Posted: 12/19/03
THIS CHRISTMAS:
Receive the gift of hope this season
By BO Baker
After another year of meeting life's complications, its barrage of hazards and hurts played out upon the grand world stage, I've concluded once more that our deepest and most urgent need is for hope–Christian hope.
This is the hope that does not come grandstanding, gift-wrapped or party-dressed. Not a kind of shallow masquerade of make-believe bequest to dreamers only, or even hope for the millions who would not know a Bible from the Far-mer's Almanac. But a hope deliberately resting upon the integrity, the absolute dependability of the God who spoke the galaxies into existence, who breathed life into the man he made and, and “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31).
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| BO Baker |
I contend for a hope resident and resilient in the person of Jesus Christ, not a hope provided by practitioners of unkept promises, nor for the warden of some “life island” adrift in space, dark with questions seemingly unanswerable.
Rather, the hope that shepherds found lying in a manger of a lean-to in the tiny town of Bethlehem over 1,900 years ago. They knelt, stunned in wonder, at the coming of Mary's babe. They arose transformed, never to be the same again.
Dear God, it is the hope we need so desperately this Christmastime–hope that still believes in the God of divine intervention in spite of mockery, malaise and malcontent. How we need a hope that does not segregate or pretend to bleed in bodies tendered to look the part of suffering without the slightest reminance of pain, or for that matter, the giving of a single drop of blood!
It's time, and far past, to ring the bell of hope again–the Christian hope. It's time to ring it out for all to hear–every Cross-bought one of us, wherever he or she may be. It's time to ring it loudly enough for the weeping to hear, for the lost to find their way to the land of grace and the weary to breathe new winds of caring love.
Yes, we all need to be reminded that there's hope enough left in the heart of God for every human being to find solace and inspiration, to look up and live victoriously again, to know that “he who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us” (Ephesians 3:20).
What a gift to receive at Christmas, the gift of hope! Hope by the heartful!
BO Baker, a longtime Texas Baptist pastor and evangelist, has written a Christmas reflection for the Baptist Standard for 28 consecutive years
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