Audio Transcript:

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I have a problem. Every time I preach, the worship is so awesome. By the time I get up here, my voice is already shot. And so, thank you band and thank you Jesus for being worthy of such praise. If you're new, my name is Shane. I'm one of the pastors here at Mosaic, and we're so glad to have you with us. We mentioned this earlier, we would love to connect with you. We do that through the little connection card in your worship guide. You can fill that out and turn that in either at the little white box there at the back of the room or at the Welcome center. And we have a gift that we'd love to give to you to thank you for being with us this morning. As we begin, would you please join me in prayer over our sermon today?

Father, we thank you for Advent. We thank you for Christmas, for sending, for giving your son. And we thank you for putting this season into the rhythm of our year, this time where we can slow down and remember that Jesus Christ was born, that you didn't just make us and leave us. You actually wanted to be with us. You wanted a relationship with us. Even when we were unworthy, even when we were too sinful to be with you, you sent your only begotten son to come to be our manual, to be with us, to die for us, and to deliver us from the wrath that we deserve, to lead us back to you. And Father, we thank you for this unsurpassable gift of grace, from which true hope and love and joy and peace continually flow. And I pray that in this Advent season, we would receive those gifts with glad and grateful hearts. And that they would transform us from the inside out to be more like our Savior, more like your Son, Jesus Christ. It's in his name that we pray. Amen.

Well, Happy Advent. It is hard to believe that we're already five days into our advent calendars. And I say, "calendars," plural, because this year we have two advent calendars in our home. Owen and Nora each get their own. I made a decision that this year, that the sadder of the world gets around us, the harder our family is going to celebrate Christmas together. So, we're going all out this year. We got a real tree, which is not usual for us. We went out to the tree farm. We picked, we just bought this massive Fraser fir, brought it home. And the first thing I put it up, I was like, "It wasn't big enough." Next year, we're getting an even bigger one. It's awesome though. Our apartment smells like a pine forest.

We have a fireplace, our landlord doesn't let us use it. I know most of you can relate to that, but we decked it out with wreath and the garland, all of that. And here's just a little pro tip. Cedar incense bricks. You can get them in Amazon, instantly makes your home smells like a campfire. Instantly fills the air with Christmas spirit. I'm really excited for Christmas. We had an awesome Christmas Members' Party last night, joyful, jolly Christmas party last night. Thank you again to all the volunteer who put that together. Next Sunday, Mini Mosaic is going to be up here singing a special Christmas song. You're definitely not going to want to miss that. But as we begin this Advent season, I want to just take a moment right now to reflect.

And here's the question that I want you to reflect on as we begin. What is Christmas to you? Visualize it in your mind, in your heart. What is the ideal Christmas look like? What comes to mind when you picture the perfect Christmas? For me, growing up, Christmas was combing through the JCPenney catalog, looking for that perfect piece of plastic mechanized, electronic joy to satisfy my greedy little heart on Christmas day. Christmas was hiking through the fields of a tree farm to find that perfect tree, coming home all sticky and covered in sap. Christmas was sledding with my friends. It was snow days, snowballs, and snowmen and snow forts in the church parking lot. Christmas was playing outside until you were frozen and wet, and then coming inside for some hot chocolate and some Super Mario Bros. 3 in my cousin's Nintendo. Christmas was lights and decorations. It was food and fellowship. It was Sunday school pageants at church. It was candlelight caroling. It was opening presents at grandma's house. Christmas was great.

And for many of us, Christmas is it's just that, it's something that was. And now, it comes and it goes, and it's maybe just not quite the same. Why is that? When did we stop looking forward to Christmas and settle for just looking back? What changed? Here's my diagnosis. Christmas didn't change. We changed. We grow up, life knocks us around. We get calloused by pain, we calloused by our own sin. We get scared. We get scarred. We get proud, and our childlike hearts get hard. They get cynical. And at some point, we all start taking ourselves a bit too seriously.

And here's the problem. Jesus Christ is born, but it's hard to joyfully run into a smelly, dirty stable when you're taking yourself too seriously. It's hard to bow down before a baby lying in a manger when you think that you're all grown up. It's hard to kneel before a child, unless you have the simple, pure, humble faith of a child yourself. The other day, my son, Owen, he randomly asked me a question. He says, "Hey, dad. Is Christmas getting too commercialized?" I'm like, "What are you talking, you're 10 years old. Too commercialized? What have you been watching?" They've been watching Charlie Brown Christmas.

When I first became a Christian, I used to rant about the commercialization of Christmas. "Ah, it's not about the parties and the presents and decorations. Christmas, it's just about Jesus. Jesus is the reason for the season. You can't spell Christmas without Christ." Now, the problem with that is it's true. When you take that too far and in your attempt to avoid becoming Santa, you turn into Scrooge. You turn into the Grinch. You become the Christmas curmudgeon. And so, you got the Santa over here on one side, and you have the Scrooge over here on the other. The Santas are all about the celebration, but there's no Jesus, and it is kind of a sad and empty party. And the Scrooges are all about the idea of Jesus, but it's a Jesus with no joy. And it's kind of a sad and empty party as well. They're both missing the point. It's like an awkward middle school dance. You got one side over here, one side here. How do you get these two parties to get over themselves and meet in the middle so that we can all start having a good time?

The answer is Jesus, but it's the real Jesus. Because, the Scrooges are right. Christmas is all about Jesus, but because it's all about Jesus, it's all about joy. It should be a season of great joy. So, sing and decorate and throw parties and give gifts and have fun. Luke 2:9, "The angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shown around them, and they were filled with great fear. And the angel said to them, 'Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ The Lord.'"

Christmas should be fun. Christmas should be a party. It is good news of great joys so we should make at a party, because let's face it, most of life is not a party. Most of life is pain. And Christmas isn't about sticking our heads in the clouds and pretending that the pain isn't real. It is about joyfully bowing our heads to the ground before the manger of our maker, because here lies the Christ, the one who was born to make everything better. And so, this Christmas, this is what I'm saying. If you're feeling a bit Scrooge-ish, and I'm preaching on myself here because I'm not the most naturally happy joyful person. Christmas is an invitation to be a kid again. Not to be childish, but to be childlike in a humble faith. If you're having a hard time with Christmas, I invite you to be born again, and then come with that childlike faith, come with wonder and adoration before the manger of the newborn king. What I'm saying is the life of the party is here. Hope has been born, and we have a reason to celebrate during this season.

If you have your Bible, open up to 1 Peter chapter one. We're going to be walking through verse three through 12. We're going to be focusing on God's gift of hope that was given on Christmas day. And I want to talk about the foundation of our hope. I want to talk about the substance of our hope. And then, finally, I want to talk about the power of our hope, as our three points for our sermon today.

This is 1 Peter chapter one, beginning in verse three. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls."

"Concerning the salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ in the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by of the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look." This is the reading of God's holy word for us this morning. Point number one is the foundation of our hope. "What a time to be alive." We've heard that phrase lot over the last couple of years, not always in the most positive sense. But the point of these last four verses, I'm not going to spend a ton of time in these last four verses, we're going to spend most of our time in the beginning of the passage, but you get the point in these last couple of verses, that it is an amazing time for us to be alive.

We live at a privileged point in human history, that for thousands of years, God's people we're longing, we're waiting in anticipation for the Messiah to be born. They were eagerly looking forward into this mystery, wondering how it was that God was going to put all of these pieces of his plan for salvation together. And we now live at a place where we don't have to look for that anymore. We have the privilege of looking back. We're not hoping for hope to be revealed. We can build on the hope that has already come through the gospel of Jesus Christ. And we're standing on this foundation. Peter says, "Even the angels long to see these things." The hope has come, the foundation has been laid and nothing can destroy that.

And so, what is the foundation of our hope Peter tells us in verse three? It says, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." And notice that there are three things there that Peter mentions that we did not do and that we cannot change. And this is why we know that this foundation is firm. First of all, he tells us that the Father has caused us to be born again, that we didn't give birth to ourselves, that the Holy Spirit sovereignly regenerated our hearts and made us new creations in Christ. We didn't do that. We can't undo that.

Second, he says the Father has caused us to be born again according to, what? According to our great merit? No, according to his mercy, that this is rooted in the eternal, unchanging character of God, the Father. And then, finally, he says the Father causes to be born again according to his mercy through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that is surely as Christ is alive, our hope lives. We're standing on a foundation of his finished work and atonement. The basis of the gospel is our hope. We know that, but we need to start there and we need to stay there because this is the hope that our hearts were built for.

Until we rest on this foundation, our hearts are always going to be fearful. They're always going to be anxious. They're always going to be restless until we rest on this foundation. And so, the question I want to ask you right now is are you anxious? Are you an anxious person? A better question is how anxious of a person are you? Because, we all have fears. We all have cares and anxieties. And the problem is most of us spend way too much time worrying about the little things, because we put way too much hope in the little things. When I was in college, I struggled with anxiety in a pretty intense way. There were times I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I'd be up all night worrying about things. And it was a constant struggle for me.

I started college in the year 2000 to study graphic design. At the time, the whole world was changing. The internet was coming to be this thing that we know it today, was something that I didn't even grow up with at the time. And the design world, there was this shift taking place where the workforce was shifting from designing things by hand on paper, to doing all of these things on computers. And so, there was this huge need for new people to learn the skill and rise up and enter this workforce. And so, I was told this is a great career to go into. And so, I started off college, and then by the four years later, when I graduated, apparently those needs had been met because there were no jobs left. And I was one of a very few people in my graduating class that actually managed to have a design job lined up after graduation.

And so, the week after graduation, started this great job at a small ad agency, moved to a new city. I got my own apartment, started paying my own bills for the first time. Kelly and I, we were engaged at the time, had started going back to church together. Things were going great in a lot of ways, but I still struggled with a lot of anxiety and something still hadn't clicked with the gospel in my mind. And forward about six months later, I'm in my new career. Things are going well. And one day, I come into work and my boss calls me into her office and closes the door. I'm like, "Ugh, this is not good." And she tells me that our agency had just lost their biggest client, which made up the majority of our work. And that because of this, the last three people who had been hired on staff were going to be fired. We're going to be laid off, and that included me.

And now, looking back, this seems really silly, but I started freaking out. I was devastated. I was crushed. I felt humiliated. The whole world was crashing down, and I started catastrophizing everything. "I'm never going to find another job. Kelly's going to call off the wedding. I'm going to run out of money. I'm going to lose my apartment. I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life homeless and living in a gutter." That was what I was thinking. Maybe not reasonable, but those were the real thoughts that were going through my mind that day. And I remember this so vividly. That night, I was walking through my living room, and all of a sudden, I just fall to my knees and I just started crying.

And I cried out to God and something clicked, because I didn't cry out to God and ask him to give me my job back. I didn't cry out to God and ask him to change my circumstances. For some reason, I cried out to God and I just said, "I don't care. I don't care if I lose my job. I don't care if I lose my apartment. I don't care if I lose everything. I just don't want to lose you. I need you, so don't leave me." Where did that come from? I'd never had that thought before. For the first time in my life, I wanted God for God. I truly saw my sinfulness and my need for a savior. And all of a sudden, everything clicked. I confessed. I repented of my sin, of my pride, of all of the ways that I had been trying to rule my own life.

And I don't know how to describe this, but there on the floor of my living room, it was like something reached down and just pulled me. I felt physically this weight of anxiety lifted off of my back. And I stood up. I felt life, and I felt this joy. I felt peace that I had never experienced in my life. I had so many misplaced hopes, and the basis for those hopes had always been myself. And you can only live that way for so long before that will crush you. I needed to learn that losing my job was not my biggest problem, money wasn't my biggest problem. None of that, didn't matter. My biggest problem was me. My biggest problem was my sin. My biggest problem was my soul hadn't been reconciled to God, and I'd been trying to build my life with no foundation, a foundation of sand.

I opened my Bible that night and I read through the Sermon on the Mount. You get to Matthew 6:31 and Jesus tells his disciples, he's like, "Therefore, don't be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all of these things will be added to you." We're going to talk about the substance of our hope as Christians, but we can't talk about that until we talk about the foundation of our hope, because hope without a foundation is just wishful thinking. We need something real. What I'm saying is don't assume, as I had done for so many years, that you're okay just because you grew up going to church, or because mom and dad are a Christian.

Have you personally experienced Christ for yourself? Do you long for his kingdom and his righteousness? Do you hunger for his word? Are there signs that you indeed are born again, a new creation that the Spirit is working, bearing fruit in your life? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. In other words, do you bear the family resemblance? Are you growing to look more like your heavenly Father, more like Christ, your brother? If so, rejoice, because you have been born again, born again to a living hope, to an unshakable foundation. And once you have that foundation, now we can begin talking about the substance of that hope. Because, what we see is that with this new birth comes a new Father, a new family. And in this new family, you have a new inheritance.

This is point number two, the substance of our hope. This is what Peter talks about next. And going back to verse three, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is in imperishable, undefiled, unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God's power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time."

There are these two really dangerous apps that you can get on your phone. One of them is called Red Tree, and one of them is called Zillow. Now, I've never done this, I'm sure you've never done this, but we've heard about people who have done this. They get sucked into these apps. Begin looking around like, "Yeah, why not? Why shouldn't I increase the filter? Let's see what can you get for half a million dollars, a million dollars, $2 million, $4 million, $8 million." You start looking at all these big, beautiful mansions in Brookline. And then, you see the price of a studio apartment, and you delete the app and cry yourself to sleep.

Wouldn't it be nice to find out that you have a rich uncle and he died... And that part's sad, but you didn't know him. And before he died, he wrote you into his will. And he left you a mansion in Brookline, or even just a house with a yard and a washing machine that doesn't take quarters. I'd be happy with that. The bad news is you don't have a rich uncle, or maybe you do. I don't. The good news is you have a generous Father and you have an inheritance that is so much better. Imperishable, undefiled, unfading. It's guarded, it's secure. It's kept in heaven like a treasure in a safe, ready to be given, ready to be received at that last day at the revelation of Jesus Christ. The Apostle John in the book of Revelation, he has a vision that kind of helps us just grasp a little bit of what this inheritance will be like.

Revelation 21, beginning in verse one, he says, "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.' And he who was seated on the throne said, 'Behold, I am making all things new.' He said, 'Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.'"

"And he said to me, 'It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. And to the thirsty I will give from the spring of water of life without payment. To the one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.'" And he goes on to describe the completeness of this city, the perfection of this city in verse 22. He says that, "And I saw no temple in this city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no sun or moon to shine on it for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day and there will be no night there."

"They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life." If you've been born again, and your name has been written in that book since before the foundation of the world, and nothing can erase it. Now, imagine an eternity where everything is as it ought to be, where heaven and earth become one, where the battle has been won, and where those who conquer will dwell with their God and see their Savior face to face.

The night that Christ was born, the shepherds ran to see the face of their Savior, gentle and lowly swaddled in a manger. The day that Christ returns, we will rise to see the face of our Savior, beaming with power and glory and seated on his throne. This is our inheritance. This is our hope. This is important. Because we are hope-fueled creatures, without hope, we can't survive. But with the right hope, we can do almost anything. Hope gets us out of bed. Hope sends us on our way. Hope keeps us pushing forward until we reach our destination. When you combine the right foundation of hope with the right substance of hope, you get the unstoppable power of hope, power to persevere, power to do the hard things that we are called to do as we ultimately wait for the fruition of our hope to come. And this is point three, the power of hope.

Peter continues in verse six, says, "In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire, may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ." Theologically, the basis of our hope is our justification. The substance of our hope is the glorification. That's the easy part. Right now, we're in the hard part in between. Justification, glorification, for us, those come easy. The hard part is our sanctification, and this is why we need a hope that gives us power.

Because, the question that we're tempted to ask in the hard part is does this cost really outweigh the benefit? Is this worth it? And obviously, we know in our minds that it is worth the pain. But when you're in pain, it's easy for your heart to forget. And you need that reminder. And so, think of it like this. Justification is like conception. You find out you're pregnant, everyone's excited, there's joy. There's celebration. Glorification is like birth. You're holding that little bundle of joy in your arms. Sanctification, it's like all the stuff in between. It's the pregnancy, there's groaning, there's suffering, there's discomfort. It's the morning sickness, the mood swings, the contractions, the pains of labor. And it's not the most fun, but you get through it. And at times, you're even able to make it fun. Why? Because, you know that the pain is temporary and you know the joy that is coming.

Peter puts it more like this. Justification is like our cradle. We're newborn babies, born again. We didn't give birth to ourselves. We're just happy to be here. Glorification is like our inheritance. We didn't pay for it, we didn't build it, but our Father has left us this epic mansion. And then, Peter switches metaphors a little bit. Sanctification, it's not just like the demo and the renovation. The metaphor that he uses, he describes it as a crucible, where you're thrown into the fire, where everything that is unholy needs to be burned away until all that is left is pure gold. When you think about suffering like this, this completely changes the way and you think about the trials of this life, that our suffering is not random. It's not meaningless. It's doing something. It can produce value. It can result in things that impact our eternity, that we are going to be rewarded with what we do with it.

Peter says that the tested genuineness of our faith will, what? It'll be found to result in praise and glory and honor in the revelation of Jesus Christ. And so, have you ever thought about suffering as stewardship? We all know that if God gives us wealth, if God gives us blessing, if God gives us talents, that we should not let those talents go to waste. What if God gives you suffering? Would you let that go to waste? When faced with suffering, we have a choice. We can be faithless and grow bitter and let those flames burn us up until there's nothing left. And that's no advantage to us. It's no advantage to anyone else. Or, we can face those flames with faith. Not to grow bitter, but to get better, to let them refine us. And to do so, knowing that we will receive the praise of our King and we will hear those words, "Well done, my good and faithful servant. Come, enter into the joy of your master."

This is why James, the brother of Jesus, he begins his letter, James 1:2, he says, "Count it all joy, my brothers, when..." What? "When you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." Romans 5:1 says, "Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 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. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who's been given to us."

Have you ever thought about suffering as an investment, with a return both in the long term and in the short term as well? Like, we know we'll be rewarded in the future, but there's something to be gained here right now. James talks about steadfastness. Paul talks about endurance. What is endurance? I'm not a runner. I don't run. Fun run, oxymoron, I don't get it. But, I understand some of you do. And we used to have a woman in our community group who loved to run. She was actually a professional runner. If I were to run with her, I would not have a very good time. I would be keeled over, passed out, gasping for air. She would just be getting warmed up. And in some sick twisted way, she'd be having fun. Miles in, and she'd still be having a good time, not winded, enjoying her run. Why is that? Well, she had endurance. She had run so much in the past that she had grown her capacity to run faster and farther in the present.

The question is how do we do this spiritually? And there's two things that you need to do to grow in this kind of endurance spiritually. You need to run, and you need to remember. First of all, you have to run. There's no way around it. You have to go through suffering. And as you go through suffering, you need to remember, to remember God's faithfulness to you. In your walk with Christ, you are going to be faced with trials that seem impossible to endure. And sometimes, they're going to come to you through crisis. Sometimes, they're going to come to you through calling.

Crisis is the unexpected. Something happens, your whole world gets flipped upside down. Calling is God's going to ask you to do something that from your perspective seems terrifyingly impossible. And so, here's a little life hack for when you're faced with these trials. You need to run, you need to remember. In order to remember, you need to start writing things down. First of all, you need to write down every time that God has been faithful to you during trials in your past. Our community group had an opportunity to do this this week. And everything inside me wants to share this story, I'm not going to because the people who went through it are going to do a much better job with some day. But, all I want to say is we began a trial last week that ended in a testimony by the end of the week. And that in between, God had done a miracle and showed us again his faithfulness. I'm going to write that down. I'm going to remember.

Remember the day that I lost my job? That was a crisis. But, you know what? I think I got saved that day. And following that day, things didn't get better right away. It took three months of constant job searching before I even got a response. Since I had just gotten saved, I would spend my mornings, the first part of my day, finding any job that I could and applying for it. And when I ran out of that, I would spend the rest of my day reading my Bible for hours at a time. I'd never read the Bible before. This was new to me. By the way, there are three really important pieces of evidence that you need to look for that will tell you if you have truly been born again.

First of all, you're going to love Jesus in a real way. And that's going to click for you what that means. Second, you're going to love the church. You're going to stop making excuses for why you don't want to go to church, and you start looking for opportunities to go to church, to serve, to worship, to gather with the body of Christ. And then, three, you're going to get hungry for the word of God. You're going to want to just start devouring scripture. And that's where I was at this time.

This is a true story, by the way. Three months go by, I'm running out of money. My bank account is about to hit zero as I'm writing my last rent check. The week that I was writing that check, I finished reading the Bible cover to cover for the first time. And I'm not kidding, that week, for the first time in three months, I got three calls and I got two job offers. And by the next week, I'd started working a new job.

God was making it obvious that my biggest need was not my job, that my biggest need was him. But, also, that he orchestrated this entire thing from the beginning. It didn't feel good, but he was using it for my good. And looking back now, I wouldn't trade it for the world, but what I needed to learn is that if I'm going to follow him, I need to actually trust him. And so, I wrote that down, I remember that, so that the next time when you're tempted to freak out about something, you count your blessings. You remember, "God loves me, that he was faithful to me here and here and here in the past, and he'll be faithful again." And so, first of all, write down every time that God has been to you through trials in your past. Secondly, write down any evidence of God's providence, of God's present activity in your life right now.

I told you about a crisis, I want to talk to you about a calling. In 2012, God called my family to move to Boston to join the mission at Mosaic, and we were so excited. It was the honeymoon phase. We were pumped. We're ready to move to this big city and be part of this amazing thing that God was doing at Mosaic. And that excitement lasted right up until the day that we started looking at real estate in Boston. In the Midwest, we had a four-bedroom house, two-car garage, beautiful yard, privacy hedge. We had a deck with a hot tub right outside of our bedroom, a grill. And we had an escrow, mortgage taxes, insurance, thousand dollars a month.

"All right, Zillow, let's see, Boston, Massachusetts, thousand dollars a month. That gets us almost the parking spot in Austin. Oh, it's going to be like that." We started freaking out. "Oh, I don't know, maybe God's not calling us to Boston." What did we do? I made a list. I started writing things down. And I've been thinking about this because after Mosaic's 10th birthday party a few weeks ago, I went back and I found that list. It's still on the notepad on my laptop. I'm not going to read it all for you, but I want to give you a few examples of things that made the list.

The first one is kind of silly. We started researching Boston. We want to learn everything about the city, and we started researching the different churches in Boston because we want to know what is the spiritual landscape going on. We came across this church called City on a Hill. You're probably familiar with it. We know them now and we're friends with them, but I had never heard of them before. Seemed like a good church. We're looking at their website, and on the homepage of their website is a picture of my deck. When we moved into the house, I painstakingly, I sanded it down. I stained it. And then, we put these nice little lights up all around the deck, and Kelly took a picture of it and posted it on Splash. And they had found it and they'd used it with their website. I was like, "Huh, that's weird."

Secondly, we knew that if we were going to move here, that Kelly was going to have to work, and we kind of assumed she would have to find a new job. And so, she scheduled a meeting with her boss to let her know like, "Hey, we're going to be moving and I'm going to have to step down for my job." And he asked her in that meeting to not only keep her job and work remotely, but in the process, she was offered a promotion. And he said, "If you work an extra hour a day when you know would be commuting, you can stay on a hundred percent full time and only work four days a week." And so, those first couple years, we were able to stagger our days off and only pay for three days of childcare. And if you know, you know. That's a big deal, that saved us a ton of money. And so, I'm like, "Oh, that it was encouraging. I'm going to write that down."

I remember the day called Pastor Jan to tell him we are in, we're moving to Boston, it was actually the day before the Boston Marathon bombing. The next day was a little bit like, "Oh man, what did I get myself into here?" But, I called Pastor Jan. We talked on the phone. And after we were done, I called Kelly and I let her know, "Hey, I talked to Jan. I let him know we're going." We hung up the phone, and Kelly's iPod randomly shuffled to the song called The City is Yours. So, we say we're going to take this city because God told us we're going to take this city. But, that's weird. Was that a coincidence, or was providence? "I'm going to write that down." And then, the biggest one was Mosaic couldn't afford to pay us for the first year. That one actually was not a great sign, but by God's grace, we were able to sell our house and raise all the money that we needed for that first year of ministry here in the city. And we did it all in six weeks.

And despite never having any experience doing any kind of fundraising before, there were all these signs that, yeah, God was with us and we needed to write them down. And some of them were big and some of them were small, but we put them in a list so that when those fears and those doubts crept in, because it was like a nine-month period of time, and there are so many times we were doubting. "Are we doing the right thing?" We'd pull that list out, we would read it, and we would remind ourselves. "Oh, that's right. God was faithful here and here and here. And we've seen providence here and here. Why would we start to doubt him now?"

Psalm 9:1 says, "I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds." The power of hope for our crisis, for our calling, we're recounting God's faithfulness in the past, and we're believing his promises for the future so that we can press on and persevere through our trials right now. Romans chapter eight, we all probably know and love this passage, but we have to go there because it's just so beautiful. It's so powerful. Romans 8:28, "And we know that for those who love God all things are working together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

It says good is done. "What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?" It doesn't mean that things are always going to turn out the way that we want them to in this life. It means we can march forward with faith, knowing that no matter what happens, God is in control, that he loves us. He's working all things together for our good. Peter concludes in verses eight and nine. "Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not now see Him, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls."

At the start, I mentioned that we have the benefit of looking back at the gospel, of seeing the things that even the angels long to see, but we don't see everything. There's still a lot that we don't see. We don't see Christ right now, not face to face. We're not always going to see the purpose in all of our pain. We're not going to get answers to all of our questions, but we've seen the love of Christ and we know the power of his resurrection, and therefore, we can rejoice and we can have hope. Hebrews 11:1 says, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

Awhile back, Kelly and I started reading, we read through The Hobbit with our son, Owen, and a few weeks ago, we let him watch the movies for the first time. Since then, we've kind of been slowly working our way through the Lord of the Rings series with him. And there this quote early on in the first book. Frodo, he's lamenting the crisis in the calling that has been thrust upon him. That the whole world is on the brink of darkness and doom, and the weight, the hopes of the world is kind of resting on their shoulders. And he says to Gandalf, "I wish it need not have happened in my time." "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to these such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what we're going to do with the time that has been given to us."

And my prayer for you, my prayer for us, as a church, is not that we would never see such times, but that when we do, we would suffer well, that we would never suffer in vain. I pray that is when we do suffer, that our suffering would produce endurance, that our endurance would grow our character, that this character would result in hope, and that this hope would fuel us to change our lives, to change the city, to change the world to the glory of Jesus Christ. At the first Advent, Mary suffered well. Through the pains of labor, she gave birth to the son of God. Jesus suffered well through the pains of crucifixion, gave new birth to the sons of men. And may we suffer well the labors of our life and calling so that at that second Advent, when Christ returns, the tested genuineness of our faith may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ. So that in this time in between, the world would see and know and experience for themselves the reason for the hope that is alive in us.

We are celebrating communion today. And like Advent, communion is a time where we look back and we look forward. We look back to the cross of Christ. We remember his sacrifice. We remember the atonement that was made, but in 1 Corinthians, Paul tells us that it's also a time where we look forward and where we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes again. The way that we celebrate communion, hopefully, you're able to grab one of these on the way in. If not, there's some in the back, or better yet, you can just raise your hand and one of the ushers will bring one to you. The bread inside represents the body of Christ that was broken for us. The cup represents his blood that was poured out for us. If you're here today and you're not a Christian, or if you are a Christian and you're walking in unrepentant sin, we would ask you to refrain from this part of the service. It's not going to do anything for you. It's not magical. Scripture tells us that we need to examine ourselves to partake in a worthy manner. But, if you...