Rev. David Holwick F Dealing With Your Deepest Needs
First Baptist Church
Ledgewood, New Jersey
February 6, 2011
Romans 4:18-21; 15:13
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I. When you haven't got a prayer.
A. A desperate situation.
On December 17, 1927, the Navy submarine S-4 was conducting
submerged trials off Provincetown, Massachusetts.
As the sub surfaced, a Coast Guard destroyer rammed her and
penetrated the hull.
The sub sank immediately in 110 feet of water.
All of her officers and men were able to reach unflooded
compartments.
However, 34 of them, who had gone to the rear, soon died.
In her torpedo room, forward, six men remained alive.
In extremely cold water and tangled wreckage, Navy divers
worked desperately to rescue the survivors.
An approaching storm made the divers even more frantic.
The divers tapped on the hull and were able to communicate
with the survivors by Morse Code.
As the trapped men used the last of available oxygen in the
sub, a diver placed his helmeted ear to the side of the
vessel and received this Morse-coded message:
"Is ... there ... any ... hope?"
#18612
B. Many people are asking the same question.
1) The submarine situation is one that I would dread.
a) Being alive but trapped and running out of air.
2) Some people feel life itself is like that.
a) The end of our life approaches closer each day.
b) But sometimes life doesn't seem much better than death.
1> We wonder why we are even on this planet.
2> What difference do we make?
3> What do we have to look forward to?
C. The Bible says we can have a wonderful future.
1) God has good stuff waiting for us.
2) Will we claim it for our own?
II. What hope is.
A. It is a fundamental human need.
1) Even if there are no rational reasons for it, humans
still continue to hope.
a) It is something that is hardwired into many living
creatures.
b) According to psychiatrist Karl Menninger, even animals
die quickly when hopeless, and revive quickly when
given new hope.
2) David Aikman: "Hope is the heart's deepest longing." #29652
B. Ancient philosophers viewed hope as a temporary illusion.
1) They did not consider it a virtue.
a) In Ephesians 2:12, Paul says pagans were "without hope
and without God in the world."
b) This is an accurate description of their viewpoint.
2) Modern people put a positive spin on it, but it is still
something that is nebulous.
a) American Heritage Dictionary - "hope is the feeling
that events will turn out for the best."
C. Godly hope is different.
1) It is more than just a feeling.
2) It is based on our belief in the living God.
a) He acts and intervenes in human life.
b) We can trust him to keep his promises.
III. The most hopeful man in the Bible. 4:18-21
A. God gave Abraham a huge promise.
1) He would have a son, a multitude of descendants and a
country.
2) Downside - he was already an old geezer.
a) There was no rational way it could happen.
1> Even ancient people realized this.
b) What do you do?
B. Abraham believes anyway.
1) "Against all hope" alludes to the impossible odds.
2) But he had hope anyway, and believed God's promise.
a) Abraham wasn't blind - he acknowledged his limitations.
b) But he knew God was greater than his limitations.
1> He was fully persuaded and didn't waver.
2> Biblical hope is intimately tied with faith.
C. Unspoken result - God delivered what he said he would.
1) Abraham had a son - after waiting 25 years.
a) God's promises often have a wait built into them.
2) He didn't live to see it, but he also got the innumerable
descendants and the land of Palestine.
IV. What Christians can hope in.
A. Believers can hope for earthly needs being met.
1) Farmers hope for a harvest at the end of the season.
2) Women hoped for children, and gave birth.
3) Deliverance from danger.
a) Paul continued to hope he would be rescued from
persecutors. 2 Cor 1:10
b) Paul and a boatload of people actually gave up hope
that they would survive a storm, but they did.
Acts 27:20
4) Daily sustenance.
a) 1 Timothy 5:5 speaks of widows who hope God will answer
their prayers and provide for them.
B. We can hope for heavenly blessings.
1) Heaven, and a new world in the age to come.
a) When a loved one dies, we don't have to grieve like
those who have no hope.
1> God promises life beyond the grave.
2> Paul even says that if our only hope is in this
life, we are to be pitied.
b) Christians should always keep one eye fixed on heaven.
c) We not only have hope for heaven, but for the Second
Coming.
1> Paul calls this our blessed hope.
2) Spiritual strength here and now.
a) There are times God will give us a taste here and now
of the future blessings he has in store for us.
b) Hope in God can keep us strong and help us to endure.
Charles Colson cites the example of Armando Valladares.
Valladares spent 22 years in a Cuban prison because of
his refusal to bend the knee to a communist regime.
Valladares counseled and pled with other inmates to stay
true to the faith over the 8,000 days of hard labor and
solitary confinement.
He resisted communist indoctrination, saying "For me that
would've meant spiritual suicide."
He says, "All the time I was in jail, I never gave up my
freedom.
My freedom is not the space where you can walk around in.
There are lots of people in Cuba who have space to walk,
and yet they are not free."
For Vallardes, true freedom was "8,000 days of testing my
religious convictions, my faith...
of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to
instill in me with each bayonet thrust...
fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart."
When he was finally released with French intervention in
1982, he published his classic book "Against All Hope."
For Vallardes, hope was not a flimsy optimism that
everything would somehow work out alright.
Hope was understanding that the reward for holding fast to
God was a weight of glory that exceeded the pain of
any momentary affliction.
His hope in God yielded joy, sacrificial love, boldness,
and endurance. #35810
V. We need a rescue plan.
A. Hope in and of itself is useless.
1) Many people have put their trust in people or ideas, only
to have those people or ideas fail them.
2) Not every hope is realistic.
3) Our faith must be in something that is true and can work.
B. The lesson of the S-4.
Most sermons that use the submarine illustration I opened with
leave off with the Morse Code message.
What happened to the six trapped sailors?
They all died.
The Navy had no means to rescue them short of raising the
multi-ton submarine to the surface.
All along, the divers knew there was no hope for them.
The disheartened team decided to do something about this.
Over the next few years they developed the McCann Rescue
Chamber.
It was a large iron bell that was designed to fit over a
submarine's hatch.
Survivors would be safe from the surrounding water pressure
and would then be lifted to the surface.
Twelve years after the S-4 sank, another sub ran into trouble.
The new submarine Squalus was making test dives off the coast
of New Hampshire when something went terribly wrong.
Several compartments flooded with water and the sub sank to the
bottom, 243 feet down.
Some men drowned but 33 made it to safe areas and were still
alive.
Once again Navy rescue divers went into action.
Within 24 hours they had the Rescue Chamber at the location.
In four dives over the next 13 hours, they rescued all 33 men.
Four of the divers were awarded the Medal of Honor.
#18612
C. Christians have a rescue chamber.
1) Our hope is not in a thing, but a person - Jesus Christ.
2) Paul Tournier wrote, "The Christian hope which inspires me
is not a thing, but a Person. ...
The person of Jesus ... who is alive ... and who is
awaiting us beyond death." #27405
3) The word "hope" is used 85 times in the New Testament alone.
a) Throughout the Bible it is stressed that the ultimate
ground of hope is a relationship with God.
b) German theologian Jurgen Moltmann once wrote:
"Christianity is hope, forward looking and forward
moving,
and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming
the present."
#26547
D. Do you need a new hope?
Lewis Smedes tells the story of a pastor's wife named Tammy
Kramer who worked at an AIDS clinic in Los Angeles.
One day a young man who came in for his weekly treatment, but
this time he faced a new doctor.
Without so much as looking at the patient, the doctor said
casually,
"You know, don't you, that you won't live out the year?"
As the man left the clinic, he stopped at Tammy's desk and
sobbed, "He took away my hope!"
"I guess he did," Tammy answered.
"Do you have another one?"
#19024
Do you have a hope that can sustain you no matter what the
world throws at you?
The only hope worth having is found in a relationship with
Jesus Christ.
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SOURCES FOR ILLUSTRATIONS USED IN THIS SERMON:
#18612 “Is...there...any...hope?” by David Holwick, adapted from
“USS S-4 (SS-109)” in Wikipedia.org, and Charles R. Swindoll,
“The Tale of the Tardy Oxcart” (Word), p. 275.
#19024 “Having Another Hope,” by David W. Henderson, Discipleship
Journal #114, April 22, 2001.
#26547 “A Future Hope Transforms the Present,” Rev. Brett Blair's
Illustrations by Email, www.sermonillustrations.com,
December 25, 2005.
#27405 “The Christian Hope Is a Person,” by Paul Tournier, Dynamic
Preaching.
#29652 “Becoming a People of Hope,” by Stuart McAllister, A Slice of
Infinity: Ravi Zacharias International Ministries;
http://www.gospelcom.net/slice/, July 7, 2005.
#35810 “The Halls Of Hope: Lives Worth Emulating,” Charles Colson,
BreakPoint Commentary, April 9, 2009.
These and 35,000 others are part of the Kerux database that can be
downloaded, absolutely free, at http://www.holwick.com/database.html
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