Wed. Night Impact

Last night was a pretty good night. Josh Wyman was in town, so Jerry always lets him lead worship when he's here.
I spoke about hope. 1 Cor 13:13 lists 3 things: faith, love and hope. 2 weeks ago I taught about faith. Last week I talked about love for God (but it was a lot about worship as well. So tonight I finished the verse and spoke about hope. I had never taught about hope before. It's always been more of a word I skipped over. It's a word that doesn't mean as much to me as love and faith and grace do. But really, hope is an amazing thing.
I read about an experiment at Berkley. They put rats in a pool of water, and let them swim. They found that rats could swim for 7 hours before they drowned if they had no help. Then they put some more rats in the pool, but just before the rats gave up and drowned, a scientist would pull them out and let them rest. These rats could swim for 20 hours...and the scientists came to the conclusion that these rats would last longer because they had hope. They didn't give up as easily. Hope can motivate. Hope is what gives meaning to what we are doing now. It helps us endure the hard times, because we know God is going to make things better.
There are three things that we have hope in. 1. Jesus is coming back. 2. Jesus is taking us with him. 3. Jesus is giving us eternal life. It's pretty awesome to think about. And with that hope comes joy. With that hope, we can endure hard times. Because we know it's all going to get better. God is going to restore his kingdom and we're going to be here with him. Hope isn't just a good idea. The New Testament actually talks quite a bit about hope. And since studying about this word, it has gotten me more excited about my future with Jesus