Posts with the tag “hope”

In Coco, the rule is devastating. When the last living person forgets you, you suffer the Final Death. You simply cease to exist. It is a beautiful movie. But it cannot answer the one question that matters most: what happens when everyone who loved you is also gone? What happens when there is no one left to remember? Isaiah saw the answer. God sends the dew of the dawn onto those sleeping in the dust, and the earth gives them back. Not because someone kept a photograph on a shelf. Because God remembered where He put them. The people you love who belong to Jesus are not waiting to be forgotten. They are waiting to be raised. Read the full post.  Read More

Most of us have years we have quietly written off as the price of getting to where we are now. But Joel says repay. God is not just moving you past the lost years. He is moving you through them. The locust years are part of the material He is working with. Your story is not behind schedule. It is still being written.  Read More

Sonny Kapoor runs a crumbling hotel with a leaking roof and broken plumbing, and greets every disaster with the same line delivered with complete sincerity and absolutely no supporting evidence: "Everything will be alright in the end. So if it is not alright, it is not the end." The guests find it infuriating and irresistible. Because they want it to be true. Here is what Sonny did not know. He was not being optimistic. He was being theological. The Bible has been making his argument for thousands of years, backed by something far more solid than a hopeful hotel manager in Jaipur. Time is not a wheel going nowhere. It is a story going somewhere magnificent. And God already declared what the ending looks like. Read the full post.  Read More

Most of us have something we stopped reaching for after a significant loss. A dream that got attached to someone or something that is no longer here. When they left the dream felt like it left with them. But Isaiah says God will carry you. Present tense. Still moving. Still sustaining. The adventure did not die with the loss. It was waiting on the other side of it.  Read More

A foreman walks up to Carl Fredricksen's house, surrounded by construction equipment and developers who want him gone, and asks plainly: when are you going to give this place up? Carl does not flinch. He says: "When I'm dead." The audience laughs. Then they cry. Because every one of us has something we are holding onto with everything we have. Something the world keeps pressuring us to release. But here is what Peter told people who had already lost most of what they had built: you have an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. Reserved in heaven. Beyond the reach of any bulldozer. The question is not whether you will hold on. The question is what you are holding. Read the full post.  Read More

Nobody in the middle of a contraction quits having the baby. The contraction does not mean the birth is not coming. It means the birth is getting closer. The intensity is not evidence that something is going wrong. It is evidence that something is about to arrive. Most of us are carrying something this week that feels too heavy for where we are in the story. That is not the end. That is the contraction. Stay in the room.  Read More

There is a seat at your grandmother's table that nobody sits in anymore. The chair that was always his, always hers. The empty place that represents a meal that is not finished yet. Every family has a version of that chair. And if you listen closely, the Lord's Supper is the Church's answer to it. Because on the night before He was crucified, Jesus did not just start a memorial. He made a promise. He said: the next time I eat and drink at this table, it will be in the kingdom. The meal is not over. The guest of honor is still coming. Read the full post.  Read More

There is a moment in every swimming lesson that nobody talks about honestly. The moment the instructor says let go of the wall. Everything in that child says no. The wall is solid. The water is unpredictable. Baptism is that moment. And it is one of the most prophetically loaded things a believer can do in a world that is desperately afraid of what comes next. Because when you went under that water, you were not just getting wet. You were practicing dying. And when you came back up, you were declaring something that death itself cannot argue with. Read the full post.  Read More

For some of you yesterday was genuinely good. For some of you it was hard in ways you did not fully advertise. The empty chair. The complicated relationship a Hallmark holiday does not fix. The grief that does not take Sundays off just because everyone around you is celebrating. All of that is allowed. God heals the brokenhearted. Not the ones who performed gratitude correctly. The brokenhearted. He is already close.  Read More

Long before Revelation, the Hebrew prophets were already using the image of a woman in labor to describe the deepest kind of hope. Not the easy kind. The kind that costs something. Mary stepped into that tradition when she said yes to God before she could see how the story would unfold. No plan. No approval from her community. Just a word from God and the decision of what to do with it. She said yes. She stayed through the cross. She was in the upper room when the Spirit fell. That is what your mother has been doing for you. This one is for her. Read the full post.  Read More

I live with five women. My wife and four daughters. And the word in our house lately is delulu. Short for delusional. It means you are holding onto something the rest of the room has already decided is not going to happen. Here is what I did not expect. The longer I sat with that word, the more I realized it is exactly what the world says about the Church. About every believer who still genuinely expects Jesus to come back. Peter warned us this was coming. Mockers would say: where is the promise? Nothing ever changes. Everything just keeps going the way it always has. But the people calling us delulu forgot about the empty tomb. And that changes everything. Read the full post.  Read More

Want to go deeper? This blog expands on the message preached on April 19 at GracePointe. Watch the full message at https://gpnaz.church/media. There is a character in C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew named Uncle Andrew.He is present at the creation of Narnia. He is standing there when Aslan, the great lion who represents Christ, opens his mouth and sings the world into existence. Stars appear. Mo...  Read More