Hold Fast to Hope

What are you holding onto today?  While many things have changed since the beginning of time, our need to find strength for living has not.   People have struggled for thousands of years to maintain the quality of their spirit, their hearts, and their lives.  Many things enhance our lives in the modern era, but the human element remains remarkably consistent across the ages.  We live with an illusory hope that human progress, such as education, information, technology, or political processes, will solve the brokenness of humanity, and we are disappointed when it does not.  There is no doubt that human life is better with all of these. Yet, it is not hard for us to see humanity’s destructive misuse of the best things to bring about the worst results! Education becomes indoctrination.   Information becomes misinformation. Technology becomes a tool for power and control.  Political processes become selfishly manipulative.  We lose truth, trust, and ultimately our hope!  God has always had a plan, and it is based on the truth of an enduring hope.  This hope becomes most apparent in Jesus coming into the world to redeem us and transform human existence.  This has empowered believers through some of the most difficult times in history.  Their world was truly falling apart, but they did not give up this powerful and eternal hope.  They realized, as the hymn states so well, that “on Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand.”  In our series Hold Fast, the sermon is Hold Fast to Hope.  It is based on the scripture that we used last week, Hebrews 3:6-15.  The first verse of our passage points to this hope: But Christ, as the Son, is in charge of God’s entire house. And we are God’s house, if we keep our courage and remain confident in our hope in Christ. (Hebrews 3:6, New Living Translation)  What are you holding onto today?  These believers were struggling to hold fast to a courageous faith.  The enemy of their souls was seeking to use adversity, doubt, and despair to force them to live in fear rather than faith and uncertainty rather than confidence!  This Apostle not only empowers these early Christians but also us to find the strength of this powerful hope that transforms the darkness of doubt with the marvelous light of truth.  As the enemy of your soul assails you in raging storms of life, we pray that you will be filled with God’s power and presence that will strengthen your grip on the transforming hope found in our faithful Savior.

Hebrews 3:6-15: But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are his house, if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory. ⁷ So, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you hear his voice, ⁸ do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the wilderness, ⁹ where your ancestors tested and tried me, though for forty years they saw what I did. ¹⁰ That is why I was angry with that generation; I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.’ ¹¹ So I declared on oath in my anger, ‘They shall never enter my rest.'” ¹² See to it, brothers and sisters, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. ¹³ But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,” so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. ¹⁴ We have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original conviction firmly to the very end.   ¹⁵ As has just been said: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion.”  (NIV)