a Word for Every Year

Our Christmas Eve service was about a question the speaker had asked his son, about what is the most important thing to be taken away from Christmas. It isn’t getting the shopping or baking done, it’s not about the presents or anything else; it’s not even about a birth. It’s about what that birth meant, what that birth gave to the world. It gave us HOPE.

Hope of salvation, hope for the future, hope in all things. Without that birth, there would be no hope in the world. We would exist in a superficial and cyclical life, without any hope for something better or a purpose.

Now just how important is hope? Without hope, we have nothing to strive for in life, because without hope there’s no point. It is a life filled with heart-ache, difficulties and pain. We wouldn’t have hope that things can be better, that people can heal from sickness, that what we’re doing means anything.

Hope is such an important part of human nature that entire industries have been built upon it: Books, movies, clothing, cars, careers…you name it and it is probably founded upon the idea that people are hoping for something.

Obviously not everyone places their hope in Jesus and salvation; but even those self-serving hopes, that we all have, would no longer exist if it were not for His life and death. The world would already be cast into darkness, Satan would already be at the helm, and we would be bound for the fiery pit.

By now I’m sure most people have heard of The Lord of the Rings, written by J.R.R. Tolkien, and most have realized that Tolkien was a Christian, that the entire series of books is written on the premise of Hope.

Frodo is sent on a “fool’s hope” to destroy the ring and ultimately Sauron. There is a part at the end of movie, in which Samwise is asking Frodo, if he remembers the taste of food, and Frodo responds:

“I can't recall the taste of food... Nor the sound of water or touch of grass... I'm naked in the dark, with nothing. No veil between me and the ring of fire.”

That is life without hope: A life without any joy or pleasures at all. Before His birth there was the hope of His coming, after His resurrection there is hope without ceasing. Hope can be fleeting, for those who put their hope in things and circumstances, but there is nothing that can happen in this world that can remove our hope if we trust in Jesus and His truth.

“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
John 10:10