Waiting on the Lord!

But she puts big, like elastic to keep it all together. And of course, it’s written in Chinese, which I can’t read. It’s not helpful. There’s just some numbers. And every measurement is like, it goes from metric to a different one too. So I have no idea what is what. But I have this distinct memory of her at the kitchen table and just running around the kitchen, making those Christmas log cakes, sheets and sheets of chocolate and vanilla cakes. And then they had to sit there and wait for them to cool.

And then after we finally waited, I was like, oh, I could eat it. Nope, you can’t eat it, because that’s just step one. They had to slice it, then they had to put the cream, then they had to roll it, and then they had to sit it there. I was like, it’s done. Nope, because they had all those, I don’t know if you guys remember all those like plastic things you would stick on top of the log cake. Yeah, the not edible ones, but it looked really pretty. I just remember that being such a big part of my childhood. And I just remember that the feeling that I had of those Christmas memories, as much as the smells of the cake, it was a lot of waiting. I wasn’t allowed to eat it at every step. I wasn’t allowed to eat the cake.

I wasn’t allowed to eat the candy. I was allowed to open the presents. So much waiting. And that brought me to the text that we will be reading very shortly today. This idea of waiting was such a big part of my memory as a kid, obviously, but also in relation to Christmas time. And most of you know, a lot of you know that I did not grow up in the church. So we celebrated Christmas as a holiday, and my mom is still a very big gift-giver. And I remember this one time she had this stack of boxes from descending order, largest to smallest.

And every box had a box inside it. You know, some of them were tricks, some of them were actually gifts. But I had this distinct memory of not, like, Christmas was wonderful, and the anticipation was also almost killing me, like, waiting, when do I get this? And there is a goodness to that as well. You know, not just in the sense of oh, we’re waiting, we’re waiting for Christmas to happen. We know that Jesus came, right? We read in the scriptures, we know, and there’s a reason why we celebrate the season of hope. But I find it difficult sometimes because I don’t know about you. The older I’ve gotten, the less patient I’m becoming. And you’d think when I look at my children, their patience is terrible. They can’t even wait for someone to stop talking before they talk over each other. I’m constantly telling them to wait. Why not a time listen for someone else than you speak?

But it’s funny that the older I get, the more I see that I’m just like them in many ways. My patience, I thought, has grown, but there’s so much more that still has to grow. And there’s this thing about waiting. And I think possibly because I think back of when I had to take VHS tapes and press rewind and wait for the whole thing to wind and that waiting was a normal

thing, you know, in the 80s. And some of you are probably like, okay, Jay-Z, let’s talk about the 50s and the 60s and the 70s. We’re waiting about a lot of things. I know, like, I remember the rotary phones in my grandma’s house, that same house with the kitchen. Every time you press the

number, you’d have to wait for me to go back, calling someone and leaving a message and having no idea when they may get the message and when they’re going to call you back. You just have to wait. You send a card. I had a pen pile in BC. I had no idea when she’d get the letter. I just wait,

wait for her to write back. It could be months. Wait. There was so much goodness as a child and knowing that the waiting, there was something. But I think in some ways, as I got older, of course, it’s different when I became a believer.

But there’s just a sense of, like, waiting is terrible. But I think, as believers, too, when we go through life circumstances, waiting’s not that fun, is it? We wait for our, I mean, my own family, Dense’s doctor’s appointments, book an appointment eight months later. We have to wait.

Lineups. We have to wait. We’re getting used to shows where we don’t have to, we can just click to the next episode. And if it tells you that you have to wait till next week, you’re like, why am I waiting? This is awful.

Why am I emphasizing on the waiting? It’s because when I think about Christmas and when we think about Christmas, Pastor Dave kind of alluded to this a couple of weeks ago when he brought us into the Christmas season, he preached about hope. And so today I wanted to continue that. But more specifically, in the line of what he mentioned, he talked about how a lot of times we talk about Jesus and in this generation, we don’t often talk about the second coming.

But it’s Christmas, not the best time to talk about how hope has come that Jesus came. But he will return. Amen? Why? Because friends, we are in a perpetual state of waiting. Are we not? Hope came in the form of Jesus as a baby in human form so that he would live just like us.

So he could understand and live a perfect life, but yet experience all human experience so that he could relate and that we would have a God that knows and understands us. He came. He died. He rose again. And he’s coming again. Right?

Yeah. So the thing is, are we not alive right now waiting for that day? Now, the difference is how are we while we’re waiting? If it was me, just generally about waiting. I’m impatient, so I don’t like waiting. And so it could really easily feel like, oh man, everything’s just terrible. I don’t want to wait. Here’s the thing. There is a gift in waiting. It might not feel like it. It might not seem like it. But through the history of time when you look at scriptures, are the people of Israel perpetually, was that not just a history of waiting?

Waiting to be delivered from the captivity of Pharaoh and then waiting for a king. Hey, David, you’re not ready yet. Just grow up a bit. Go be a shepherd. And then finally they get their king. A couple generations of that, then they get to exile. Waiting to be rescued again.

And then you move to the New Testament. They’re waiting for the prophecies to come true, for the Messiah to come. And then he comes, and then he leaves. But he says he’s going to come back. Is that not our human story, friends? That we are perpetually in a time of waiting,

that while hope has come, that the kingdom has come already. He has not yet returned, and the kingdom is not yet in full. But until then, is our waiting static? Is our waiting idle? Man, biblical waiting is active. God is never static. He is ever on the move.

And I think his invitation for us as we come into a season of hope and remembering the birth of hope incarnate is that we will learn as people to hope in the seasons of waiting. What does it mean to have hope? Not just the logical. I find that that’s difficult for me too, where I know that he is hope. But when I’m waiting for something to change, or I’m waiting for something to happen, or I’m waiting for a season to finally turn, or I’m waiting. What are you waiting for today? And I’m asking you for yourself, as we dive into the word, what are you waiting for? And what does it look like for you to hold on to hope and have hope in the waiting?

Today’s text I’m going to read from the NIV, Romans 4. And I’m going to read from 18 to 25. This is the word of God through Paul. 18, Romans 4, against all hope, Abraham, in hope, believed, and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, so shall your offspring be. Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead, since he was about 100 years old, and that Sarah’s room was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. This is why it was credited to him as righteousness. The words it was credited to him were written not for him alone, but also for us, for whom God will credit righteousness, for us who believe in him, who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead.

He was delivered over to death, for our sins, and was raised to life for our justification. This is the word of the Lord for us today, friends. It’s amazing that Paul was speaking to a whole group in Rome. And I think I’ve mentioned before in one of the sermons a couple weeks back, where you can imagine the collection of people that were there, and I would argue that even though that might not be our ethnic dissent necessarily, it was a group of people mixed-mashed.

They happened to be in Rome, but not everyone was actually of Roman descent. So for the couple chapters leading up to chapter four, he was greeting the people and saying, hey, I really wish I could be with you, and I missed you. But I need to remind you of a few things, because while everything does come from the Jewish lineage, what you are connected through, through Christ Jesus, you have a collective share history now because of him. And he was going through and reminding people whether you’re Jew, whether you’re Gentile, and for us it would be whether you are 80 or whether you are 50, whether you are 70 or whether you’re 30, whether you live in Vineland or just moved here, whether you are from here or you immigrated here. We have a shared history. And soPaul spends quite a bit of time in this part of Romans going back to Abraham. There’s a lot that I didn’t read, but in this particular text, he goes back and he says, against all hope Abraham in hope believed. And so he became the father of many nations. 

He was referring to Genesis. So if you ever go back to Genesis between the chapters 12 to 18, it goes from the call of Abraham in chapter 12, which God says, you’re going to have a generation, many generations of children. He was 75. People lived a couple hundred years, by the way, just to let you know. So he was young then. But it didn’t just all of a sudden poof. He had many generations. Him and Sarah could not have their own biological children. And that was part of their story. So you could imagine in Abraham’s mind, he’s like, how is this going to happen? At 75, around there, right after he finds Sarai, which was her name before it changed to Sarah. And they couldn’t have their own children.

So then I’m sure in Abraham’s head, he’s going, God made this promise to me, how on earth is this going to happen? Because it didn’t happen and come to fruition in a day or two days or weeks or years. As we keep reading through the different chapters of Genesis 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, we realize that he ends up having a new covenant with God.

He changes his name from Abraham to Abraham there. And in this new covenant, he says, you will be the father of many nations. I’m sure that sounds great because he’s wanted to be a father and wanted to have his own son and child for so long. And he’s like, that’s fantastic. But he’s waiting again.

So we find that he’s 99 years old. So 24 years later, when God reveals himself again and says, it’ll be next year, Sarah is going to have a baby and you will name him Isaac. Could you imagine waiting 25 years or so? For a little, little glimpse of what might be, I’m sure he wished there was a map or like instructions that God would give him a book and say, every year, just wait like this.

And he would be like, that’s great. But there’s a reason why it was credited to him righteousness. It was the reason why he’s called the father of faith, which is what the word and the name Abraham means. It’s because through this one person that the Lord chose, history was being made in a way that he could not even understand.

To this man and woman who struggled with something as simple as starting a family. God made a promise to them. And so to their human mind, I could only imagine it being a wonderful gift that God will give us children and a lineage that he’ll extend over generations. They’re probably thinking, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren,

that’ll be kind of in their lineage. And that is true because that line led to David. And then David led to Jesus. And when he was born, everything that was spoken of came to be. But the thing is, Abraham had no idea what

father of many nations would mean. Because in his brain, it probably meant father of the nations of Israel. Because that’s a lot already, right? But God, there’s always a but God, had so much more planned, not only for Abraham, but for the future of every single person he had in mind.

Can you marvel with me for a second that in these first chapters of Genesis 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, that God was making a promise to Abraham. And he had in mind the people in the New Testament. And then he had this present moment in mind knowing exactly the future of his people. Is that not amazing? That the legacy of Abraham, that we call him father of our faith because of Jesus, that we share a collective history, not because we are genetically the same.

 But because we’ve been bought, but because we’ve been invited into a family through the blood of Jesus. And we are now family. Yes, you can clap for that. Thank you, Lord. Right? That is the amazing thing. And that is what Paul was trying to tell his people. And it’s amazing to me that he literally said here, this is why it was a credit to him as righteousness. In these words, it were not written for him

alone. He wanted the people in Rome to know that these words were for them too. And because this is the living word, these words are for us too, Church. Amen. That hope came not to give us a particular result.

But as we wait like Abraham and many of the people that came before us, generation after generation, that we’re living into the will and the timing of our sovereign God. And so the invitation for us, Church, is how do we do that in our lives right now? As we are waiting, as a people who are waiting for him to come again, and maybe we will not see it in our lifetime. But that does not mean that our time of waiting is wasted. Right?

So if we look to Abraham, the text that we have gives us some very practical ways in which will hopefully help us by looking at Abraham. How do we hold on to hope while we’re waiting? And it will bring life as we are waiting in anticipation of Christmas. I have, I don’t often do this by the way. I don’t have like three points, but today there are three points.

So when they put it up here it is, through our text today, we see three things that Paul indicates through Abraham that helps us hope while we’re waiting. First it says, belief shapes our behavior. What do I mean by that? First part of the verses that we read today. It says against all hope, Abraham in hope believed, and so he became the father of many nations.

It’s a tricky line. I remember reading it many, many times to figure it out. What did it mean? What did he mean when he said against all hope, Abraham believed in hope? We use the word hope a lot, right? And when I actually just Googled hope dictionary.com. The definition was something to the idea of the anticipation of something coming to fruition or the anticipation of something happening, right? But that idea of hope is attributed to nothing. It’s attributed to, I really hope that the thing I want happens, right? But I don’t know, you’re not talking to anyone, you’re just saying, I just throw it out there into space. But I want to know that it’s possible.

That’s the definition of dictionary definition of hope. So against all hope, against all types of hope, whether it’s different idols, whether it’s different ideas, whether it’s just this thing, against all these other concepts of hope that are not true, Abraham believed in hope. Hope is not an idea. Hope is not a thing or a notion. Hope is a person.

And Abraham believed in hope and so. And there’s a sense that because of his faith and his belief and so something came after it. He became the father of many nations, not because he worked his way to become the father of many nations. That was the call and the gift of God.

That was not out of his own merit. But his faith and his belief affected his behavior as in every time he would hit a wall. Think of the time where Abraham was called. He was called to put his only biological son on that table basically to be executed. We all just heard the story. He waited 100 years for this kid. And then one day God goes, you need to sacrifice him. What do you think he thought? Many things. But his belief in the hope of God the person, knowing who he is, even though his logical mind was, that doesn’t make sense. His belief affected the way he chose to obey. Does that make sense? Does that make sense? 

His faith in who God is. As hope incarnate as a person, that he’s experienced life with, he knew that whatever God had in mind, he’s probably like, I don’t know how you’re going to do this, God. Maybe you’ll bring him back to life.

This makes no sense to me. I will obey you because you commanded. Our belief in who God is, just like Abraham, can shape our behavior in the time of waiting so that our hope is not in some weird desire that we might have for what we want to happen arbitrarily. But is that we’re living in the will and the timing of God because we’re obedient to his call. And we’re saying yes to the little things and the big things that he’s calling us to daily. Amen? But also, Paul brings us back to this. I didn’t even do this alliteration. He did it for us. It says, without weakening his faith, Abraham faced the fact that his body was as good as dead since he was about 100 years old. And Sarah’s womb was also dead. He didn’t say, just deny reality. Don’t think about it.

Think good thoughts. Be positive. That’s usually what we recommend, like, you know, what we try to comfort ourselves or other people. But this is the exact almost. He faced the facts that there is a limitation to our humanity. Right? There is a time for everything. There is a time to live, a time to die. There’s a time and season in which God has ordained and called and made all things good. And he was confronting it head on and saying,

are you serious? I’m 100 years old. And her womb has not worked since the beginning. But somehow you’re going to give us a kid now. All right. Whatever way you’re going to do with God.

There’s something amazing when we cross our limitations as humans and we acknowledge the unlimited reality of God. Right? Because often when we think the way we think, we limit God in our minds. We don’t walk around and like we’re making, okay, this is how God’s going to work. God doesn’t even work in time. He doesn’t have time. He doesn’t look at it and say, it is 1150, Jay-Z. You got five more minutes. No. Like everything that has happened over each course of every couple thousand years till this present moment is nothing. He breathed life into existence. He said and it was. This is not a human that we are describing. This is God. He was before time, before existence. So let us not limit him, but face the facts of our limitations with faith in him. That’s how we can continue to hope in him while we’re waiting because it hinges less on the result, but more on who he is.

And it leads us to the final thing, which is promises not possibilities.

It says yet Abraham did not waver in unbelief, not at all.