If I can have your permission, I’d like to work backwards from the usual method today.

Normally I start by talking about the passage of the bible we’re looking at; dig a little bit into what it meant when it was written, and then make an application to what it means for us now.

But today, I’d like to start with the bottom line. I’d like to start with the punch line, start with what’s most important, and then talk about the foundation in Micah. Ok? Here we go.

God is the basis for hope in our lives.

The world as it exists now, with its pain and struggles and fighting, is not the final word. God will change the rules, and God will make us better than new. And what’s perhaps most amazing is that God won’t erase or ignore our failings and our woundedness to do it; God will transform the very things we hate about life into something strong, something that brings honor to him.

Now, that may have become so familiar to you, so expected in a church setting, that it goes in one ear and out the other. But I’m not sure we think often enough about what our hope is based on, and what exactly it is that we hope for.

God is the basis for hope in our lives.

More often, I think we put our hope in ourselves, in our ability to plan, to think, to accomplish. The fact that we tend to make ourselves the basis of our hope leads some of us to be completely overconfident in our abilities, and others to having ZERO hope whatsoever.

The prophets and Micah remind us that God has not left us on our own. God is not just in the punishing business, not just in the forgiving business; God is also in the redeeming business. God is active and strong enough, God is powerful enough to be the basis for hope in our lives, a much surer basis than we are ourselves.

“God helps those who help themselves” is not found in the bible, even though 75% of the people surveyed by George Barna in 2000 thought it was.

It’s essential for us to recognize that God isn’t a sort of vitamin we take to give us just enough to accomplish our goals in life. God isn’t a little booster shot of hope, but the complete source of it.

I think even more challenging, though, is looking at what we hope for.

In those difficult times where we really need hope, when we are fearful or hurt or in difficult circumstances, what we are usually hoping for is something completely new.

We want the difficult times to stop, the thing we fear to never come, the hurt to be made “as good as new”.

It’s been several years since I had one of those “a-ha” moments, where a new thought became crystal clear: God is not a “throw out and start over” kind of God. In God’s dictionary, “good as new” isn’t found as often as “better than new” is.

God doesn’t replace, God transforms. God doesn’t forget and move on, he remembers and renews.

It makes us realize that perhaps we are asking God for and hoping for the wrong things.

We often ask God: “take away” or “start over” or “make it go away.” That might miss how God wants to transform the very thing we fear, the very thing that hurts, and make it something better than new.

This part of who God is comes out everywhere. Because he was crazy enough to let people live however we want to live, the world doesn’t look as God intended for it to look. Because God refuses to stay far off and leave us to stew in our own juices, God is actively and intimately involved in the slow process of making something good out of the pain and failures of our world.

I’ve come to think of this as the most miraculous and awe-inspiring characteristic of God.

When people stray off the melody that God sets, God adds more notes around our missed notes to make beautiful harmonies.

I picture God as this amazing artist, painting a masterpiece on canvas. Along comes a small girl, who dips her finger in the paint and smears a bright yellow patch on the canvas, ruining the creation. But rather than paint over the smear, God the master artist reconceives the picture and incorporates the smear into something more beautiful than the first design. The smear is forever there, but it is made a beautiful part of a new whole.

God transforms; he rarely erases.

And now it’s time to look carefully at Micah chapter 4. Will you open your bibles to Micah 4, verse 1?

In the first three chapters of Micah, the theme is unrelenting judgment except for a few brief verses of hope at the end of chapter 2. But now, the message changes. We still see God’s power, we still see his intimate involvement in Israel and Judah’s lives, but now the power is moving in ways that transform. [READ 1-2]

In the last days, God promises, it won’t be about the destruction of Jerusalem. It will be about all the nations of the world coming to Jerusalem to learn and be healed.

This picture in itself shows God as a renewer. One of the supreme examples of humanity’s wrong choices is being transformed in this promise, not erased.

Way back in Genesis, people got together and thought, “Let’s put our minds together, and build a tower to reach up to God.” If we combine our efforts, we can be like God!

They called it the tower of Babel, and God’s response was to separate humanity into all sorts of different language groups, keeping them separate from each other so that they wouldn’t try to be like God. People’s wrong motives are what led to our greatest separations of language and culture.

Now, in Micah 4, the promise transforms the failure of Babel. It isn’t erased, it’s changed.

In the last days, God won’t wipe out cultural diversity. No, God will bring all the world together and teach them himself from Jerusalem. And what a transformation will come! [READ 3-5]

God will settle our disputes and be our judge. They won’t be erased or ignored, they will be settled, made right, in such a radical way that swords and spears can be transformed forever into useful, productive tools.

The instruments of war don’t disappear or simply go away; the new tools for farming and peaceful living don’t appear out of nowhere. God transforms the very things that make life on earth so horrible into useful, peaceful things.

This is our God!

A transforming, redeeming, healing God!

And this is so important for how we see ourselves. It means we ALL have value in God’s way of doing things.

Not just the strong. Not just the smart. Not just the healthy and those who have never failed or never been wounded.

Because it is GOD who brings hope, we all have a place. Because God doesn’t start over or forget what has come before, we ALL have a place in what God is doing.

Listen for who it is that God gathers into a remnant, into the ones who will be his people in the last days. [READ v. 6-8]

The lame. The exiles. Those I have brought to grief.

Not the strong, the powerful, the winners, the successes. No, God takes the wounded and the left outs and transforms them into his faithful people.

This is what we so often forget. It’s not about us, or our accomplishments, or our right living. God doesn’t help those who help themselves, God helps those who CAN’T help themselves.

It’s not US or what we’ve done that brings us hope. It is the power of a transforming God, who does not forget and cast aside the woundedness and the failings of the world…but who takes the lame and exiled and gathers them from all over the world and teaches them himself.

It’s something that for some reason is difficult for us to get through our thick skulls.

Outside the church and even inside it, people think you have to be good for God to like you. Our hope too often is based on what we do rather than what God does.

But all through the prophets, as much as God speaks words of judgment, God also speaks words of gathering and of healing. What is it that Jesus said? “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

If we try and make ourselves presentable enough for Jesus to accept us, we’re missing it. If we think we’re presentable enough without Jesus, we’re missing it.

God takes who we are-our best and our worst-and if we let him be the teacher, let him be Lord and God in our lives, he transforms us and he will transform the world into something beautiful.

Will you let me go back to the beginning, now that we’re at the end?

God is the basis for hope in our lives.

The world as it exists now, with its pain and struggles and fighting, is not the final word. God will change the rules, and God will make us better than new. And what’s perhaps most amazing is that God won’t erase or ignore our failings and our woundedness to do it; God will transform the very things we hate about life into something strong, something that brings honor to him.

Prayer

 

Commissioning

Camps: if you will be on staff at a camp this summer, or going to a camp this summer; if you’re going to be a director, counselor, teacher, camper, go-fer, whatever, would you stand?

SLP: Sarah Staples, Tim Fodge, Lisby Rogers

Scott Cornwall and Katie to Silverton, teaching 7^th grade for 12 years, intern. Pray.