It is a privilege for me to be able to introduce to you Pastor Jeff Thomas. He comes to us today from the Alfred Place Baptist Church in Aberystwyth, Wales. And he has been pastoring that church since 1965. And that is longer than some of us, probably many of us, have even been alive.

And I don't point this out to embarrass our brother with reference to his age. but rather to highlight the fact that God has privileged us very greatly in giving us a seasoned and a proven brother to come and minister the word. And it is a great privilege for me to be able to introduce Pastor Jeff Thomas. I was wondering where the volume of sound was coming from and was too shy to turn around and look at you. I know I'd see you soon.

Thank you very much for the invitation to come here and speak on this Lord's Day morning. I'm very much at home. See the leaflets in the rack there at the back, the very same ones that we put on display in our book rack in Aberystwyth. and also sell in our Christian bookshop and friends of mine like John Blanchard, Peter Jeffrey, you've got them there. I'm delighted to be with you today and trust that what I say will be a means of grace to you.

Scripture Reading: Romans 15:13

I want to draw your attention to the letter to the Romans chapter 15 and verse 13, Romans 15 and verse 13.

Introduction

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace. in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. One of the great verses in scripture, isn't it? Let's get the great verses right in our lives. You've been traveling in a state, Wyoming, Montana, Saskatchewan, lots of empty space there, you've been travelling far north in British Columbia, you don't know where the gas stations are, you're going on a family trip, you've got your camping equipment with you, children in the back seat and the needle is on empty and you're going along there and you're hoping no one else has noticed it and you sing some hymns and turn the radio on, put a CD so that your wife doesn't spot that you're on empty, that she doesn't see the flashing light.

You come to one community, there are no gas stations there, and you're on. You're talking heartily and jovially, but your heart is sinking. You're on empty. You're just wondering, what will you do now if you run out of gas and you're miles from anywhere?

What will you do? Who will come? The dangers and the worries. of it all. And then you go round the bend and you see a sign and the light is there, oh you've never been so glad to see a filling station in your life.

You fill it up. You're so glad. You're so thankful. Our civilisation is on empty.

People are having music and loud singing and constant laughter on the media, radio, TV, something to dull the pain of knowing that they're on empty and not knowing where they're going to get filled up again. People are out of joy and they're out of peace and they're trying the narcotics and the alcohol and the popping the pills just somewhere to find joy and peace. Men without God Amen without hope. And then one day you were in work and you meet a girl and you say to her, so how do you weekend go?

Lovely, great time, she said. We were in church yesterday. I found the message so helpful. Oh, you go to church.

And she begins to talk to you. Always when you're together then you somehow find her and you talking about Christianity and the Bible. And one day she says, we've got a baptismal service in our church on Sunday, would you like to come along? And you come along.

And your life has never been the same since that time when you heard the gospel preached and you were welcomed in a believing fellowship of men and women. And you began to discover then in the message of Jesus Christ the source of joy and peace. Now I can tell people that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all. I can tell you that God is a consuming fire, that it's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

I must say those things to you because that's what the Bible says. I can bring to you the great solemn sanctions of judgement and eternity. But the unique distinctive of the Christian faith is that it contains a message of hope. That Jesus Christ didn't say to the church, you are the headmaster, you are the principal of the world.

He doesn't say, you are the traffic warden. of the traffic police of the world. He told them that they were the light of the world. And I can speak to you of a God who is love and joy and peace and long-suffering and gentleness and goodness and faithfulness and meekness and self-control. That this God of hope can fill despairing men and women with all joy and peace.

It's possible for your burden to be lifted, for your heaviness to evaporate, for your discouragement to be turned to acceptance and for you to be influenced so that you are filled to the brims of your lives with joy and peace. That's what the text says. Isn't this what the text says? Belonging for the Apostle, for the whole congregation there in Rome, the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

He's writing to the entire congregation in Rome. He's writing to the illiterates. that were there, the slaves, the poor beggars that have come there, the women, the slaves, the soldiers that have come down from the palace, he's writing to them all. And he's praying this, he's longing for this, for all of them, that every one of them may be filled with all joy and peace in believing that they may overflow, that they may abound in hope through this living God. The great question on the lips of this me generation in which we live is, what's in it for me?

What's in Christianity if I came back on another Sunday morning to this congregation? If I got seriously involved now in the Christian faith, what's in it for me? Well, what's in it for you? is you being filled with all joy and peace as you trust in God. That's what's in it for you, isn't that marvellous?

That you will never, never in your lives hear such an offer made to you as you are hearing now.

The God of Hope: His Character

The first thing I want to say to you is that the Bible tells us how such hope can be ours. And it begins by focusing on the God of hope. The God we worship is the God of hope. He's not twisting his hands in frustration as he looks from heaven on the earth today and he sees turmoil in northern Africa and Afghanistan.

He's not frustrated as he looks through the history of the last hundred years and world wars and Korea and Vietnam and 9-11. He is the God of hope. He's the God of the future, the God of the rolling years. a God who makes promises and fulfills every single one of them. He says if you come to Jesus Christ, you will have rest.

Hope for the Most Despised

He is the God of hope for the most despairing, for the most despised men and women in society, for the child abusers and the torturers and the rapists. There is hope for you because God is a God of hope. If you turn to Him, He says, though your sins are scarlet sins, they shall become as white as snow. He assures you that if you entrust yourselves to His loving care, He will freely pardon you for the worst things you have ever done.

He will clothe you with the righteousness of His Son, Jesus Christ. He will adopt you into His family. He will make you His sons. He will give you all the privileges of access to this great Creator and you can say to Him, Abba, Father.

He will become your teacher. He will give you ever increasing understanding and knowledge of who you are and how you should live what this world is all about and what your purpose in life is and how to handle the various pressures which mortality and a groaning creation bring into our lives. He will work all things together for your good. He will never leave you.

When you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, He will be with you then comforting and support you. He will take you to Himself in heaven and you will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Isn't that a marvelous message of hope? Sigmund Freud hasn't got a message like that.

Charles Darwin didn't have a message like that. Karl Marx doesn't have a message like that. Only God can say such things, because He is not the God of the humanists or the God of the stoics. He is not the God of the veil worshippers in their despair, cutting themselves and dancing and shouting and crying and hearing nothing.

The Resurrection as Ground of Hope

God has given us certainty that what I have said to you is true. You say, how is that? You Christians are always talking about love and joy and peace and they're words, they're just words. No, God has given us assurance that what I have said in your hearing is true because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Peter's Living Hope

Peter was a companion, he was an eyewitness. of the Lord Jesus Christ. He said, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He's begotten us again to a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. He'd been a know-all.

Not even Jesus could tell him everything. He didn't need warnings. He didn't need the peril to be made spectacularly clear to him. He didn't believe in the necessity of Jesus dying?

He didn't believe in the resurrection of the dead, and he was now in despair. He'd given three years of his life to following a healing rabbi. But now it was all gone. Jesus was dead.

Another good man put to death. But on the third day, he ran after John to the tomb. and found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty and then he met, he met Jesus. He met him. He met him in the upper room.

He met him in a private re-commissioning when the Saviour gave him then restoration of the privileges of serving Him and working for Him, feeding His sheep and feeding His lambs. His life was reborn. He was a new creation. He had a living hope.

He spent the rest of His days in joy and peace because He knew God. And He knew that Jesus Christ was more powerful than death. That absolute reality was not death. But absolute reality was the preacher of the Sermon on the Mount.

And the glory of the resurrection is that it didn't take place in the world of hypotheses or the realm of ideas. It didn't belong to the sphere of theology, that it belongs to the realm of facts. An empty tomb, a folded napkin, grave clothes laid there. The great word of the angel, behold the place where they laid him.

He is not here, he is risen. The empty tomb, the triumph of Christ over death and the forces of evil. Hours in which love incarnate lay in a tomb. Wisdom incarnate, power incarnate seems to have been overthrown by death and the powers of evil.

And then God raises Him from the dead, and God gives Him the victory, God vindicated incarnate grace, and God raised Him up, and it is the great guarantee of our resurrection. It is the model of our resurrection, we too sown in weakness. There was a time when your father could repair a television. But now he's unable even to switch a television on.

There were times when he would devour his food. And now he needs both hands to hold a cup to sip through a tube. We're sown in weakness. Mortality is written on all of us.

But that is not the end. It is raised in strength and glory And honour, that is the Christian hope. On the first Lord's Day, there was the eruption of the power and goodness of God into this world. On this planet, someone who was dead opened an eye and opened another eyelid and looked around and flexed his fingers and toes and got up and took off the napkin.

And a messenger from God took the stone away and he came forth in the power of an endless life. God gives us the assurance that when he speaks of hope and peace and joy, that it is grounded in his mighty power in Christ over the greatest and last of our enemies.

How Joy and Peace Become Ours

And then this God of hope, he tells us how this joy and peace can become yours. It is as you trust in him.

The Nature of Trust in Christ

Some of you are not sure whether you have faith or not. The New Testament doesn't tell us much about the psychology of faith. It doesn't give us much information that we can analyse that. emphasises greatly Jesus Christ. It wants us to think about him.

It wants our minds and our conscience and our affections to be drawn to Jesus Christ and in that, faith comes. Let's use the word trust, the NIV translates it as we trust in him, and that's a good word, trust. It's a softer word, isn't it? It's an Anglo-Saxon word rather than faith, which is a Latinized French word, faith, fide, trust.

You trust in him, you trust, you know what trust is, you've got that digital alarm clock at the side of your bed and it's so reliable and you hardly ever have to change it except if there's a power cut. It's there and it'll tell you, you can't sleep, it's 3.34. You trust the clock, don't you? You trust your mother's love for you.

You know, her face lights up when she sees you. We can trust in God. We can trust God. We can trust God implicitly.

We can trust whatever God is. We can trust God. Whatever He's done, what He says, God is straight. We can trust Jesus Christ.

You can trust Jesus. You can trust Him. When He said, the Son of Man came to lay down His life for ransom for men. That's why He came.

You can trust Him. Our ransom has been paid. He says, come to Me and I will give you rest. You can trust that He will give you rest if you come to Him.

Coming to Him is a movement of your heart and affections and mind, energised by the Holy Spirit as he takes the word that you were listening to, and he brings you then to himself. He is meek and lowly of heart. because he received a sinner like you. You can trust him. You can trust him absolutely.

You can trust him implicitly. When the devil says we've sinned too much and we've out sinned his forgiveness. There was a little girl and she was six years of age. She is six years of age.

Her name is Aspen and she was being driven home from school by her father. Mother couldn't do the school run and her father had gone down to pick her up and it was one of those downpours where you need double speed on the windscreen wipers just to see ahead. And there was silence in the car, father didn't want to hit anything. And she said, Daddy, yes, I've been thinking.

Yes, he said, what are you thinking about? The rain is like sin and the windscreen wipers are like God wiping our sins away. He'd never said anything like that before. He had a lump in his throat.

She was a funny little girl. She said that. He wanted to see if he could go a little further with it. So he said to her, do you notice that the rain is still coming down?

What does that tell us? She didn't hesitate for a moment. She said,

Continual Forgiveness and Grace

we keep on sinning and God keeps on forgiving. We keep on sinning. And I said, yes, Lynn, I've never done anything free from sin. Everything I've done and said, holiest prayers and sermons they need the forgiveness of God.

There's too much self here still, until in a better land when I'll sing His power to save. You may say about what I've just said to you, we keep on sinning. But Jesus Christ keeps on forgiving. You may think that that is a license for promiscuity, for continuing in sin.

I say to you, Golgotha won't let you. The rest you've had in coming to Christ won't allow you. to add an ounce to the burdens that he bore. You trust in him. You trust right into him.

You trust and trust in him as your prophet, as your priest, as your king. You trust everything about Jesus. You trust him. You trust his warnings.

But they are pastoral and caring warnings. The place where the worm dies not and the fires are not quenched. You trust what he says. Trust everything.

He's never dying love for you. He's saying... Sometimes, you know, I say, if he sends me to hell, I'll go to hell trusting in him. Well, of course, no one's ever gone to hell trusting in Jesus.

No one's ever gone to hell asking Jesus for mercy and forgiveness. I'll go to hell with you, if you go to hell crying to the Lord to save you.

Filled with All Joy and Peace

The God of hope kills us, and the result is We are filled with all joy and peace. That's such extraordinary encouragement. We, not super Christians, not Jonathan Edwards, not Spurgeon. We ordinary Christians.

He wants that church in Rome. Young believers, new believers, people from such awful backgrounds, converted gladiators. He wants them filled with all joy and peace. The joy of knowing God, the joy of being loved by God, the joy of realising our sins have been cast into the depths of the sea and God remembers them.

The joy of walking through life from getting up on a Monday morning, going off to school, going off to work and the Lord is with you, the joy of the heart, the joy of having a Bible, the joy of the Lord's day, the joy of the Lord's people, the joy of the means of grace, the joy of the Word of God coming in power and the Holy Spirit and with much assurance, the joy of serving other people in the name of Jesus, the joy of bearing witness with a lisping, stammering tongue, the joy of hearing What a friend we have in Jesus. I was in Grand Rapids a couple of years ago now. I was preaching in Providence Reformed Church in Grand Rapids. We went for lunch to a fascinating family.

The man was a carpenter. I knew a bit about the family. There were ten children. and there was the husband and the wife and there was Jola and myself. We were 14 around the table.

We had chicken soup and bread. Just great. And he got the Bible to read at the end of the meal. He said, you were preaching on contentment this morning, Pastor Thomas.

I said, do you know something about our family? And I did, but I wanted to hear it from the horse's mouth. He said, I was married and had three children and my wife was expecting her fourth and she was driving along the road and a drunk shot through a red light and hit the car and killed her. And my second wife here, she said her husband, he was a baker in Grand Rapids.

And one day a disgruntled employee took a Colt 45 and went to work and shot him dead. And her parents came to look after her and the five children. And on the Sunday morning they were driving to church as they did. Her parents and her and the five children in the back and they were driving along and suddenly a voice came from the back of the vehicle.

We're not singing. We always sing going to church. And one of them pitched up John Newton's great Sabbath hymn. safely through another week. They'd lost their father.

He'd been murdered. But he was safe in the arms of Jesus. It's said that when the boy had more faith than all of us, the children, like children, like statues, listening to this story of their life. She came with her five children to church and he was there with his three children and the Lord brought them together.

They fell in love with one another and then the Lord has given them two children themselves and there are the ten children. And he read scripture and expressed his contentment with God's good and perfect will. The God of hope filled them with joy and peace as they trusted in God. You have joy as Christians.

The clouds lifted this morning when we saw the mountains for the first time. We'd heard about them. They were there. They were beautiful.

Sometimes you look out of a window at your backyard and you see a bird pulling up a worm from the lawn and you're just overwhelmed with joy. I sit and watch my three girls and behind a book that I'm watching them and they're talking to one another and they're listening carefully as one speaks and the other speaks. See their affection for one another now, all mothers talking together. Just overwhelmed with joy.

How unworthy to be blessed in this way. The Lord fills us with joy. The joy of hearing of people being converted. When Philip preached in Samaria and the Lord blessed his ministry in Samaria, then many Samaritans were converted and Luke tells us that the city was full of joy.

Isn't that interesting? He could have said it was full of faith and full of praise and singing and full of repentance and all that would have been true. That's what he seizes on, his joy. And when Philip was taken and ministered to the Ethiopian eunuch, he went on his way full of joy.

The disciples were full of joy and the Holy Ghost is at the end of Acts 13. That can't be the disciples were regenerate. It can't be. There is something experiential about that definition of Christian men and women.

They were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit. Paul, the great apostle of joy, he mentions it twenty-one times in the Bible. Joy, filled with all joy and peace. Never joy only, but a joy that's characterised also by peace.

It's not just effervescence. It's not I'm working on the microphone, getting close to you and asking the organist to play a tune again, dimming the lights and all that psychological trickery. I despise it. It's joy and peace.

It's heaven's gift. The only explanation from it is that God in his mercy has given us this joy and peace.

Peace Through Providence

The peace that comes from knowing that nothing happens by chance or because of the devil. But we go back to the first cause and our Heavenly Father is the first cause of everything. If only we could believe what we do believe, what we say we believe. Oh, if only I believe what I say.

If only I believe wholly what I'm preaching to you now. Peace from accepting God's will without murmuring. I was reading John Newton a couple of years ago because it was the bicentenary of his death and I was so interested in Newton. And Newton, I came across this illustration of his, one morning all the angels of God gathered together before God to receive their instructions for the day.

The first angel, God says, go and become the emperor of the greatest empire in the world. Angel goes and he comes the next one, he says, go and clean the public toilets in the slum in Mexico City. Angel goes and does it. It's their delight to do the will of God without question.

If God says something, they do it. It's a matter of utter indifference whether they're going to clean a ditch to clean out a barn of rain over an empire. The peace of the angels lies in doing God's will. One day one will lift a stinking beggar and he'll carry him into heaven.

Another day the angel will take out the chariots and horses and will go down and will drive Elijah to heaven. Obeying God's will is all that comes. A young friend of mine was engaged to a girl in our congregation and in her last term, just before her examination, she dumped him. She ended the engagement.

She said to me, he's boring. So unkind and so untrue. and he was just shattered and heartbroken. Well, he went into the ministry and he was just a really superb preacher. I always profit from listening to him.

Years went by, he told me, I'm called to be a bachelor. I'm called to celibacy. He said, come on, come on. I said, come on now.

No, no. I'm going to be a bachelor for the rest of my life. And then one day, he began to notice a girl in the congregation. Very tricky.

And he waited until she was 18. He was 38. And when she reached her 18th birthday, that week he went to see her parents. Her father was an elder in the church.

And he asked her father and mother permission to take her out to ask her would she come out for a meal with him. And he and his wife talked it over and they came back to him and they said, no, we feel The age gap is too great and she is too young to begin a serious relationship with you. So we don't want you to make any attempt to get closer to her. And he accepted that.

He knew he would do it that way. And then three weeks went by and he noticed a fellow from the church beginning to sit next to her and share a hymn book with her. And then this fellow, a few weeks later, came to her and said, Pastor, you notice that I'm going out with so-and-so in the congregation. I want you to give me some advice on this.

I want to do this right now. I want you to help me. He said to me, I'd make a far better husband for her than he ever would. But there we are.

So I was so sorry for my dear friend and I tried to give him, you know, the verses that you would give to encourage him and comfort him. There are plenty of them, aren't there? It's all right, Jack. It's all right.

We believe that when we ask God for something, He either gives us what we ask for, or He gives us something better. Now that's the bedrock of Christian comfort. That's the bedrock of joy and peace. But if we don't get that fellow that we love so much, if the love is unrequited and we are facing singleness, then God has someone, something better for us.

And sure enough, a couple of years later, he met his dear wife and asked me to marry them, and I did. He's still in that church, which has been the scene of his long ministry, and he has four children in the congregation.

Overflowing in Hope by the Spirit

The end of all this is that you may abound in hope, or the NIV says, overflow in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit, the result of God working in us. Preachers always talk about the two seas, don't they, in Israel? There's the Sea of Galilee in the north and the Jordan flows in and then it flows out and down the steep Jordan Valley into the Dead Sea, and the Dead Sea is totally arid. There's no river out of the Dead Sea, is there?

So nothing lives there. It just takes in and evaporates and that's it. Nothing living is there. But the Sea of Galilee, well, The river runs in and there's fish in abundance there and the river runs out.

It not only takes in but it gives out as well and preachers use that illustration about there can be no joy and peace without service. It's a basic point that you all understand. It's no good you just coming here week after week and taking in. the great truths from the Word of God, the great understanding of Jesus Christ and His salvation, without then a life of ministry. But you pray, Lord guide me to someone, guide me somewhere, use me this week, help me, teach me, that the God of hope fills us with all joy and peace. that we may overflow, that we may overflow then in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

That's why He fills us with joy and peace, not to make us feel good, but to overflow, to needy chilliwack. the needy school you go to, the needy neighbours that live around you. That's why.

Application: Custodians of Hope

There's much in this world I can doubt this morning. I can doubt the claims and promises of every candidate running in the election this week. I can doubt their promises. I can doubt their achievements.

I can doubt global warming. I can doubt windmill farms on the mountains and at sea. I can doubt the value of state religion giving lessons in morality. I can doubt many things that others believe.

I cannot doubt the goodness of God. I can't doubt that. I've been a Christian now since 1954. I've been the recipient of God's goodness day after day, year after year, decade after decade.

I'm one of these people who's experienced something of the God of hope and how he's changed my whole heart and life. And I want to abound in hope. to you and to all the world, that this world is held in the grip of the God of Hope, that He's got it tight. He's in control, the God of Hope. He's in control of my life and my destiny.

When bad days come, then it's the power of the Holy Spirit that just keeps me going. I can't attribute it to anything else. An energy wholly outside myself, that energy helps me, keeps me going, picks me up. When I fall again into sin, it picks me up.

No matter how unworthy We feel ourselves to be an incompetent, and our lack of success, the littleness of our growth, and so on. A sense of hope. Let's be churches where there's a great message of hope. I have good news for you, brother.

I have good news for every one of you. I have good news. I have a God of hope for you. For you to harvest your God and your Saviour.

To fill you with joy and peace as you trust in Jesus Christ. I have this wonderful message, the God of hope, that you can abound and overflow in hope. In a hopeless, despairing world, God has made ordinary Christians like you and me, custodians of this wonderful message of hope. May God bless His Word to us this morning.

Amen. Let us pray.

Closing Prayer

We pray, gracious and loving God, for Thy blessing to attend Thy holy word as we sought to explain it and honour Thee by it and yearn to know more of the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, filling us with joy and peace as we trust in Thee. O God of hope, fill us, fill this congregation of Thy people. We beseech Thee. and grant that the message of hope through Jesus Christ shall go out to the ends of the earth. We ask it in the Savior's name.

Amen.

Scripture References

• Isaiah 1:18
• Matthew 11:28-29
• Mark 10:45; 16:6
• Acts 8:8; 13:52
• Romans 15:13
• 1 Peter 1:3