Amen. Good morning church. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas. As pastor, as you said, it's Christmas time. There's nothing after Thanksgiving. So we might as well just celebrate. I don't know, if you're the type that's like, oh, no, we have to wait for the Christmas music. As the day after Thanksgiving, right, Carrie is on full blast, right? Like we all know, this is just how it goes. And it's not just culturally, but it's also in the church. This season of Advent really is a time for us to prepare our own hearts for the coming of Jesus. Now us as New Testament believers, we know that Jesus has come. And so we live in that reality. And this is the time for us to focus specifically, on the truth that Jesus has come to us and in the Incarnation, he has come to the earth, we are going to be in Luke chapter seven, this morning, you can turn in your Bibles or turn on your Bibles to Luke chapter seven. But we're going to be there. And we're going to start a new series this morning. And this series is called here a few weeks ago, I felt like the Lord was kind of speaking that we need a theology of here and not just there, that we don't need you to think that God is here with me or God is there when I get what I want, when my life is what I want to look like and where I'm at where I want to be. But God is with me here, here in the mess, that Emanuel means God with us. And we're going to take a look at the places where Jesus has embodied Emanuel the promise given to be the Messiah, and to bring exactly what we need to us, not just there where we want to be. But here exactly where we are. We're going to be in Luke, chapter seven, verse 11, through 15, Luke, chapter seven, verses 11, through 15. And it says this. Soon afterward, he went to a town called Nain. Jesus did and his disciples, and a great crowd went with him. And as he drew near to the gate of the town, behold a Woman, behold, a man who had died, was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the towns with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her. And he said to her, Do not weep. Then he came, and he touched the beer, and the bearers stood still. And he said, Young man, I say to you arise, in the dead man sat up, and began to speak. And Jesus gave him to his mother. What I want to talk about for the next few minutes that were together three things one, why you should have hope? To why hope is hard. In three, why hope should have you. I want to title this message, really simply hope is here. Hope is here. Would you pray with me for a minute? Lord Jesus, we love you. And God, we're expecting you to do something special here right now. Today, Lord, we affirm the authority of Scripture over our lives in this moment, and say, you speak to us. We welcome the Spirit of God and misplace here, not just there. When our lives look like what we want them to look like, but the Spirit of God here, would you speak to us? Would you glorify yourself? God, would we know you and be known by you? Lord, if you're not glorified in any other place, would you be glorified in this place? And if you're not glorified in any other heart, how would you be glorified in this heart? Father, we love you so much. In more importantly, you love us. Holy Spirit. Would you empower us to live look in love? More like Jesus today than we did yesterday? Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. Advent, hope is here speaking about that Jesus Christ in the person has now fulfilled the promise of being Emmanuel, God with us. And because of that reality, now here is where we can worship and here is where we can have hope not just they're here. Now, hope It is here. And this is important because if we're asking the question, why should you have hope? The answer is because we serve a God of hope. And if you are a follower of Jesus, something is either something good is either coming now or in the life to come. And so if you love Jesus, and if you are his guests what something good is coming, so you can have hope. Hope is here. Because he promises as a God of hope that now we can have hope. And how many of us know that inherent in hope is expectation, an expectation that something is going to happen. And if I could exhort this for just a minute, this word expectation, I want all of us in this room to have an expectation in this season, dare I even say in this room, that the Lord is going to do something in your life? Why? Because Advent the entire theology that Jesus has come to us means that wherever the presence of God is hope is, and if Hope is the expectation that something good is coming, I want you to raise your expectation that God is going to do something special in your life. Now the issue is when we wait and just assume that God will do something special without any of our participation at all. There was the people that did that. Jesus in the scriptures, he goes to a town, Nazareth, where he grew up. And the scripture say that when Jesus went back to his hometown of Nazareth, he could not do many miracles there because of their unbelief, their lack of faith, which means that Jesus who was doing miracles, walking on water, healing people with a word, touching beers, and people in coffins, and people being raised to life, who could who could call them a storm with a word who would touch lepers and they would be cleansed, that Jesus could not do many miracles in the place where there was not an expectation of him. So some of us think, Oh, well, God's just going to do something in my life, because I'm around church, I'm around him. I know we need an expectation, a faith that God is going to do something in this Advent season. Faith is the substance of things hoped for. Hope comes first. And then faith is birthed out of hope. And this teaches me that Jesus when it comes to Nazareth, is that before you can receive from Jesus, you first need to receive Jesus. If you want something from him, make a place for him to be welcomed in your life. You know, how you do that is through faith is through believing His promises. And if we want to believe if we want to receive something from him, we first need to receive him. Well, I believe that sometimes we don't even receive the full blessings that God truly has for our lives because we don't have the faith to receive them. We're not expecting God to do anything in our lives. And us as New Testament believers, we know Jesus has come, Amen. We're thankful that God is here. And Advent is all about the season where God came to us in the person of Jesus, I want to set an expectation that he's going to do something is the hope is meant to lead to faith. And if I could maybe define hope, I would say that hope is living like a God is working.