Is There Hope This Christmas Season?

There’s a lot of turmoil and pain in this world right now. Here we are in another Christmas season. My 67^th Christmas season, and a season I definitely enjoy. Part of that is due to nostalgia, and part of that is due to the recognition and celebration of my savior’s birth. The latter was not a real part of my Christmas joy until Jesus became a reality to me during my college years. Christmas 1980 was very different than the previous 21 Christmas’ I enjoyed for the simple fact that I had a new Hope in my life. Prior to that my only real hope was that I was good enough to play the sport I loved professionally. It’s a hope I nearly achieved, but in the end failed to do. What I soon began to realize was that much of the hope that had sustained me for 21 years, was a false hope, or at least a very flimsy one. My hope was based not only on my abilities, but it was based on other people’s reaction and acceptance of my abilities. I wasn’t completely in control of what I had placed my hope in, and it shaped how I viewed myself. When my hope of playing my sport professionally crashed to the ground, it left an emptiness in the pit of my stomach. The sport I loved to play became for me an albatross of mental anguish, that what gave me hope, was now gone. My identity, which I placed in my abilities, had to be re-shaped. I still had the competitive nature, and the desire for others to love me for what I can do for them, but the hope of the fame had disappeared. Who am I now? Hope became sort of a bane to my existence. Was hope even something that matters? What in life can give me real hope? Why is my new faith so powerless to give me what I desire the most? I was left empty, looking for a new hope, one that won’t leave me hopeless in times of despair. Is such a hope even available to me, or to anyone for that matter? Since humanity doesn’t live well without hope in their lives, I found myself trying to reconstruct myself into something else that give me hope, especially with my newfound faith in Jesus Christ. I knew Christ was supposed to bring hope and even understood that His birth was “Good News of great joy that will be for all people” and going to bring “peace among those with whom He was well pleased (Luke 2:10, 14). This is ‘hopeful,’ but why wasn’t it bringing me the hope and joy it promised? The very hope I was hoping for through fame and fortune in the sport I loved.

     What I began to learn was the very thing I loved was what shaped me, and my identity. I loved the idea of being a pro athlete, and it had shaped everything about me, including my identity. It unfortunately shaped how I saw God, as a savior, but not as one that really cared about me, because if He did, He’d give me what I wanted most. This started a search for real hope and joy that I’m still on today. Because it’s a journey I believe we are all on. Turning our loves around is not an easy project. We can sing ‘we love God,’ but the question is do we? Is God’s love what shapes us and our identity? Is our hope and joy really found in a relationship with the creator of the universe? One Puritan writer, Henry Scougal once wrote that the “The worth and excellency of a soul is to be measured by the object of its love.”[1] In translation, you become what you love. Our problem according to C.S. Lewis isn’t that we are pursuing joy and happiness, but that we are “Too easily pleased.” We settle for less, because we are unaware of the beauty and glory of God’s love, which ultimately produces the joy and hope we are after. My professor, Dr. Gregory Ganssle wrote similarly about Augustine,

“Augustine wrote that when it comes to our moral and spiritual well-being, what we want is actually more important than what we believe: “For when there is a question as to whether a man is good, one does not ask what he believes, or what he hopes, but what he loves.”  He articulates this further: “So that it seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love. “A good person loves the right things and also loves them in the right order. The root of moral and spiritual failure, Augustine thought, is that our loves are disordered. He would say that our moral failures are not a result of our loving bad things. Rather, we love good things, but we love the less important things more than the most important things.”[2]

Re-ordering our loves isn’t an easy task. This is a shaping and a search that takes time and needs to be part of our discipleship and part of our desire to please the one that loved us enough to suffer on the cross to secure that relationship we now have with the Father.  It’s a truth that is life altering, but is also at times illusory, especially during the stresses and disappointments life can bring on. Ironically it is in those disappointments that we realize what our hope is actually in, because the hope and joy that God provides in Christ, is an antidote to life’s disappointments, and as a matter of fact, according to the Apostle Paul, our struggles shape and define our understanding of the hope we seek. In Romans 5: 2-6, we get an incredible look into the true hope we have in Christ, even during our pain. Paul writes,

“2 Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. “

While I’m not extremely excited about ‘suffering,’ it is a reality in this life, and one that scripture consistently reminds us of, but what I do see in these words of Paul, is that our Hope is not contingent on me controlling my circumstances, and in truth, is not connected to my circumstances at all. It is contingent on the faith into His grace in which we stand.” This hope doesn’t put us to shame, because it’s a hope in the midst of our shame. It’s a hope that we can’t lose because we aren’t ‘good’ enough, or attractive enough, or wealthy enough, or from the right tribe, country or ethnicity. It is the hope of mankind, and the reason Jesus was born 2000 years ago. This is why Christmas is different for me than it was for my first 21 Christmases. It represents an eternal hope, but even better, a new love that I’m still gaining a hold of and will entirely when I see Him face to face. Changing our loves, or at least re-ordering them, is a lifelong project, and one I “Hope” is a project you can enjoy this Christmas Season!! Many blessings to you and have a very Merry CHRISTmas!