Proclaiming Hope Through Sand Castles

Let me start by saying that Carolyn often greatly encourages me regarding my preaching. She did that again last Sunday. She was very supportive about my sermon. However, she did think that I undersold our little one week Mexico vacation. If you were there, you’ll remember that in the intro, I shared a number of “low lights” about our resort. Carolyn would agree with most of what I said, but she thought I should have been a lot more balanced. For example, I said that the taco bar at the resort provided a barely edible lunch. What I should have said is that on five of the days, the taco bar was fine, and it was only on two of the days that the food was borderline inedible. My bad. I should have been more fair. So let me emphasize again that we had an awesome week away. We saved a ton of money, we survived, and we spent a ton of quality time as a family in a warm, sunny place. It was great.

You want to know what was especially great? The sand. That sand in Cabo is incredible. What quickly became a kind of routine for us was that late in the afternoon, we would attempt some sand-related project. One day, we dug a huge hole that went more than 6 feet deep and hit water. Another day we built a two-seater sand car. After dinner, when it was dark, we ventured back down to the beach to see if our car was surviving the incoming tides. We found a couple- as in, an adult, romantic pair of people- sitting in the sand car we had made, enjoying a moment. We were excited to tell them we had built it. They weirdly didn’t seem excited to talk to us about that. And then one day, we built an airplane. I think that was our biggest project of the week, and we decided to make it somewhat evangelistic. We wrote “Isaiah 40:31” on the wings of the plane, which actually did spark a few conversations with by-passers who asked what that meant.

If you don’t know it off hand, here’s Isaiah 40:31:

 You see what we did there? “They will soar on wings” (yes, wings like eagles, not airplanes, but close enough). And who will soar? Those who hope in the Lord.

That’s how Isaiah 40 ends. This is how it begins: “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins” (40:2). Isaiah 40 addresses a people who have suffered in exile. God speaks to them through His prophet promising good news. And again, this good news will be experienced by those who have endured in putting their hope in the Lord, despite the seemingly hopeless circumstances around them. Even in exile, with all former sources of security stripped away, they continue to place their hopes on the character of God.

This gets at what I said on Sunday about the chain reaction of Romans 5: suffering leads to endurance, which leads to character, which leads to hope. As I said, suffering has the potential to remove from us our faulty sources of hope and to establish them in God alone. If your hope is for financial abundance or for world peace or for the perfect family, you will quickly grow tired and weary, you will stumble and fall (Isaiah 40:30). Your hopes will not be sustained by the reality of this broken and twisted world. But if, even when those things are shaken, your hope is in God and His promises of future restoration and renewal of all things, then you can soar. Then your strength will be renewed. Then you will bear witness to the “everlasting God” (Isaiah 40:28) who is absolutely dependable.

In the midst of the hopelessness that permeates this world, may we put our hope in the Lord above all else and find Isaiah 40:31 to be true.