A shoot from a stump. We’ve seen that; that happens. The stump about which Isaiah speaks is the stump of David, cut down, cut off (11:1). In Columbia Lakes just now, there are a lot of hard feelings about certain trees cut down to develop lots. People don’t see the need of cutting down those trees; it saddens and angers them. I suspect Israel felt much the same way, grieving in Babylon. Why has this happened, this disaster, this stump? The prophets spend a lot of time telling God’s people why this happened and reminding them that there is still hope. It’s hard to feel hope when you’re looking at a stump, though, whether on a lot in Columbia Lakes, or the stump that life has just made of your life, your world, your future, your joy, cut down, cut off.

Sudden disappointment comes, unhappy surprises: a telephone call or knock on the door that knocks you to the ground. The look on the doctor’s face just before you get the news. The silence of a spouse about to ask for a divorce. You may remember watching the Challenger space shuttle that day, up and up, then something different, unexpected, something that didn’t look quite right. We understood without wanting to believe it: it was like our hopes, suddenly cut down, cut off.

Ezra, Nehemiah, and the late prophets Haggai and Zechariah briefly mention descendants of David;[1] they don’t seem to amount to anything. The glory is gone. Glory days, yeah, they’ll pass you by. By the time of the birth of Jesus, Herod was king, and he was no descendant of David. The only descendant of David we hear about is Joseph, a carpenter or maybe some sort of day laborer, working in humility and obscurity far from Jerusalem, way off north in Nazareth, barely Jewish territory, by that time. We rarely, if ever, rise to the level of our famous ancestors. They become legends, and who can measure up to a legend?

But God’s people knew that God had said, through Isaiah and other prophets, that there was hope. The ancient Greeks had a fanciful way of viewing hope. You may have heard of Pandora’s Box: a woman named Pandora was given a box but told that she mustn’t open it. Well, Pandora did about as well with that as Eve with the fruit. For Pandora and all humanity, the result was similarly disastrous: inside the box was all the evil, hard, bad things that happen to us—disease, hunger, poverty, war, hatred, despair, and so on. There was one little thing left in the box, though. It was pale and looked feeble, as if it lacked the strength to get out of the box. It looked malnourished. It didn’t look like much. It was hope.

Hope doesn’t seem like much to cling to. Wealth, yes. Beauty, sure. Popularity, of course. Intelligence, naturally. Hope, though, is strangely resilient, tough, durable, much stronger than we had imagined when we first contemplated it from our vantage of ease, comfort, prosperity, and health. Hope proves to be our true lifeline.

Consider what weak, wan hope gives us: courage, a future worth living for, striving for, perseverance and resolve. We need these gifts for the long waiting, the struggling, in this life. God’s people knew it then; we know it now. We’re not good at waiting. We’re not good at suffering, though I suppose some pride themselves a little on being long-suffering and are happy to tell just about anyone all about it. We don’t know what to do about our own troubles, let alone the troubles of others. We shy away from conversations that get into our hurt, our fear, our worry—we don’t like to talk about these things, and we have learned from painful experience that others don’t want to hear. Hurt, fear, and worry make us feel weak. Nobody likes to feel weak. This is especially true of people who claim that God Almighty has claimed them. If anybody should feel upbeat and ready for anything, it ought to be us Christians, right? Yet so often we can feel tired, worn down, anxious, a bit angry and confused. And what can we do?

We can pray. Prayer is a place where we can talk about our hurt, our fear, and our worry—where we’re supposed to! Prayer is a place where we can graciously be with others in their hurt and fear, and confusion—we can be with them in these challenging things and be together with them before God. Often, we pray alone, and that is good. Sometimes, we pray with others, and that is very good. Prayer requires three things: faith, hope, and—can you guess?—love. When you’re staring at a stump, feeling a little shocked, a little hurt, a little dazed and confused, and more than a little worn out by it all, all this life, all this trouble, turn together to God. Turn to God in prayer, as God’s people have always done.

Prayer without faith is not prayer. If you’re praying, there is faith: it doesn’t matter in the moment whether that faith seems weak—consider how weak and ineffectual hope looked at first. Now consider how strong hope proves to be, especially when there is faith. Faith feeds hope, and hope feeds faith. If there is no hope, there isn’t much point in talking about faith; if there is no faith, there isn’t much point in talking about hope. Miracles happen through one means only, one being only: God. Has a miracle never happened in your life? Isn’t faith a miracle? Ask someone who rejected all that God nonsense who later came to faith.

What is prayer to a God whom you don’t love? What is hope in a God you don’t love? We can serve God out of a sense of duty for a time, as though we owed it to God, but then we get tired of that, and we figure we’ve pretty much paid our debt, done our time, and we find our hearts more interested in other things. Oh, we never stop believing or anything like that. It’s just that other matters and pursuits seem more satisfying, more enjoyable. The Bible tells us all about that. The prophets have a lot to say about that. That stump is there as a constant reminder of that.

The God who loves us doesn’t put up for long with our wandering hearts. The God who has infinite regard for the honor and glory of His name doesn’t put up for long with our wandering hearts. In love and in righteousness He does something about it; He promised He would. The ancient Israelites lived in full knowledge of what God said He would do, and they continued to live in that hope. Through Isaiah, God says He will cause a branch to arise from the stump. God promises His people that He will give them hope, because He loves them through it all: all their mistakes, their confusion, all their wandering and stumbling, all their sin. God doesn’t stop loving us, even when we stop loving Him, when our hearts are more infatuated with whatever, than with God.

And we wait. Just like those faithful of long, long ago. We wait and, in the meantime life is rough: work is rough, family is rough, the past is rough, the prospect for the future looks rough; no job, no friends, far from family, bills due, sick and kind of sick of it all. And the prophet speaks, just then, the prophet calls: God will give you hope. God will give you a future. God will give you a king, a savior, His love, His promise, your life.

Has it ever occurred to you, beloved, that the one whom God sends us is our very life? He is the one, the power of God, through whom God called us into existence, and now through Jesus Christ, God calls us once more into life: the life of God, infinite, eternal, joyful. Why would we say no? Are our idols that pretty? Is our popularity among our non-Christian, or nominally Christian friends so important to us, that we would sacrifice our future to such an idol? We’re taught that the way of success requires performance and productivity—our schooling and our jobs teach us that. It’s easy to begin to view our faith along those same lines, as though what God wants from us is performance and productivity—the Bible talks quite a lot about that, it seems, after all: bearing fruit, and such.

But our hope is not in our performance, not in our productivity. Our hope is in the one who gives us the Spirit to do all that we do to glorify God, to show our love for Him and even, yes, our fear of Him: our fear of disappointing Him, of shaming ourselves before Him. Isaiah tells us that this righteous branch from that hopeless stump of bygone glory will have the Spirit of God upon him, and that he will know God, and honor God, and find the perfection of joy, the fulfillment of joy, in obedience (11:2-3). He will find the fullness of joy in obeying God because the fullness of joy is found in God. Our performance and productivity are not our means of getting into God’s good graces, let alone our way of getting into heaven! Our performance and productivity in whatever way God gives it to us to be productive for Him, are the fruit of the joy we find in God, the ongoing harvest of the faith, hope, and love we have for God, which are themselves God’s gifts to us. We don’t give God anything He hasn’t already given us! The only thing we have that God hasn’t given us is our sin, working overtime to kill hope, root up faith, and extinguish love.

In this coming week, I invite you to spend much time with this passage from Isaiah. Get this Word in your heart. There are great riches, here. Here, the treasury of heaven is opened to you: take, fill yourselves. In Jesus Christ, the gift of God’s Word for us, God gives us faith, gives us hope, gives us love, and tells us, repeats ongoingly, that we don’t need to be afraid, any longer. In Christ, we don’t have to be afraid of the past, any longer. We don’t have to be afraid of whatever might be happening now. In Christ, we don’t have to be afraid of the future. The fullness of the knowledge of the Lord (11:9) is growing in us, by the Spirit. That knowledge brings heavenly peace, grows great love, and, by faith, scatters fear to the wind.

God gives you the Spirit right now to start living for Him right now. In the Spirit, Christ’s gift to His Church, we can be in fervent, faithful prayer from the depths of our hearts. We can be praying, by ourselves and together, for the Holy Spirit to be with us to help us to begin living up to God’s standard, starting now.

We want to make Christianity attractive. We want others to know this love, grace, and hope. The church does all kinds of things to make Christianity attractive, yet we faithful may be overlooking one important thing: the attraction of Christianity is not me or you, the hymns we sing or this building. Lord knows it isn’t the sermons I preach! It isn’t our mission projects or how often we’re in the newspaper. The attraction of Christianity is Jesus, whom we show, introduce to others through Jesus-centered, Jesus-oriented living; through us, through believers, the Spirit is filling the land with the knowledge of the Lord. The Spirit is starting with you. With whom will you share the Spirit? With whom will you share hope?

Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!

               [1] See Ezra 3:2, 5:2, Nehemiah 12:47, several instances in Haggai, and Zechariah 4.