The Hope That Holds Us!

 There’s a story about a man who arrived at a little league baseball game one afternoon. He asked   a boy in the dugout what the score was. The boy responded, "They are beating us 18 to 0.” The spectator said, Boy, aren’t you discouraged?” The boy replied, "Discouraged? Why would I be discouraged? We haven't even gotten up to bat yet!” Hope always lives in the heart of a little leaguer even when things look bad! But it’s not just little leaguers that have undying hope. Christians literally have an undying hope! The apostle Peter described this hope at 1 Peter 1:3 as a “living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” Two thousand years ago, the Gospel tells us, sinful people crucified Jesus until He was dead as a doorknob. They buried Him and used every    political, military, and religious means humanly possible to make sure He stayed dead and in the grave (Matt.28:62-66). But God raised Him from the dead (Acts 2:23-24, 32). But when some women showed to visit His tomb Sunday morning after His crucifixion the Friday before, they were told by an angel of the Lord, “He is not here; for He is risen” (Matt.28:6a). They were instructed, “Go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead” (Matt.28:7a). Verse 8 goes on to tell us these women “ran to bring His disciples word.” Mark’s account of the Gospel records that when they told the apostles, at first “...they did not believe” (Mark 16:11b). But it was true! And once they became convinced, they raced out to tell a hopelessly lost world that there is hope after all – “the Lord Jesus    Christ our hope” (1 Timothy 1:1b)! And His disciples have been holding on to and held by and holding out that blessed and undying hope for some two thousand years, awaiting Jesus' second coming (Titus 2:13).

 Hope – that powerful Bible word at the center of the Christian faith. Hope – that deep-down-inside fire that the devil's water can never, ever put out. Hope – that light that shines even during the darkest nights of our lives. An inspired man, referring to God's promises, declares at Hebrews 6:18a that, "it is impossible for God to lie.” He goes on to encourage readers to “lay hold of the hope set before us” (v 18b) and hurries on to add in verse 19, “This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure & steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil.” The Christian hope is a heavy-weight thing. The Hebrews writer says, in effect, that hope is what keeps our souls anchored in the next world even as we struggle with sin and setbacks and sail through a sometimes-stormy-sea of heartbreaks and heartaches in this one! Hope – why does it have such a hold on Christians? Words from Titus 1:2 are a big part of the reason. There, as he began a short letter to his friend Titus who was preaching on the Mediterranean island of Crete, the apostle Paul wrote that Christians are “in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began.” Read Titus 1:10-16 and you might think things looked hopeless. The gospel appeared to be behind 18 to nothing! But the apostle Paul believed in a power-packed Gospel chock-full of hope! Hope that could change not only people’s lives but change where they spend eternity! Jesus Christ is the one hope we all have for forgiveness of sins and getting out of an eventual grave alive (Ephesians 4:4). Face it friend, there is no other hope. Why would you let go of the one hope you have in a world that offers no hope at all? If you hold on to that hope, it will hold on to you!

    By: Dan Gulley, Smithville TN  

The Truth About Lying!

 J. Michael Shannon tells about three men discussing the biggest liars they had ever heard. One said, “I know a boy who lied so often he had to get somebody else to call his dog.” The second man complained, “That’s nothing. I knew a man who lied about his golf score so often that one day he made a hole in one and wrote down ‘0’ (zero) on his scorecard.” The third man chimed in, “My preacher said last Sunday that our crowd was somewhere between four and five-hundred. I told him I only counted 125. He insisted, ‘Well, that’s between four and five hundred.’ ” These funny stories illustrate a sad truth – lying is common and acceptable. Groucho Marx once said, “There is one way to find out if a man is honest. Ask him. If he says yes, you know he is crooked.” David said in Psalm 116:11, “I said in my haste, all men are liars.” David admits he was hasty in saying that, and I don’t want to overstate the case. Still, there’s a lot of lying going on. Advertisers, politicians, even preachers sometimes prevaricate (a fancy way to say fabricate, fib,lie)! It is easy to say someone looks nice when they don’t, or tell the preacher you “enjoyed” the sermon when you slept half way through it! Or tell your host the grilled steak was great when it was tough as shoe leather! In "The Day America Told the Truth" (published 1991) author James Patterson, then CEO of J. Walter Patterson (an ad’ agency in New York) related that 91% of those surveyed lied routinely about matters they considered trivial; 36% lied about more important matters; 86% lied regularly to parents, 75% to friends, 73% to siblings, and 69% to spouses. Girls lie to boyfriends and boys lie to girlfriends. Husbands lie to wives and wives to husbands. People lie to the IRS, their employers, and their insurance companies. Witnesses lie to courts, students lie to teachers, and people lie to preachers. All indications are many people have a proclivity to prevaricate! Put more simply, there’s a whole lot of lying going on! And that’s the truth!

Abraham Lincoln famously said: “It is true that you can fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” What can you say about people who are consistently deceitful and dishonest and who make lying a way of life? All you can honestly say is they are liars. Some people lie to be polite, others out of carelessness or to avoid conflict, and some lie out of malice, seeking to create or add to conflict. Some people lie out of habit. The apostle Paul must have been referring to such liars (on the Mediterranean island of Crete) in Titus 1:12 when he wrote, “One of them, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.” This passage and the people it describes brings to mind the businessman who complained about a partner: “He’s a real phony – I wouldn’t believe him if he said he was lying.” If  we engage in deceit and lying, we are very unlike the God who cannot lie (Titus 1:2) and for whom it is impossible to lie (Hebrews 6:18). “The truth is in Jesus” (Ephesians 4:21b) and Jesus’ gospel is “the word of truth” (Ephesians 1:13). Christians are told to“ put away lying ... Let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another” (Ephesians 5:25). There will be no liars in heaven (Revelation 21:8). There ought not to be any in the church of Christ here on earth. To be like Jesus, Christians simply will not lie to one another (Colossians 3:9). That’s the truth about lying. 

By: Dan Gulley, Smithville TN