Summary & Key points
All right, because we believe in Jesus, we have a hope, and that’s our message for today, isn’t it? Because we believe in God, whether the weather is gloomy outside or the situation in our life is up and down, we still can have hope. All right, that’s what I’m reaching for today. It’s good to see all of you guys here today this morning, and I know it’s a long weekend, so those of you watching from home, we pray that it also be as meaningful for you guys there as well.
Well, I want to start with a short story. This is a true story because it happened to me many years ago. I tried climbing. I’m not talking about climbing stairs, okay, or like, you know, going up three flights of stairs here. No, but I remember my friends, they, you know, climbing just took off in Malaysia—this was in the mid-90s—and they said, “Hey, come and join us, okay? We want to go climbing.” I said, “Okay, you know, how difficult can it be, right?” So I went, and I think we were over at Batu Caves’ side, and they had just started a climbing wall on the actual rock, right? And I looked at that, and it was like three stories high, okay, and I said, “I don’t think I can do this. You want me to just climb up this rock? What if I lose my grip and I fall and I’ll die, right?” And they said, “Don’t worry, this climbing is professional climbing, okay. It’s not just, you know, your schoolboy climb over some fence, okay, and you just go for it. No, it’s not that. They actually have professional safety gear.”
So the first thing we were taught—and remember, we went through a bit of this course—there’s this special harness which you wear, all right, which then is linked to a special thing called a carabiner, which then has a rope which passes through it, and that rope is very expensive—it’s an imported one, okay. So every time we say, “Oh, imported must be expensive,” oh, it must be good quality. Hopefully, it was; it saved my life, okay. So you put in the rope, but as you climb, there was somebody at the bottom holding on to that rope in a special way, you know, because he also has a safety harness there. And as you climb, if you were to make a mistake and somehow lose grip and you were to fall off, that person will be there—not to catch you—but the way they control the ropes is such that you won’t fall too much. And that gave me confidence. I said, “Oh, okay. Can somebody else do it first or not?” So I stood there watching, and this guy was climbing up, and he was pretty confident, but he still made a mistake, all right. One of the rocks came loose a little bit; he fell. As he fell back, because he was still tied onto the wall, the person down there, called a belayer, was holding on and watching, and when the person fell, he held on tight to the rope. And the way it’s tied is such that the person just fell one foot a little bit, so he grabbed back onto the wall and started climbing up, and he made it to the top.
Then it was my turn, okay, and I’m like, “Okay, let’s go.” All right, so I went up pretty safe, okay, went up midway. Lo and behold, missed my grip. My footing got wrong. That time, I was a bit fitter, okay; now I cannot really because I’ve got this thing blocking, okay. So now, cannot do that climbing, all right. But back then, can, okay. I gripped the wall, looked okay, okay. But midway, lost grip, fell. Thank goodness, my best friend—I trusted him—he was my belayer. If he was somewhere else, if he was talking and forgot to hold the rope, I would have slid all the way down and died. So the belayer is very important. The belayer who is holding the rope there must be very careful and attentive to what you’re doing and be able to anticipate when mistakes will happen, and he’s there holding the rope ready.
Happened to me. I fell, but just a little bit, about one foot. Came down, managed to grab back on, and I went up back to the top. Once I reached the top, they said, “Okay, now come down.” I’m like, “What?” And that’s a whole different story, yeah. Then you have to abseil down and so on. But all that gave me the confidence. You know, as I was going, I wasn’t concentrating because I’m afraid of heights, okay. Those who know me, I’m not the kind who, you know, cannot fly because it’s too high or whatever. But you come to the side of a building or a balcony, I’ll be inside the house, okay. And not only am I afraid for mine, I’m afraid for whoever is out there. All of a sudden, my mood different. “Get off there, don’t go so close, come back close.” But, “No, it’s okay.” “No, get off,” you know, because I’m nervous, right. I’m also afraid of heights. But somehow, I could climb three or four stories that day. Somehow, I could gather enough courage to actually go up there and just focus on climbing, knowing that if I made a mistake, somebody is there to catch me. I had hope that I could make it. I was confident that I could make it. That’s the idea for this morning—that our lives are like that. As we go on the journey called life, as we climb, we will face challenges. We will experience our mistakes. We will have dark times. But we can have hope because we are in a covenant, and that’s our title of the sermon today: We Have Hope—Our Hope in Covenant.
That’s what Pastor’s been talking about for the past four or five weeks, talking about this idea of covenant, which I will revisit a little bit. And the reason we can actually live our lives to the fullest, live our lives without fear, live our lives knowing that if we do make mistakes, okay, or we do go through tough times, the Lord is there for us. He’s our belayer. He’s the one holding the rope there. That gives us hope and confidence. And that whole system for me climbing—the whole system of the harness, the rope, okay, and all that—brings safety for us. We are in a system as well, and that system is called God’s covenant.
God’s covenant is for us; it’s with us. Desmond Tutu, okay, I don’t know if you know the name—it’s a bit funny, right. But if you know, Desmond Tutu is a bishop from South Africa. Those of you from Africa would know him. If you are a history buff, you would know him. He was the bishop of South Africa during the time of apartheid. Apartheid was a time in South Africa where blacks and whites were seriously segregated, okay. Blacks were second-class citizens. They were treated horribly. They didn’t have a chance for education; they didn’t have a chance for proper even transport, and they were looked down upon, okay. All the wealth went to the whites over there in South Africa. And it was this time where freedom fighters started to rise up, started to fight against the system. We know Nelson Mandela, right? Well, Nelson Mandela’s great partner and supporter was Desmond Tutu. Desmond Tutu was the bishop, and it was his mission to speak out against the injustices which he saw. And you know how long he did it for? He struggled through for 20 over years—from the 1980s all the way to the 1990s. And this is what Bishop Desmond Tutu said: Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.
Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all the darkness. As followers of Jesus, you know, the fact that we’re here, we believe there is a God who loves us. That gives us that hope. And in the midst of darkness, in the midst of the struggles you’re going through, I pray that this message will be relevant for you this morning.
Some of us are students, and our future is unclear. Some of us are struggling at work with a boss, with a financial situation. Some of us, our work is not too good—not prospering, businesses struggling, sales numbers dropped, collection weak, poor. But we want to know that in those tough times…
Some of us are struggling through serious health issues, serious mental health issues, and it is during that time, those times, we need to have hope—hope to be able to see that light despite all the darkness.
And who else better to think about than the life of Joseph? You know, you read in Genesis, the Book of Genesis, Joseph said this: You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives. (Genesis chapter 50, verse 20).
This is what Joseph said. Joseph, huh? You know the story of Joseph, right? Okay, so he basically was kidnapped, okay. Basically, his brothers got so jealous of him, all right, because he seemed to be the favored son, okay. So they kidnapped him, and they were about to sell him off, okay, as a slave, right. Oh, we all hear all these stories, “Oh, you be naughty, I’m going to sell you off to Thailand,” or something like that. Somehow, Thailand always gets the bad rep, okay. “Oh, you know, don’t be naughty, you’ll get sold off to Thailand,” all right. Right, so this is what actually happened to Joseph. And you know, if you were in that situation, how do you find hope, isn’t it? How do you find hope when your own brothers betray you, put you in a hole, and basically say, “Okay, let’s wait for the slave traders to come; they’ll take him and sell him away.”
How do you find hope in tough times like that? But Joseph hung on. He hung on because he knew his God. He knew that God would come in for him. He didn’t know when. And our situation is the same. We must know God. We must know the system we are in. We must know the kind of relationship we have with God. And that’s what Joseph knew because he knew, at the end of the day, that God—other people wanted to harm him, but God somehow can turn things around for good because he was in a covenant with him, to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.
Today, we want to explore where this hope comes from. When we’re talking about hope, yeah, I’m not talking about the usual non-biblical hope, okay. The usual hope is, “I hope it rains tomorrow,” okay. Or like, you know, if I’m going fishing, the thing I’ll say is, “I hope it doesn’t rain tomorrow,” right. And it’s kind of like 50/50, yeah. You just—this is not the hope talked about in the Bible. It’s not the hope where “I hope the guy turns up.” It’s not that kind of hope. The hope in the Bible is one of more of confidence. Hope meaning confidence, meaning that I’m sure it’s going to happen.
We think that hope is our 50-50: “Let’s hope it happens, you know. We roll the dice, hope we get six,” okay. It doesn’t work that way. That’s not the hope we’re talking about. The hope we’re talking about here is the confidence that God will step in, the confidence that God will do something, the confidence that God will turn things around for us, help us in our situation, alleviate the pain, move us out. That’s the hope we’re talking about.
So I want to just define that properly, and the idea is that we can have a confident hope that God will do something, that God will turn things around in our lives because, at the end of the day, we are in a covenant with him. All of us, when we believe in Jesus Christ, we enter into that covenant.
Covenant’s a big word, and I’m going to define this now because we generally don’t use it, right. I don’t remember writing any essays about it when I was young. You know, we see it in the Bible a lot, but other than that, no. Contract we know, promise we know, but covenant—a bit rare. In simple terms, covenants are formal, okay, and they are actually binding. They’re different from a promise. Yeah, I mean, somebody comes to say, “Hey, I promise to buy your house.” What are you going to do? “Uh, okay, he promised really, he’s going to buy my house. I start finding another place to live, okay. I’m going to start doing my renovations now, all right. I’m going to pump in 40K, all right, clean up the garden a little bit, all right. Bring in 20K, get some guys coming to give the whole place a paint job, all right.” So, you know, are you going to do that based on a promise? No.
But if he says, “Hey, I want to buy your house. Come, let’s go to lawyers now and get an S&P done.” Sale and purchase, okay. Then you’re like, “Ah, this guy serious.” But I’m not going to invest any money yet into renovating until I get the S&P signed, right. Just like, for example, you go and work for a job, isn’t it? You go look for a job, and somebody says, “Okay, I’m going to promise you’ll get it.” Older people will tell you, “Hey, promises are cheap, ah. Sign the employment contract first, then only you quit your other job.” Does it make sense or not? We all have gone through that before, right? That’s the difference. The covenant we have with God is that it’s formal, it’s binding, and it is something which God writes for us. We didn’t seek God to be in a covenant; he sought it for us.
A covenant also needs a guarantor, and that’s what makes it special. A covenant needs a guarantor. A guarantor is basically somebody who says this, and in Genesis 43:9, if you have your Bibles, you can just quickly turn to it, and let’s just have a look at that, okay. Here we are given an example of a covenant, and in a covenant, there is a guarantor.
The word guarantor is shown here in Genesis chapter 43, verse 9. All right, it says this: Judah offers to be a guarantor for his brother Benjamin when they go to Egypt to buy food. Judah tells his father Jacob, I myself will guarantee his safety. You can hold me personally responsible for him. If I do not bring him back to you and set him here before you, I will bear the blame before you all my life.
See the role of a guarantor, right? So that means he’s made a promise, “Ah, but I’m going to elevate the promise to a covenant. I’m going to make it a little bit more serious,” okay. Anybody can promise, and if you break the promise, you’ll just be known as a promise breaker. “Ah, this guy cannot be trusted, haha,” and we laugh about it and all that. But when you break a covenant, there are serious implications. There are serious repercussions. And here’s an example of Judah, who was the brother of Benjamin, saying, I myself will guarantee his safety. He becomes the guarantor. See, You can hold me personally responsible for him. That means whatever happens to this boy, okay, I’m going to find you for it. And I’m not just going to scold you, okay; I may have to take away your inheritance and do things to you to actually balance the situation.
That is the role of a guarantor. Judah acted as a guarantor for Benjamin. So when it comes to covenants, right, we’re going to look at some of the things, but the reason I’m bringing up this idea of a guarantor is because later on in my sixth point, okay—and all got subpoints as we all learn, right—no, no, at my sixth point, we’re going to know that Jesus is our guarantor for our covenant we’re in. And that’s what makes this covenant out of this world, makes this covenant we are in amazing.
So where are we? We’re talking about a covenant. It is more than a promise. It is even more than a contract because it is something which God enters in with you. God enters into it with all of us. He’s the one who initiates it, and I’ll talk a little bit about that in a short while. And we are all in this covenant, and this gives us hope.
So let’s look at some elements of God’s covenant with us. Why is this important? It’s because, just as I’m climbing up that hill, and I know the system and how it works, I know I have to have a solid harness tied on well. I know that carabiner—I must be able to trust. The rope must be good quality, and I can trust the belayer down below. I know the system. So it’s important for us to know what a covenant is about so that we can have that hope in covenant, so that when we go through difficult times, when we are unsure about God, we can look back, understand the covenant we’re in, and say, “Okay, I’m brave enough now, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to move forward, to face the dark times, to face the struggle I’m in, to face the unknown.”
We didn’t do anything to deserve to be in a covenant with God. We didn’t do anything for him to spark this contract—which is even higher than a contract—which has a guarantor in the name of Jesus. We didn’t need to do anything to deserve it. At the end of the day, it boils down to his everlasting love for us.
Jeremiah 31:3 says this. Let’s read this together: The Lord appeared to him from far away. “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”
Have you ever figured out and tried to wonder what an everlasting love looks like? If somebody comes up and tells you, “I love you with an everlasting love,” don’t believe them, okay? “My love for you is everlasting.” Don’t believe them. Why? Because a finite being cannot give infinite love, okay? A finite being—which can be born, grow, get sick, grow some more, and eventually die—cannot give a person everlasting love.
Because the idea of everlasting love is a love which lasts forever. So when somebody tells you, “I love you with an everlasting love,” don’t believe them. But when God tells you, “I love you with an everlasting love,” you can be 100% sure that’s true.
Most of the time, when we say, “We love you,” to one another, it’s not an everlasting love. We just love that person with a finite love. That’s the reality of it.
What’s a finite love, right? It’s the opposite of everlasting love. When somebody comes out and says, “I love you,” they are saying, whether it’s from a mother to a child—which is a very deep form of love—or a husband to a wife, girlfriend-boyfriend, at the end of the day, that kind of love, because it has a starting point, will have an ending point. Does that make sense, everyone? All right, human love has a starting point, and because it starts, it can start to grow. Your love can grow, all right, but it can also fade. We know husband and wife love can fade. Sometimes, between parents, love can fade and even disappear. Between parent and child, same thing.
So human love is that—it can fade. You know why? Because if there’s a starting point, there will be an ending point. If there’s a starting point, it can grow, it can shrink, and it can end.
God’s everlasting love is not like that. Let me explain to you what it is. God’s everlasting love: no starting, no ending. Now just put your mind on that a little bit. God’s everlasting love has no starting point. There was never a point in time when he didn’t love you, and all of a sudden, he said, “I’m going to love you now.” No, God’s everlasting love has always been there for you—no starting. And because there’s no starting, it will never end. There is no ending point.
And that’s what makes God’s everlasting love only possible for God. Because, by definition, an everlasting love can only be given by God. Does that make sense? Sorry, that’s how I talk to my students sometimes, okay. I say, “Make sense, everyone?” Okay, it’s a bit hard to grasp. But basically, the idea is this: that God’s love for us has always been there. That means even before we are created, he knew you were going to be formed in the womb. He knew already; the love was there already. There’s no starting point.
And because there’s no starting point, these are its implications to us: God’s love will never fade. God’s love for us will never change. God’s love for us will never disappear—regardless of what we do, regardless of how we behave, regardless of how we reject him. Because it’s a special godly love which is everlasting. And that’s the basis of the covenant. That’s why when we are unsure about ourselves, we look back at the safety net known as the covenant, and we realize that this covenant is birthed from an everlasting love. Take that to heart. Remember that.
Take that to heart. Remember that.
The second point is this: this is God’s initiative. The covenant which we are in—what is this covenant we’re in? Basically, God has promised us a few things. I’ll explain later. Once you believe in him, okay, he says, “Okay, you have now come into a covenant with me, and here are some benefits of the covenant.” You cannot break the covenant, but it’s his initiative. That’s the second point I want to look at.
Let’s read Genesis 6:17-18. It says this: For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die. But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark—you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.
Now, if you don’t know the background to this, this is the story of Noah’s ark. Okay, so what happened was God started a covenant with Adam and Eve. Then we know what happened in the garden, right? The covenant was kind of like broken, okay. So God had to find another way to work things out, to start another covenant. Do you see how intent, how much he wants to have a covenant with human beings? How much he wants to have that relationship sealed with us?
He can just let things go along, right? You know, like some people don’t want to get married. Wait how many years—they just want to let things go along. But God is not like that. God wants something serious with us, something which his own character can bind and tie down. And he says this. He says, “Okay, Noah, times are bad now. Sin has really gone crazy in this world.” Basically, that’s what he said, okay. So behold, I will bring floodwaters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven.
And that’s when he intervenes. Normally, God doesn’t intervene like this. Throughout history, we see he lets things go because of free will. He’s given us free will. But there are times he does intervene in a magnificent way, and he says, Everything that is on the earth shall die, but I will establish my covenant with you. He still wants it. He didn’t want to wipe out—not like us. Sometimes the computer hangs already. Yeah, what do we do? Just switch off, pull out the plug, do a hard reset, okay, and start again now, okay.
Thank God, God didn’t do that, didn’t he? Here, we wouldn’t be experiencing life; we wouldn’t have loved ones; we’d all be gone. But the Lord said, “No, everything on the earth shall die, but I’ve chosen a few people here, and I will continue my covenant. I will continue a relationship. I will continue with you, and you shall come into the ark—you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.”
Here, we see this: I will establish. That’s what the Lord says. I will establish. It is he who does the work in the covenant with us. Because what can we really do, right, in our weak state, in our compromised state? What can we really do? Nothing much. That’s why God sees it. He knows it, and he says, I will establish my covenant with us. He will establish his covenant with you.
He takes the initiative. And what I can tell you about this is, initiative shows intent. If you say to somebody, “Hey, let’s meet up,” right, but that person never calls back, okay, never replies to your message—no initiative. No initiative, at the end of the day, means not interested, right? That’s the reality, isn’t it?
We have people like that. “Oh, okay. Oh, maybe it could be us,” okay. “Oh, you know, I know this guy calling me after many years. Never call, all of a sudden call. Must be trying to sell me something, you know what I mean?” So after that, I don’t really reply to the calls. No initiative. Why? Because actually, I’m not really interested to meet up.
But here, we see this. We see God making the initiative because it shows his intent, which is to extend that everlasting love to us, to extend that relationship to us. Initiative shows intent. And initiative is directly proportionate to intensity.
Now, what does that mean? That means because he has initiative, it shows us how much he wants it, isn’t it? He started it with Adam and Eve. That kind of like broke down. Then he continued another covenant with Noah. After a while, that also kind of like broke down because men messed up. Then he started with Abraham. Then when he messed up and David messed up, and at the end of the day, Jesus—no more messing up.
He kept at it. God kept at it because, at the end of the day, the intensity of how much he wants to be with us in this relationship is so clear. He badly wants to be in a relationship with us.
Of course, we can mess it up, right? Noah could have messed it up by saying, “No thanks, all right, not interested.” But in God’s divine providence, he knew he would say yes. In God’s divine knowledge, he knew that some of us would say yes to him, and he continues that initiative. The initiative which God puts in tells us how much he wants us to be with him—that the God of the universe wants to be involved in our lives. He wants us to experience him and all the benefits of the blessing which comes in this covenant.
Don’t think this covenant we have with God is so that he can just suck us dry. No, it’s not ever the reason. The reason in this covenant is so that he can bless us, and from there, we bless the world. That is clear, and I’ll explain to you a little bit more. And because we know this, our lives must change.
Because we know that God really wants a relationship with us, he’s done so many over the generations. And the last one, the guarantor, was Jesus. And Jesus died, and he bore the sin on his own life. That will tell you the intensity to which the initiative was born and the intensity to which God loves us.
And knowing that, we must live changed lives. We must say no to certain things and yes to God. No to certain people and yes to God. Harder sometimes, huh? That’s where the Holy Spirit comes in.