Can I Trust the Future?

Hi, this is Bernie Dake. Welcome to the Salvation Army's Words of Life. And it's rising, the morning star is dawning. Heaven and earth rejoice in glory in the highest. Oh, and it's shining, the promise of the Savior. Holding back the night, bring the light of day. Open your eyes to see our King, and to deliver us.

The light has come, no more wandering in darkness. Our hope is 12th among us, the Child comes to save us. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. The Child comes to save us. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. As the child comes to save us Welcome to Words of Life. I'm Bernie Dake.

And I'm Cheryl Gillum. Welcome everybody. Officially, Merry Christmas. We are launching our new Christmas series today with Commissioner Phil Needham. This series is actually a sneak peek of an audio book he's working on for the book he wrote called Christmas Breakthrough. Yeah, it's a wonderful, wonderful devotional book.

I did it last year. You've read it? I have. Man, I have a copy of it. I have a passion for audiobooks. I think people consume books in different ways. So we're actually editing the audiobook form so that I'll be able to listen to it as soon as possible.

And I will become familiar with it again as I listen to it. So I'm excited about that. That's great. Awesome. Yeah, thank the Lord.

Yeah. Today, as we begin this new series, Phil is asking the question, can I trust the future? He discusses the optimist and pessimist we all are, depending on the situation. And in this case, depending on our memories of Christmas. Do you have a favorite memory of Christmas, Cheryl?

Oh, so many. I mean, I grew up in upstate New York. So, you know, snow on the ground Christmas morning. Snow angels. Snow angels, you know, peeking out my my second story window bedroom window and pretending not pretending.

I saw hoof prints. I'm just saying. Wow. You are very fortunate. Yeah.

What about you? I definitely the smells of Christmas for me, the smell of winter. I also call upstate New York home.

Yes, you do. But snow angels and snowball fights and all the things that you do. It's actually not something I necessarily miss, the snow. But it's always cool to see it when it's freshly on the ground. Once a year. Yeah.

And it's gone the next day. Yeah. I love it. Hello, my name is Phil Needham. I'm a retired Salvation Army officer who enjoys writing books that honor Christ and explore what it means to be his disciple.

My email is Phil Needham at Comcast dot net. The five weekly messages that begin today and extend through the Advent and Christmas seasons are based on meditations from my book Christmas Breakthrough. The book provides reflections and prayers during the Advent season from November twenty seven to January six. The book is available from crest books dot com Christian book dot com and the Kindle format from Amazon dot com. We start today asking the question, can I trust the future?

You may want to look at Luke twenty one, twenty five through thirty three. We humans tend to be optimistic until we turn pessimistic. We go through cycles, sometimes within the same day. On an emotional level, optimism is a feeling that things are going to get better. Pessimism, a feeling that the future does not look good. Which emotion one has can relate to a number of factors, high or low self-esteem, upbringing, the influence of powerful people in one's life. On a more objective level, both optimism and pessimism can be based on observable evidence. You see a definite trend. You see the makings of a better or a worse future. Someone has said that the greatest difference between people is what they anticipate. You've probably heard this ditty before.

Two men look out of prison bars. The one saw mud. The other starves. What you anticipate tells you what your life is about. It suggests what your vision of tomorrow is.

If your life is committed to that vision and you are working toward it, you are revealing who you are, no matter what your present circumstances. Our hope defines us. Advent is the season of anticipation. Popular songs are full of it. From the nostalgia of, I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, to the longing for family in, I'll be home for Christmas.

Oddly, some adults think the possibility of a really bad Christmas can be used to get children to be on their best behavior during the season. It comes in the words of a rather cruel Christmas song we're all familiar with. You better watch out. You better not cry. You better not pout. I'm telling you why. Santa Claus is coming to town.

Get in shape, kids, or you won't get the goodies. The longing for a happy Christmas may be one expression of our greater longing for a better future. By the time Jesus was born, the Jewish people had for centuries been longing for deliverance from their oppressors. Their psalmist cried out for this deliverance in agonizing poetry. Their prophets saw it in visions of a God-anointed Savior who would proclaim and grant the deliverance.

Christians believe that Jesus, the saving Messiah, did indeed come, freeing those who received him, not from external oppressors, but from the oppression of their own sinful hearts, their compromised lives, their abuse of each other. The psalmist declares God's goodness to his people in the past and then asks for a similar future in which what they have sown in tears becomes an abundant harvest. He hopes God will come through for his people, as he has done in the past. In another psalm, the writer David isn't so sure.

My God, my God, why have you left me all alone? These very words were repeated by Jesus himself on the cross. He was not simply quoting from the psalm for effect or to state some doctrinal principle about God the Father who was disgusted by the enormity of sin Jesus had taken on himself, turning his face and his heart away from his beloved Son. Jesus the man was honestly crying out as a result of the pain of his forsakenness. In the gross uncertainty of the days in which we are living, as the world seems to be falling apart, many people wonder if God has abandoned us.

When terrible things happen to good or innocent people, we wonder where the hope is gone. We sometimes wonder if God is there for us, and then we hear the cry of dereliction from the cross, and we realize that Jesus experienced this too, and he cried out his feeling of utter forsakenness by God. He may be giving us permission to do the same, to be honest in our times of despair, to be upfront about our feelings of feeling God's absence. What does it mean to believe that God is there for us if we cannot honestly confess or cry when we don't feel it is so? Should we pretend piety to cover honest uncertainty? The psalmist and Jesus himself knew God would be there for them, but they didn't mince their words when he seemed so far away.

So many things are happening these days to make people wonder if the future can be trusted, so many questions unanswered, so many hopes dashed. Hope, however, still hangs around, and we, the people of God, still hold it, or maybe it holds us. We are like Moses when he was leading a multitude of slaves to the Promised Land. They took many wrong turns, lost their faith time and again, almost turned back.

It took them 40 years to get there. In the face of his own doubt and the doubt of his fellow travelers, Moses kept saying one word. Remember.

Remember. Remember how God carried you just as a parent carries a child. Remember how he has seen you through our times of helplessness and threat. This Advent season is about hope for the future. We followers of Jesus stand alongside the children of Israel with plenty of reasons sometimes to feel God's absence, but with more reasons to believe his seeming withdrawal is temporary, and he will be there tomorrow. We stand alongside Jesus when he says in the passage from Luke that heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will certainly not pass away.

We stand alongside our resurrected Lord when he assures his disciples he will be with them every day until the end of this present age, even when it doesn't seem so. This Advent season, let hope capture you. Let Christ, the one who disarmed the principalities and powers, be your hope. When you come to the Christ child this Christmas Eve, know that in this manger lies the hope of the world.

Come prepared to give yourself to him again, perhaps in a new way. Indeed, you are part of the hope. Please join me in prayer. God of hope, open my eyes, my heart, my thinking, my life to the miracle of your actual presence in the world. Help me to own the miracle even though some days I don't feel it or see it. Especially on those days, give me the courage to risk living the hope, as did Jesus at great cost and at unlimited benefit to the world. I pray this in his name and for his glory.

Amen. The Salvation Army's mission, Doing the Most Good, means helping people with material and spiritual needs. You become a part of this mission every time you give to the Salvation Army. Visit salvationarmyusa.org to offer your support, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us at radioatuss.salvationarmy.org. Call 1-800-229-9965 or write us at P.O.

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