Real Hope: A Time for Hope Sample

Because God Provided The Answer In Jesus

EXODUS TO THE GOSPELS

Throughout the Old Testament, there is a tension. God is holy and demands obedience, yet He is also gracious and loving. The people can’t get it right, and we wonder how God will balance judgement with mercy and grace. Along the way, God made promises and one was to King David. David would have a descendant who would rule forever – his kingdom would never end. The Messiah would come… but when? We read of exile, hardship, lament and silence. 

Until finally, 1,000 years after that promise, God did the impossible. He came incarnate – the Lord Jesus Christ as a baby in Mary’s womb. In Bethlehem, Mary placed the Messiah, the Son of God, in an animals’ feeding trough. The most remarkable thing ever had just happened and the baby was placed in a trough. If we were to write God’s story as fiction, we could not make it any stranger! When Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the temple, an old man, Simeon, held the baby Jesus and said, ‘This child will be the salvation of everyone – a light to the Gentiles, and glory to the people of Israel!’ Jesus became the answer for every human heart. God didn’t give up on the human race – He didn’t override His promises, or overlook the sin of the people. He came Himself, to redeem and restore, and bring hope. 

Finally, the answer had arrived! God would show grace through the life and death and resurrection of His own Son, the Lord Jesus. It’s a time to hope because God came to the world, in the Lord Jesus… and He will come again, in glory.