Click here for a longer version preached at Willoughby in 1997. It's been really interesting to watch the news reports over the past 24 hours and see interviews with ordinary people all over the world expressing what the year 2000 means to them. And I've noticed a common theme in almost all their answers. It seems nearly everyone wants to link the new millenium with one word. And that word is Hope.
People talk about a new hope for humanity.
A hope that peace, or tolerance, and understanding between peoples will mark the coming age. At the tail end of the second millenium, people are looking for Hope in life, for some driving principle of optimism about the future that will sustain them in everyday life and help them to make decisions that will lead to the good life. But sadly most people seem to be looking in all the wrong places. And when we look at the century that has been and at what is happening right now round the globe, there seems little real cause for hope. In His Word, God has given His people sure and certain hope for the future.