Hope for Your Family
By Pastor Matt Black
30 May 2007
Midweek Bible Study[1]
Romans 15:13
Introduction: Open your Bibles to Romans 15:13. Tonight I want everyone here to know that no matter what you are facing in your family, with a child, or with a sibling, or a mother or father, there is hope! So the title of this evening’s message is: “Hope for Your Family”.
Romans 15:13, “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.”
Tonight, as our Scripture says, I am praying that you “abound in hope through the power of the Holy Ghost”! God wants you to “abound in hope” and it is this hope that will “fill you with all joy and peace in believing” no matter what waves and winds you are facing.
What is Hope?
Hope is that which says to your heart, my best days with God are just around the corner! Hope dreams of God’s best and God’s glory no matter what the cost. Hope is the belief that God is can change any situation. You see there is not a hopeless person out there. As long as God is on the throne, there is no such thing as a hopeless situation. Do you believe there is an omnipotent Father in Heaven who can do anything and can change any situation? Does God still work miracles today? Then there is hope.
You know why I know there is hope tonight? Because God loves you, and He is working on your behalf. You see, “it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:13). God is not finished with you yet.
You see “he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).
God wants to do a miracle in your family, and He wants to begin that miracle through you. We all have serious and impossible family problems.
You may be struggling in your job, or in other relationships, but I will tell you that there is no pain like family pain.
Whoa, where did all those thoughts come from? Come on, you know where they came from—“out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh” (Matthew 12:34).
The heart is where true feelings reside, and the hearts of many are filled with despair about their families—feelings of fear that things will never change, and thoughts that another attempted turn around will only lead to failure.
Listen to me: There is hope!
Do you remember that old chorus? I looked for it in our hymnal but couldn’t find it. God can do anything but fail. If you know it sing it with me:
God can do anything, anything, anything
God can do anything but fail.
He's the Alpha and Omega
the beginning and the end,
He's the fairest of ten thousand to my soul;
God can do anything, anything, anything
God can do anything but fail.
If we don’t have hope; if you don’t believe that God can actually change your family, we are in trouble. Without hope we are wasting our time. When you truly believe that God’s greatest works in your life are still in the future, then you and I can have hope!
So listen, sit back and let’s trust God for a fresh new work of hope in our hearts!
I. Hope is promised in God’s Word. Scripture has so much to say about hope. Here are just a few of the passages that God has used to stir up hope in the furnace of my soul.
A. Our Hope is in God alone.
Psalm 42:5, “Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his [presence] countenance.”
Psalm 71:5, “For thou art my hope, O Lord GOD: thou art my trust from my youth.”
You see hope is not in your circumstances or in your intellect and good sense to solve a problem. Hope is in a Person: Paul says to Timothy that the “Lord Jesus Christ… is our hope” (1 Timothy 1:1). In other words hope does not depending on your life going well. It doesn’t depend on circumstances or a Ph.D. It depends on God.
B. Hope is in God alone, through His Word alone. We get to the person of God through His Word!
1. We can see how God has worked before and gain hope.
Romans 15:4, “For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope.”
· I think I remember when Israel was without hope a little boy named David slew a giant named Goliath.
· I think I also remember a group of Hebrew slaves between a mountain and the Red Sea with an angry mob of soldiers behind them, and I think I remember God opening up that body of water so that every one of them walked over on dry ground … all except for… the … Egyptians!
· You see, we worship a God who can go to the tomb of dead Lazarus, and give life to a dead man.
2. God’s promises to us will always give us hope.
God says, “I’m for the impossible stuff!”
I think He said, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed…nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:20).
We can trust a God that has gone on record as saying, “You know what? When it seems out of reach, when it seems like it could never be turned around, GIVE ME A CALL!” I believe He’s put it in the eternal records of heaven and said, “Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not” (Jeremiah 33:3).
Personal Applications: Mrs. Areta, “is there anything too hard for the Lord”? (Jeremiah 32:27). Can God bring home a wayward child?
Bro. Billy, can God bring a person back from the brink of a TERMINAL disease? We can all say with Jeremiah 17:14, “Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved: for thou art my praise.”
II. Hope can be Stolen.
A. Hope is stolen by pain. We are going to get to the part where you can actually have hope for your family, but first I want to tell you where pain comes from. Yes we experience pain in our jobs, with our friends, even with our brothers and sisters in Christ, but our greatest pain comes from our families.
· You may be here as a single person and say, “I’m doing right, Lord and I’m waiting for Mr. or Miss Right”. God that’s all I want! And there are days you may feel like it’s not fair, and you feel so alone! You need some hope!
· I know there are husbands and wives out here tonight that are thinking “This is it? This is what I got married for? This is what I have to look forward to the rest of my life?” Distracted husbands. Detached wives. Distant relationships. Feeling so alone. And for the most part, suffering in silence.
· Maybe you are strong as a couple, but devastated by the burden of children who are making choices that are breaking your heart.
· For others it is financial burdens—you look at the end of the month, and you say to yourself, “I’ve run up how much on my credit cards”!?
1. The ultimate cause of pain in all the situations here is one thing: sin. The wages of sin is death. Pain is the process of death. There is no pain in heaven because there is no death in heaven. All family pain comes from sin. Either sin in you or sin in your spouse, or child, or other family member. Sin hurts. Sometimes it hurts so bad.
2. Before we get to how to root out sin, and get our hope back on track, can we agree on something? Family is important.
Nobody gets to the end of their life and says, “Agh, If I could do it all over again, I’d spend more time at the office! Nobody ever wishes he or she had spent more time traveling or accumulating more stuff. No, at the end of their life, everyone always talks about the same stuff: their family, their spouse, and their children. We can all say with the apostle John (3 John 1:4), “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth”. Whether it is our physical or spiritual offspring, it is our family that brings us joy. You can celebrate when a son or daughter is serving Christ. You can rejoice when you’ve lived your life, and you see your children and grandchildren following hard after the Lord. That is as John says, the greatest joy in life!
So if this is the greatest joy, to see our families walk in truth, then how do we get there? How do we get to that hope? We’ve got to find out what steals hope. You already know what it is. Sin!
B. Sin steals hope!
· What’s the biggest problem in marriage? You can get almost any book today, and you’ll read that the biggest problem in marriage is communication. Can I tell you something? Wife, your husband has no problem with communication. He can go out with his buddies and talk up a storm about sports or other interests. Your husband loves to communicate. His problem is not communication. Communication is the fruit, but if you go down to the root, your husband has a sin problem—the sin of selfishness and pride. It is selfishness and pride that causes men to starve their wives emotionally and find their affirmation in the workplace or with their friends. It is not that we don’t know how to talk, it is pride that keeps us from opening up and making ourselves vulnerable to the wife that God gave us.
If you want hope, then you’ve got to get down to the root issue, and the root issue is always the same. It’s sin.
· You say, no the biggest problem in our family, or in my personal life is financial. But while you’re saying that, you know that the deeper issue below the finances is a materialism problem. You have a spending problem. God made your heart to be filled with Him, but instead you are filling that place with things.
· The biggest problem in your life is not surface issues. You can deal with those from now until the end of the world, and never solve the problem. Do you want a surface makeover, or do you want life transformation? If you want transformation, you’ve got to stop dealing with the fruit issues, and get down to the root issues.
Conclusion: I’m sure you want to know how to get down to those root issues. We are going to find out all about that… next week. Come back. Next week’s message is entitled “Nobody Wants to Believe the Problem is Sin.”
But as we close, let me encourage you, hope begins with God. Hope begins in His promises to you. Get alone with Him and let Him whisper His promises to your heart. Be still and know that He is God. Hope is not in the changing of your circumstances or in your own natural good sense. Hope is believing the promises of God. If you have God, then you have hope to change!
Closing Hymn: 635 I Have Decided to Follow Jesus