God's Gift Of Hope

In two more days it will be the New Year 2008. Are you ready? How do you feel about the New Year? Are you excited about it? Are you filled with hope? Or are you worried about what it may bring? Maybe the New Year fills you with despair. It doesn't have to be that way. God wants you to have hope for the New Year, hope for the rest of your life. He wants to give you dreams that will come true and bring life and joy.

In the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" we find out that a guy named George Bailey is in trouble, he's lost hope. Discouragement, the lack of hope, can be worse than physical illness. Life without hope is no life at all. NLT Proverbs 13:12 Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true, there is life and joy. God wants you to have hope for 2008. So today my message is entitled "God's Gift Of Hope For You." We're going to talk about how you can approach the New Year with hope and optimism.

However, we have to be careful what we mean when we use the word hope. Some common uses of the word hope are inconsistent with what the Bible means by hope. A common use of the word hope, especially at this time of year, is in New Year's resolutions. This use we might call ambitious dreams. For example, someone might say, "I hope to lose 25 pounds this year." Facts are that only 5% of people who make a New Year's resolution to lose weight actually do it and keep it off. You can have an ambitious dream about your career, "I hope to be promoted in 2008," but who knows what is going to happen to your company in the coming year.

For most people, hoping is something they do, but the Bible talks about hope as something that you have. Hope that is centered on the person of Jesus Christ. NLT Matthew 12:21 And His name [Jesus] will be the hope of all the world. Hope for the believer is the confident expectation that God is willing and able to fulfill His promises to you. Hope for the believer is a sure thing because it is based on God's Word. Jesus brings hope to every person to the whole world.

Hope is a gift from God, a gift that you can receive. NLT Romans 15:13 So I pray that God, who gives you hope, will keep you happy and full of peace as you believe in him. May you overflow with hope through the power of the Holy Spirit. It takes the power of the Holy Spirit to cut through despair, hopelessness and thoughts of giving up. The result of God's gift of hope is happiness and peace in your life. So how can you have hope in 2008? In this message, I'm going to look at three steps to hope in the New Year.

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