Finding Hope in a Hopeless Age

During this season of Epiphany, we are looking at the subject of Privilege and Power. There is a pastoral method to the madness, and it is simply this: we live in an age where Christians have lost all their privilege and power in the culture. (If we’re honest, even when we had it we didn’t do a very good job with it, did we?) Anyway, what hope is there for us? Truthfully, I have never seen so many Christians, both liberal and conservative, who act like God is off asleep somewhere. I mean, they are beyond concerned—they are despairing! Is that the right posture for us? Do we the people of God need to be known as people who blow up Facebook and Twitter and make fools of ourselves when we don’t get our own way?Welcome to the world of Kings in the Old Testament! It is a dark time in the passage we look at this week, and I am asking you to do something I usually don’t ask you to do and that is get out your Bible and read I Kings 16:29 – 19:18. I know that, if you weren’t raised Baptist, you most likely don’t even know where Kings is in the Bible. Don’t be embarrassed to look in the index at the front of your Bible, and you will be able to find it. But I want you to read this because the sermon title pretty much sums up these chapters. The narrative is so long that we won’t be able to read all of it in worship and will only read selectively. So please take a few minutes and read the text ahead of time; it will make what we talk about on Sunday come alive!So, this Sunday we will see how God brings hope to a people living in a seemingly hopeless age. You and I need this! We need both the hope and consolation of the gospel so we can be people of hope to a world that has basically lost its way. I hope you will join me this Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend as we celebrate that we live in a land that has fought hard for civil rights for all people. May we be people who are continuing to bring peace and reconciliation to all the places in which we live and move.Blessings,Jim