over the holidays of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And Lord, keep us safe in all of our travels. Lord, may we be able to speak to all of the hope that is within, as Peter speaks about, that we may give a reason for that hope and speak to people about life in Christ and nowhere else. In His name, Amen.