Virtue Signals – Hope

Hope                                                                     There’s something you may not know about me. I read the news – A LOT. I don’t watch the cable news stations, but I read several reputable sources online every day. If you’re like me and stay well-informed about what’s going on in the world, you may come to the same conclusion many people have reached lately: the world is going to hell in a handbasket! War in Ukraine continues. Chaos from the coup in Niger persists. Unrest in Sudan has caused 400,000 migrants to leave the country in just a couple of months. The Morocco earthquake killed thousands. Floods in Libya killed thousands. North Korean leader Kim Jung Un is partnering with Russia. China wants to take back Taiwan. South America is in turmoil, and many people are trying to get into the United States. America’s “Breadbasket” is so dry we can’t produce much wheat. Bees are dying. The oceans are warming. Our water tables are dropping. All this is happening while prices skyrocket, the opioid epidemic continues to kill thousands each year, and our kids are failing math and reading. Oh – and COVID is back with a new strain. With all that as the constant drumbeat in the news, no wonder so many people take medication for depression and anxiety. All this paints a picture of a world lacking HOPE.  When you look at everything going on in the news, it’s easy to feel unsure about how the future will unfold. That’s why so many people are afraid of the future. Many of you with depression or anxiety might not be thinking about global issues at all, but about your own personal trials. Even the personal trials seem to be on the rise as people are less kind and more demanding to one another. Your schedules lack any downtime. Your finances lack any margin. Social media shows you that everybody else is doing life better than you are. Again, all these things make you feel like your life is hopeless. You think you will never have money or relationships like other people have, so why try? You might as well give up and stay in bed all day. These feelings crowd in on you when you’re depressed. Or, you might not feel like giving up, but instead feel the crushing pressure to measure up. You look for ways to accomplish more, earn more, and have more fulfilling relationships. You worry in the dead of night about how you will make it all happen. Whether the despair is in the news or in your personal life, any Hope for a brighter future seems to be vanishing all around. Most sadly, all this is starting to become a pretty common picture by which many Christians see the world. This is sad because we, as Christians, are to be defined by a different set of virtues. Remember – our current series of messages is called “Virtue Signals,” and we are looking at six values we Christians should be signaling to the world. We need to demonstrate that we live differently from the world’s patterns – that we root our lives not in the common values of our culture but in Christ, our Savior and our Master. We Christians can hold onto hope, even in the midst of all the negativity around us because we trust that God is in control. No ruler has been put in power for whom God didn’t have a say. No natural disaster has caught God by surprise. COVID wasn’t unexpected, and all the results it brought were within God’s plan. God DOES have a plan that He will work right up until the day the trumpet sounds and time runs out for this earth. If all this is true, then we need to be people of Hope – Hope for a future that is leading us right to where God has promised us: a New Heaven and a New Earth and an Eternity spent with our God. Two Types of Hope Obviously, today’s message is about the virtue called Hope, and we all need to understand that there