RESURRECTING HOPE: REDEEMING HOPE

Mother’s Day is upon us! We hope you are filled with warm and loving memories of your mother and her wonderful presence in your life. It is an opportunity to celebrate their contribution to all of us. However, we know that mothers are not perfect. We see the brokenness of our humanity in every part of life, even in the gift of motherhood. Everything in life stands in need of redemption. We continue our sermon series Resurrecting Hope with the sermon Redeeming Hope. Redemption is the idea that God is at work to take our broken lives, busted efforts, and base desires and transform them through healing, wholeness, and most of all, hope. This redeeming hope is able to overcome guilt, conquer despair, and claim us as God’s very own children. We turn to Isaiah 49:8-17 to hear this word of hope. God’s people felt like they were forsaken and forgotten. Their circumstances were desperate and difficult. They had lost sight of God’s care and wondered if there was any help for them. God speaks to his people and to us to reassure us and comfort us. He tells us, “Even if a mother forgets her nursing child, I will not forget you!” (Isaiah 49:15) Yet, he also wants to share with us the power of hope that sets us free and invites us into the light.  This power is able to restore and renew us through a living and enduring hope! This Word is filled with possibilities for all of our lives. We pray that you will hear God’s voice setting you free from the chains of fear and despair as you read Isaiah 49:8-17.

Isaiah 49:8-17: This is what the LORD says: “In the time of my favor I will answer you, and in the day of salvation I will help you; I will keep you and will make you to be a covenant for the people, to restore the land and to reassign its desolate inheritances, ⁹ to say to the captives, ‘Come out,’ and to those in darkness, ‘Be free!’ “They will feed beside the roads and find pasture on every barren hill. ¹⁰ They will neither hunger nor thirst, nor will the desert heat or the sun beat down on them. He who has compassion on them will guide them and lead them beside springs of water. ¹¹ I will turn all my mountains into roads, and my highways will be raised up. ¹² See, they will come from afar– some from the north, some from the west, some from the region of Aswan. ” ¹³ Shout for joy, you heavens; rejoice, you earth; burst into song, you mountains! For the LORD comforts his people and will have compassion on his afflicted ones. ¹⁴ But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, the Lord has forgotten me.” ¹⁵ “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! ¹⁶ See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me. ¹⁷ Your children hasten back, and those who laid you waste depart from you. (NIV)