Episode 1576: Our Hope is in the Lord

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Scott Maderer: [00:00:00] Thanks for joining me on episode 1,576 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

Ken Stearns: I'm Ken Stearns, and I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, and your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to find our own story and listen to others' stories is key, and one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this The Inspired Stewardship Podcast with my friend Scott Mader.

Scott Maderer: To reach out and open the circle wider to invite more people in to spread the good news and the love further, not to isolate ourselves and look for ways that we can be on top, but to lift others up [00:01:00] to be equal in relationship with God. Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling. In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

In today's spiritual foundation episode, I talk about Psalm 14. I share with you how this Psalm is about hope when everything seems wrong with society, and I also share how it is a time to find hope in community and in relationship. Psalm 14 says. Fools say in their hearts, there is no God. They are [00:02:00] corrupt.

They do abominable deeds. There is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all gone astray. They're all alike, perverse. There is no one who does good. No, not one have they no knowledge. All the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread and do not call upon the Lord, they're.

They shall be in great terror for God is with the company of the righteous. You would confound the plans of the poor, but the Lord is their refuge. Oh, that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion. When the Lord restores the fortunes of his people, Jacob will rejoice and Israel will be glad. Lad,

you know the passage here, I, I chose to title this message. Our hope is in the Lord. And yet if you listen to Psalm 14, you'll notice that [00:03:00] the word hope doesn't appear anywhere in there. It does talk about refuge, refuge for the poor. Maybe that would echo the message a little better, but no hope is really the word that I think of when I hear this song.

What is the source of hope? Where does it come from? No matter what is going on around you in society, in the world, in your life, where does hope come from? I'll be honest, right now in, in today's world, I, I would consider myself struggling with things that are going around me in the world today. Things that are going on, things that are happening here in America, in Gaza, in other places around the world.

Seeing people killed, people, harmed seeing people hold up as if they are righteous when they [00:04:00] appear to be doing things that I don't consider righteous. And the writer of the 14th Psalm, I think was feeling that at the time that they wrote this as well. It echoes some of the very same feelings.

You, you just have to read the very first verse to realize that this is someone who is struggling to find anything of value in the world as it is. All they're seeing is evil. Everywhere they look, no one is doing good. This is someone who seems to despair. That there's anyone left in life who looks with the eyes of faith, and honestly, I would say they don't exclude themselves from that either, and I would not exclude myself from that either.

I wonder sometimes if I'm truly living a life of faith, and if I'm honest, I wonder that all the time this Psalm is [00:05:00] written, it seems by someone who's so fed up with what they've seen from the very top to the very bottom of society. And I don't know about you, but I know that feeling. I know that response, that feeling that no one is worthy of this.

That true despair that apparently we've given up on God, God's given up on us, something's happened that has caused the world to go astray. This could be a lament. This could be a complaint or a calling out. This could be a prophecy of saying the people of God are failing and speaking out against that.

This isn't really a rant about people, that a espouse disgust for beliefs that claim to be atheist or agnostics. Instead, it says, fools say in their hearts. This isn't [00:06:00] an argument about. People that are outside of the church or outside of belief, no. This is for people that in their hearts say there is no God, but externally claim to believe that there is a God.

But then when you look at their actions, when you look at their lives, their lives reflect that heart belief. Functional atheists, you might call 'em, they profess God, but there's no evidence in their lives that God has any hold over them or any authority for them. I don't know about you, but I can think of leaders.

I can think of priests, I can think of politicians, celebrities, all sorts of people that claim to be wanting to bring God back to the nation. But then when I look at their actions and their values and their choices, they [00:07:00] seem to oppose the very same message of the God that they proclaim. And here in the Psalm, these people are called fools, not a fool, because they make a mistake or stumble, but.

Not a fool who doesn't have all the information, or a fool who can't possibly think it through. These are fools who have actually chosen to oppose the will of God in their life. These people have put themselves and their own purposes and they've said, those are the God that I worship. I worship the God that gives me power.

I worship the God that holds me up. And that is true foolishness. It might seem like wisdom to the world. Often these people have power. They're getting ahead, they're successful, they're winning the battles, it seems. The world looks at them and goes, [00:08:00] these people have done it right, and yet God's wisdom sees something different and the psalmist continues to go on.

Letting us see what the eyes reveal about how the world works and who rises to top and who gets the glory. And often that's what we feel like doing too. Ranting and raving, pointing fingers, calling out sinners as we see them. And there's probably some need for that at times. We should speak up and speak out against the foolishness of the day and those who are advocating it.

It, but really and truly what we are called to be by God is proclaimers of the good news. That is the I defining identity of Christ, and the follower of Christ is called to do that, and that's where hope comes from. That's [00:09:00] the return to hope that we're talking about, that hope comes in the identity of God.

The God we make space for in our inner lives, the God who is a refuge for the poor, the God who's called upon and promises deliverance and restoration. That God of the someday, that God of the restoration, that God of hope is the God we preach of, but we also preach of the God of today. We share and live into the fortunes that are already ours.

And those fortunes come in the form of community and relationship and forgiveness and transformation and grace, and they show up in the signs of God at work in us. They show up in the fruits and the actions in the response to God that does good work and ripples out. [00:10:00] It's a communal good. It's a redemptive good.

It's a corporate good in that it comes together in the body or the corpus of the church that. That is what it means to taste hope. That is what it means to recognize the source of our hope. And the response to that is always to reach out and open the circle wider, to invite more people in, to spread the good news and the love further, not to isolate ourselves and look for ways that we can be on top, but to lift others up.

To be equal in relationship with God. Thanks for listening.

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Until next time, invest your time. Your talent and your treasures. Develop your influence and impact the world.