 So friends, it is good to be home. Franciscan University is actually my alma mater. I came here as a young man, lived in St. Francis' dorm, ate in the calf, hung out here in the fieldhouse, learned so much, grew so much. I came here as a 19-year-old man thinking I understood what it meant to be a Christian. I left, after my time here, a well-formed disciple, ready to do whatever the Lord might ask of me. So it is a blessing to be here. Now every time I tell people I went to Franciscan University, what is the one question I always get? Did you have Dr. Hahn for a professor? And I have to tell you, when I was here, I studied history and philosophy. So I actually never had Dr. Hahn as a professor here at Franciscan University. Later, when I was in seminary and I was sent to Rome, I went to Holy Cross University, where Dr. Hahn is also on the faculty. And it was there that I had him as a professor. So now really to confuse people when they say, oh, you went to Franciscan University? Yes. Did you have Dr. Hahn for a professor? Yes. Oh, but not at Franciscan University. That's the good university of the Holy Cross. And of course, I have to begin to explain that. I have a vivid memory as a student at Holy Cross of sitting in this classroom. Dr. Hahn was lecturing. And the windows open, because the Italians hate air conditioning. The windows open, and I'm listening to Dr. Hahn. I can look out the window and I see St. Peter's Dome. And I can see St. Peter's Dome. I'm listening to Dr. Hahn lecture on the Covenant Theology of Pope Benedict XVI. And I thought to myself, it is great to be Catholic. It is great to be Catholic. And that's what is on my heart this evening. As I look at each of you, I'm filled with that same sense of wonder and gratitude. It is great to be Catholic. It is great to be here with you this evening. It's great to be able to put the battle-ready guard down and just be with fellow believers and celebrate Jesus Christ and the faith we share, the faith He has given to us. It is good to be Catholic. This evening, I want to talk about the important virtue of hope. Hope is attacked. Hope has been diminished. In fact, of all the virtues, we can imagine that we need as a church to be a healthy and strong church, and that society needs in order to be a strong civilization of all the virtues we can think of, the one virtue we sometimes miss is to make sure we add to the list the virtue of hope. And I would add, as a multi-illogian, it should be at the top of the list because we have forgotten hope. We have either accepted a false definition of hope or an incomplete definition of hope. And friends, if we don't get hope right, we're not going to get the rest of the virtues right. Jocity, kindness, compassion, none of those are properly ordered if we don't first have hope, if we don't fan into flame the hope that has been placed within us by the living God. Tonight, I want to speak about hope. Now, to my students at Belmont Abbey, whenever we begin a course, I always tell them I stress biblical context, biblical context. In fact, my students now, if you were to ask about Father Kirby at Belmont Abbey College, I would hope and I've heard that one thing they say about me is biblical context. Can you say that? Biblical context. If we're going to talk about Jesus Christ, if we're going to talk about the way of the Lord Jesus, we better have a biblical context. Amen, friends. We need a biblical context because if we're not engaging the written word of God, if we're not allowing the living word of God to be a part of our conversation, then we're missing the very fuel and the power that we need in order for that conversation to take root. But if we're a word of God, it dwells richly within us. And if we're going to talk about Jesus Christ, we're going to talk about the truth. If we're going to talk about what it means to follow him, we have to have a. Amen, friends. So I think tonight I need to follow my own advice. And I'd like to give you a biblical context. And a biblical context can either be exegesis or isegesis. So we're either drawing from the text, or we are discerning and bringing something to the text. And what I want to do is I want to take this to Matthew chapter 4, excuse me, Mark chapter 4. It's a story and an encounter between the apostles and the Lord that we are familiar with. The Lord Jesus early in the morning tells his disciples, go and get in the boat. And let's go to the other side. And I'll meet you there. And as the apostles are going across to see a galley, a storm comes. And they're scared, terrified. And the Lord is sleeping. And they cry out, Lord, help us. And he wakes up and he rebukes the storm. And he turns to the apostles. And at first you might almost think, well, he's going to say, good job, guys. You turned to me for help, right? But instead he says to them, oh, you have little faith. Do you not still believe? Do you want to talk about that? We want to use that as our biblical context this evening as we speak about hope. Let's go to the actual sacred narrative and let's read the exact account given to us again in Mark chapter 4. On that day when the evening had come, he said to them, let us go across to the other side. Did you hear that? Let us go across to the other side. The Lord didn't say, let's go to the middle. Let's see a galley and let's drown, did he? He told them the destination. And he told them he was going to be with them. Let us go to the other side. And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat just as he was. That's a peculiar expression, isn't it? Just as he was. But the Lord has just been teaching and preaching and doing miracles and signs and wonders. He's exhausted. He's thirsty. And we know so because when he gets in the boat, he falls asleep. So they take him just as he was. Other boats were with him. It's interesting that when we usually recount this story, we forget about the other boats. So it wasn't just the apostles in their boat. There were victims of this storm. There were other boats. A great windstorm arose and the waves beat into the boat so the boat was already being swamped. If you ever been on the Sea of Galilee, you can see, of course, this is a massive sea. Imagine being in the middle of this. And suddenly there's this storm comes. And it's so violent and so strong that the water is coming in the boat and it looks like it's going to sink. But he was in the stern on the cushion. I love the fact that Mark tells us that there was a cushion there. The next time you want to take a nap, you say, I'm going to join the Lord on the cushion. But notice that in the English translation, it stresses the cushion. Because the cushion was placed in the stern. That's where the captain slept, the leader. And so we see the acknowledgement by the apostles that Jesus Christ is Lord. He's the leader of this band. And the Lord is sleeping. He is exhausted. His human nature is exhausted. And we know that he's exhausted because a storm has just come and this boat is about to sink and the Lord is still sleeping. And they woke him up and they said to him, Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing? You can almost feel the tension. The storm's still there. The water's still in the boat. And what are they going to do? They're going to start attacking the Lord Jesus and saying, don't you care? He woke up in my own composition of place at this particular scene. When I hear that account, he woke up, it reminds me as a child when I and my siblings would accidentally wake up our dad while he was napping on Sunday. Yeah, you laugh because you know, don't you? Just run. No excuse is sufficient. So they woke him up. He woke up and rebuked the wind and he said to the sea, peace, be still. Man, look at that power, huh? That power existed when he was sleeping. That authority was still there. Peace, be still. Then the wind ceased and there was a dead calm. He said to them, why are you afraid? I suspect that the Lord Jesus wants to say that to many of us today. Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith? And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, who then is this that even the wind and the sea obey him? The Lord had told them, let us go to the other side. He had told them the destination, he was with them. Let the winds come, let the waters fill the boat, let the boat be shaken, but let the disciples of Jesus Christ place their hope in him. For he has said, let us cross to the other side when our hope is more in the wind and the waves and the water and in the boat rather than in Jesus Christ. Then we are filled with fear. Then we do not know the way. Even though he has told us, let us cross to the other side and we begin to act and live as if we are orphans rather than the children of God greatly loved and well cared for. Imagine if the boat had sunk. The Lord was with them. So we know that within context the boat was not going to sink. For he had told them, but let's go to the other side. They lost hope, they lost hope. They let fear choke hope right out of their hearts and they were massively distressed to the point where they are going to chastise the Lord. Do you not care that we are perishing? You can imagine the Lord Jesus said, he would say to them, who told you that you were perishing? There was some other liar early in salvation history who said such a thing. Who told you that you were perishing? I told you that we were crossed to the other side. That's our biblical context this evening, friends. In order for us to understand hope. To not let the winds, the waves, or the stability of the boat to be the source of our hope. But as the winds come and the winds blow and as the boat is shaken, to use those as even greater opportunities to cling ever more deeply to Jesus Christ and to declare our hope is in him and to dispel whatever fear wants to take our hearts and to remind ourselves of the promise that he has given to us. Come, let us cross to the other side. Now with this biblical context in place, I would like to now talk a little bit about hope in order for us to do that, we have to go to the beginning of salvation history. We have to go to the beginning of time. We know that God, our Father loves us so immensely that when he created our nature, he blessed us with Prater natural gifts. Prater means beyond. These were gifts that were beyond our nature, but not beyond the realms of creation, so he blessed us. They're not necessarily supernatural gifts above our nature, they're Prater natural, they're beyond our gifts. He blessed us with Prater natural gifts. He blessed us with the supernatural gift of sanctifying grace, also called deifying grace. This designation of grace is very important because this is the grace that makes us the children of God. This is the grace that allows us to be members of God's family. And he blessed us with that sanctifying grace, which is a supernatural gift, but he also blessed us with Prater natural gifts. There were three of them. And my goodness, do we miss those Prater natural gifts? The first Prater natural gift that we would know immediately, whatever we would need to know, in order to love God and to fulfill our vocations. Our first parents didn't need to have classes on how to garden and farm. They just received all the knowledge they needed in order to take care of the garden. Our parents could communicate, first parents could communicate directly with God and receive from him whatever they need to know, and they could remember it and they would know it. Wouldn't it be great to not have to learn? Or more importantly, we would not have to remember? The things of God and the things that are relating to our vocations. So we had infused knowledge. Secondly, our bodies shared in the immortality of our souls. This is so important. And then of course, the third Prater natural gift was inner harmony, which means our passions just naturally, casually obeyed our reason. Wouldn't that be nice? As we think about these gifts, these Prater natural gifts, and as we think about sanctifying grace, immediately what should come to mind is the realization where we don't have those gifts anymore, something happened, and that whatever happened, we got a world that God didn't want for us. I look at people who view the fallenness and the brokenness and the hurt and the heartache and the sufferings of this world, and they think that that's what God wants. That that's what he has willed. No, friends, we have chosen that. In fact, when we go before the fall and we look at the sanctifying grace and the Prater natural gifts, we see the world and the life that God wanted for us. He wanted us to be members of his family. He wanted to walk with us in the breeze of the evening, Genesis tells us. And he wanted us to have these gifts in order for us to have peace, peace with ourselves, peace with one another, peace with creation, peace with God. But our first parents thought they knew better. Let's say they listened to whispered lies. God's keeping come something from you. You can do better without God. You shouldn't trust God so much. And the other variations of the lies that the evil one told our first parents. That the lies the evil one tells us. And our first parents believed it. Oh, how great the fall. How great the fall. The spiritual masters liken it to a beautiful, beautiful ornate church. You can imagine this beautiful shrine designed for worship and it's ornate and it's immaculate and it's spectacular and it's majestic and it's beautiful and it provokes awe. And then someone comes and they throw a grenade into that beautiful shrine. And the grenade goes off. The wall sustained a blast but everything inside is thrown into discord and chaos. And that's what original sin did to our nature. So our now fallen human nature. And we lost sanctifying grace. We lost the friendship with God. We lost our status as his sons and daughters. We lost the preternatural gifts. God. You can imagine that if we were just left in such a state, then our first parents would have immediately fallen to some type of desolation and immediate despair and that might have been the end of the human story. But in the midst of the discipline which God allowed which was just letting the consequences of the decisions of our first parents played themselves out. In the midst of that discipline, God gave a promise. It was a promise of hope that the offspring of the woman will come and crush the head of the serpent who has done this. He will strike at its head and he will strike at his heel that a Messiah is going to come and anointed Savior will come. He will be a wounded Savior. He will redeem us through motherhood. I think it's beautiful that as our damnation came through our mother Eve, our salvation will come through our mother Mary. But he will bring salvation through suffering. He will be victor, but a wounded victor. It's interesting how we forget the second part of that, don't we? It's okay, the apostles on their way to a maze. They forgot that too. And the Lord had to remind them, right? Why the Messiah had to suffer. A promise was given, a promise of hope. And God's people held that promise through the ages. The prophets emphasized that promise and exaggerated and emphasized and stressed and wanted to highlight the immense hope that God's people have in a God who makes promises and fulfills them. And then we come to the fullness of time. And the fullness of time, the Lord Jesus came to us as Savior and he comes in order to redeem us. And the gift that he gives us that is infinitely superior to anything we deserve is to get to sanctifying grace. To be friends of God, to be members of his family, to be his sons and daughters, me, fallen, sinful, Jeff Kirby to stand before him and say, I am true son, that's sanctifying grace. And the Lord Jesus restored that by the power of his passion, death, and resurrection. And perhaps you're thinking, well, why didn't he just restore those preternatural gifts? That would have been nice, right? But instead of giving us back the preternatural gifts with the Lord Jesus, he gives us something greater than the preternatural gifts. Our aesthetic tradition tells us that instead of restoring the preternatural gifts, God blesses us with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. That by cooperating with the grace of God and these virtues that are infused, placed within our souls in holy baptism, that by cooperating them, we don't need infused knowledge anymore because we have faith. And it will be faith that allows us to understand God as he gives witness to himself. And we won't need the harmony between reason and the passions because now we have love. And there's no greater force, no greater power than theological love that desires to love God above all things, even to the point of ordering passions according to reason. And then we have the theological virtue of hope. Oh, this is the good one. The theological virtue of hope is given to us by which we can now hope, trust that eternal life will be given to us in Jesus Christ. We no longer need the mortality of our bodies to be healed in order to have immortality because we have something greater. We have resurrection. And it's the exercise of theological hope, the desire to be with the Lord Jesus, to be in eternity, to be with him forever in heaven. It is that theological hope that the Lord has given to us infinitely superior to the former preternatural gifts. And it's hope that we have to use. It's hope that we need to put to work. We look at the brokenness of this world and if we're not careful, it eclipses our hearts and we forget ourselves. If we're not careful, we look at the sin and the darkness. And we begin to allow those to overwhelm us and we forget that we are the children of God. We are children of hope. When we look at the brokenness and the fallenness and the sinfulness and the heartache and the difficulties of the world, that should compel us to greater hope. Thy kingdom come, Lord. Thy kingdom come. This fallenness is not your kingdom. And I do not place my hope in the fallenness of this world for it will disappoint me and it will lie to me. I place my hope in you. We exercise theological hope. We put our hope in Jesus Christ. We put our hope in eternal life. Our moral tradition tells us that the end does not justify the means. So true. But the end orders the means. It orders the means. If I get in my car and I say I'm gonna go somewhere and that's it, I'm lost. But if I get in my car and I say, I'm going to Ontario, Canada, now I know where to go. It's given order to my travels. And if we put our hope in heaven and in Jesus Christ and the promises that he has given to us, it gives order and structure to the journey. We know where we're going. We are not lost. We are not orphans. We are the children of God. The Lord loves us so much that he made himself not only home, but the way home. We put our trust in Jesus Christ. And it's precisely in living in the midst of a fallen world and having to deal with that fallenness in ourselves and our loved ones and our families and society that we take up our cross and we work out our salvation in Jesus Christ. The Christian way is not an easy way. The Christian way is to enter into the arena by which grace will battle against pride. And please God allow grace to be victorious. The Christian way of life is a constant death to oneself. Why can't things just be easy? Why can't they just be comfortable this one time? Why can't everything just come together? Because this isn't heaven and this is a fallen world. And it's precisely by having to deal with that disappointment and the struggles and the difficulties that we cling to the cross. And we cling to the cross because the Christ we need is nailed to it. And we carry that cross with the Lord Jesus and we work out our salvation. St. Teresa of Avila says that in life we either embrace the cross or we're dragged by it. Don't you know people that you love? Miss you the fallenness of the world they get so angry and bitter and so miserable and then they become instruments of misery? We see that. If we're honest, we can say we see it in ourselves sometimes. We are called to die to that fallenness, to cooperate with grace and to allow the Lord Jesus to work out salvation within us. Theological hope is so important that St. Paul will go so far as to write in Romans chapter eight that we are saved by hope. And our beloved Pope ended the 16th wrote an entire cyclical under that name saved by hope. Listen to this selection from that encyclical. Let us say it once again. The capacity to suffer for the sake of the truth is the measure of humanity. Yet this capacity to suffer depends on the type and extent of the hope that we bear within us and that we build upon. And all comes down to what we're placing our hope in. I look at the misery and the lives of a fallen world that keeps wanting to convince us that we can hope in its fallenness and somehow achieve eternal life. But those are all lies. People place their trust in government. If we just have the right political party then everything will be okay. If this person was in the White House it would all be all good, it'd be good, great. If the medical community just got their act together if we just had some scientific breakthroughs then everything would be wonderful. If I just had enough money. If the ends could just meet. If my marriage could finally be happier if my children could just be a source of peace then everything would be wonderful. This would be great, yes. You see how it works. So deceptive. And if we're not careful we can be willing suppliance to the false promises of a false God. Earthly hope lies to us. And we have to make sure we keep our focus on Jesus Christ that we in the midst of the fallenness and the brokenness remind ourselves all of this is worth it. Because of the promise that awaits us in Jesus Christ the promise of the resurrection given to us in eternal life. If we jump back to the preternatural gifts I think that so often times what happens is in our fallenness we keep wanting to go back to those preternatural gifts which you keep trying to create our own version of that preternatural gift of the immortality of the body. It's amazing how many people are like oh I'm gonna do all this stuff and I'm gonna live and so on. I tell people I think about 75 or 80 I'll be ready to check out. Now wait until I'm 75 or 80 it'll change but okay. But we've forgotten a certain understanding of the holy death or a peaceful death like why do you want to stick around forever in this world? But we hear this people keep wanting to create these false heavens, these false kingdoms. They want to create their own version of the preternatural gifts, they want to be God. They want to be the ones that are in charge of their own lives. But again our hope is in eternal life. Listen to another quote by Pope Benedict. In this sense it is true that anyone who does not know God even though he may entertain all kinds of hope is ultimately without hope. Without the great hope that sustains the whole of life. Man's great true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God who has loved us and who continues to love us to the end until all is accomplished. That's hope dear friends. That's the hope that is promised to us in Jesus Christ. That's theological hope. Listen to Saint Paul as he describes hope in Romans chapter eight. I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed. Do you believe that? That all the present sufferings are nothing compared to the glory that will be revealed in Jesus Christ. For the creation waits in eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. For the creation was subjected to fertility not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it. In hope that creation itself will be set free from the bondage of decay. It will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. Have you ever allowed yourself just to sit with Romans chapter eight? And perhaps this portion of chapter eight? Because there's a lot of brokenness and hurt in your life or disappointment with church leadership or where the church is or their sufferings in terms of health or bad relationships or all the above. In those moments, if you sit with chapter eight of Romans I will bet my bottom dollar and I'm a priest, I don't have a whole lot of dollars but it's okay. But I'll bet my bottom dollar that the Lord will bless you with holy tears because every time I read this portion of chapter eight it takes a lot to hold back the tears. Creation waits in eager longing for the revelation of the children of God. It has been subject to fertility, to the brokenness and the hurt. We await its redemption. St. Paul continues. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now and not only the creation but we ourselves. Don't you groan, dear friends? Well, you see the brokenness and the fallenness and the evil of our world and we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit grown inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies for in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope for who hopes for what is seen but if we hope for what we do not see we wait for it with patience. And in light of this teaching, you can understand why right after this portion of chapter eight St. Paul will move into the cult of prayer and his teachings on prayer which Dr. Sree is going to address in the second talk. You know, in the ancient world, dear friends, we sometimes hear the myths and we hear that myth about Pandora's box and when we read it as people imbued with a relative Christian spirit in what remains of the Christian West we read that and we think oh, this is okay, this is a good story because Pandora opens up the box and then all the diseases and the sufferings and everything in the world come out and so on. And but at the bottom of the box is hope. And again, we read that as oh, this is good, like okay, so these false gods in their use of humanity has played toys, at least they gave them hope, right? But if you take it out of the Christian context and you read it within their historical context, hope was the worst curse of all. It was the greatest suffering of all because hope in the Greco mind was a hope in oneself and a hope in oneself doesn't take us very far. And so the idea of giving humanity that hope, well they'll hope in themselves, hey we can do it if we just all get together, if we just have the resources and if we just all get along and hold hands and sing kumbaya, then we'll be all right, huh? Yes, this is it, right, okay, yeah. It doesn't happen, it doesn't happen. So hope in that Greek myth was actually expressing the greatest of curses. Now that's important for us to understand because when St. Paul begins to speak about Father Abraham in Romans chapter four and St. Paul's writing from the Greco-Roman mind, St. Paul tells us that Father Abraham hoped against hope and there are some people who think that Paul's just simply being poetic in this. Paul's not being poetic, Paul's making a very actually pertinent and strong point that was needed then that's needed now. Father Abraham didn't believe in the hope of this world, he hoped against that. The hope that says, hey, we can do it, woo-hoo, we got this. Father Abraham was hoping against that, no, I can't do this, I don't have this. And in spite of that false hope, he hoped in God. Now what's interesting is in Romans chapter four, the context is actually God blessing Father Abraham as the father of all nations and the father of both Jews and Gentiles. But let's say this teaching just applied to Genesis chapter 22. The defining of Isaac and the testing of Father Abraham. You know the story. God tells Father Abraham, go, I want you to sacrifice your son, your only one, your beloved. Isaac, the gift of laughter. And Father Abraham obeys. Takes the boy with him and so on. And I like how the scriptures refer to him as a lad or a boy, but actually we think that he was probably around 17 years old or so at this time. So he could have beaten up his father, who was elderly, right? But he trusted his father. Father Abraham takes Isaac up and he says to the servants, the boy and I will be back in a few days. God says to Abraham, off your only son, okay. Abraham hoped against hope. He knew the goodness and the kindness and the providence of God and he takes his son and he tells the servants, we will both be back here in a couple of days. It takes Isaac up. Of course, he's going to offer the sacrifice the angel stays his hand. Abraham hoped against hope. He wasn't gonna believe the lies or the deception of a fallen world. He's going to constantly place his heart, his mind, his strength in the providence of God. He was going to hope in God and rely on God and know that God's promises are greater than man's false hopes. And Father Abraham held the line. Listen to what St. Paul writes. Jumping back to Romans chapter four. Yet he, Abraham, he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God. But was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he promised. In our discipleship, in our lives, dear friends, have we been fully persuaded that God has the power to do what he has promised? And is our faith strong enough? Has it been fully persuaded so that we will place our hope in God and allow that hope of the resurrection to order everything we do? I don't want to forgive this person. In fact, I seek vengeance upon this person. I die to myself for my hope is in the Lord Jesus and it's that hope that orders everything else I do. I give mercy. I die to myself. This person here who was unkind and abrupt and cruel. I will not listen to the lies of a fallen world and respond to evil with evil. I am a Christian, I will die to myself and I will respond to cruelty with kindness. I will take this fallen world by the grace of God, raise your right side up and show a world in fertility and subject to decay, the beginning of the revelation of the children of God. For our hope is in the Lord and in resurrection which means everything we do. We give mercy, we give kindness, we serve. Even when people are taking advantage of us, we give. We do what the Lord commands, we seek to follow the way of the Lord Jesus and we show a willingness to die to ourselves. Cleaning to the cross, knowing the hope that it promises and staking our entire lives on that hope, knowing that God has the power to do, to fulfill what he has promised. Years ago I took a group of high school students to Rome and Poland and Rome was fun, especially if you're young, Rome was real fun. And after that we went to Poland and they were able to see the various places of Pope Saint John Paul II, but then we went to Auschwitz and we were able to arrange through the Center for Dialogue and Prayer for these young men to encounter a survivor from the concentration camp. The man survived because he was a translator, he could speak English, German, Russian, and multiple other languages. That's why he was allowed to remain alive, he worked in the office. He's communicating through an interpreter because of older age his English was relatively broken. And he asked the young men they could ask any questions that they wanted. Of course he asked very questions, what was it like, what was your day-to-day, what was the greatest struggle. By the way he said his greatest struggle was not the cruelty of the guards but the cruelty that fellow prisoners showed to one another. But one young man who later went off to Duke University and has lost his faith, should have gone to Franciscan University, right? Well young man had the fortitude to ask this survivor, did Auschwitz make you question your belief in God? I go, this is not a great question. That's a question right from the heart. Let's rephrase the question to you. The greatest suffering or the greatest evil or the greatest hardship or unkindness that was ever done to you or true love one, did that make you question your belief in God? So the young man asked this survivor, did Auschwitz make you question your belief in God? And the survivor as it was being translated to him gave the young man the death stare. Death stares are bad in most cultures. I know my own Irish culture, it's not good. The polls have perfected it. I didn't know what was gonna be said, but I just know that was a pretty intense death stare. The man stared at the young man and then began to answer. He said Auschwitz make me question my belief in God. God is the one who got me through Auschwitz. Auschwitz didn't make me question God. Auschwitz made me question humanity. God did not open Auschwitz. Humanity opened it. Boom, that was over 15 years ago, I still remember his answer. You can take the wisdom of that survivor and apply it to your greatest hardship, difficulty, tragedy, trauma in your life. And if you allow that trauma or that difficulty to diminish your belief in God, or did you realize that that was an opportunity to cling even more to God and God was the one who was gonna get you through that trauma, that tragedy, that difficulty. Where have we placed our hope, friends? There are many Christians today who are choosing to follow the path of the unbeliever. They think as unbelievers, they act as unbelievers, they live lives of unbelievers. And oftentimes they think they're good Christians, but we who have been given the grace to draw closer to the Lord know the promises that he has given to us and we stake our lives on those promises. We stake our lives in the promise of eternal life. And we do not begin to accept the lies of a false God who promises a world that he does not own. As we hope in the Lord Jesus and as we hope in the promises that he has given to us, we are molded and shaped. Do you feel this? I have felt it in my own discipleship. When I take my eyes off the things of this world and I allow myself just to truly hope in Jesus Christ, I feel myself stretched and pulled and molded and shaped. I feel myself corrected and consoled, inspired and instructed. I feel the transformation that comes with grace within my very being. And I see my way of life and my actions change and how I interact with others. I see the fruits of God's spirit, peace, patience, kindness, love, self-control, goodness, faithfulness. And the list goes on, the fruits of God's spirit. I see the grace of God making me fit for the kingdom of God, working out my salvation in Jesus Christ. And that is the hope that we have been given. That is the hope that can bring that transformation. That is the hope that can allow us in the middle of a fallen and dark age to find immense light and a cause for great rejoicing. This is what we've been given, Dehrish. This is what we've been given, friends. This is what we have to make sure that we cling to and hold on to and let nothing rob us of the glory that has been given to us in Jesus Christ. Now this week we're gonna talk more about hope. But I hope that with this talk we have put things in the biblical context. And when we find ourselves in the midst of the storm, the winds are blowing, the water has even overtaken the boat. We're not sure if we're going to drown. They remind ourselves of the hope that we have in Jesus Christ. And we do not believe the lies of the wind, the water or the boat, but that we rely on Jesus Christ and we place our hope in Him. Lord Jesus, I believe in you. I trust in you. I will remain steadfast in my following of you. That's the Christian way, dear friends. And that's the way that we are called to follow. May God bless you.