New Life Church of the Nazarene
December 7, 2025
  • O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

      • Romans 15:4–13NKJV

  • It Came Upon the Midnight Clear

      • Matthew 3:1–12NKJV

  • Lord, Let Your Hope Grow Deep In Us
  • Isaiah 11:1–10 NKJV
    1 There shall come forth a Rod from the stem of Jesse, And a Branch shall grow out of his roots. 2 The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, The Spirit of counsel and might, The Spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord. 3 His delight is in the fear of the Lord, And He shall not judge by the sight of His eyes, Nor decide by the hearing of His ears; 4 But with righteousness He shall judge the poor, And decide with equity for the meek of the earth; He shall strike the earth with the rod of His mouth, And with the breath of His lips He shall slay the wicked. 5 Righteousness shall be the belt of His loins, And faithfulness the belt of His waist. 6 “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, The leopard shall lie down with the young goat, The calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little child shall lead them. 7 The cow and the bear shall graze; Their young ones shall lie down together; And the lion shall eat straw like the ox. 8 The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole, And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den. 9 They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord As the waters cover the sea. 10 “And in that day there shall be a Root of Jesse, Who shall stand as a banner to the people; For the Gentiles shall seek Him, And His resting place shall be glorious.”

    When Hope Grows in Hard Places

    Hope is a brave little thing. It doesn’t wait for good weather, well-tilled soil, or a clean calendar. It has the nerve to push through bark and ash and circumstances that would make the rest of us shrug and say, “There’s nothing left here.” Hope is, in its deepest biblical form, wonderfully unreasonable.
    Isaiah leads us right into that wonder. He doesn’t begin with a lush tree or a fruitful vineyard. He gives us a stump. A dead, lifeless stump—rough, splintered, and exhausted from the axe. For Israel, that stump wasn’t abstract poetry. It was their story. Their monarchy had crumbled. Their kings failed them. Their life as a covenant people felt cut off at ground level. The nation was a stump: once grand, now reduced to memory and disappointment.
    Most of us know that feeling more intimately than we like to admit. We’ve all stood in front of something that once held promise—something that once had branches and shade and fruit—and now it’s just a stump. A relationship that’s been cut down. A dream that didn’t survive. A season of life that ended before we were ready. A faith that feels more like leftover wood than a living tree.
    And when you stand in front of a stump long enough, you start to believe the story is over. That’s the quiet logic of despair: “This is as good as it’s going to get.” The stump becomes a monument to “used to be.”
    But Advent interrupts that logic.
    Isaiah looks at the same stump and sees something the rest of us miss: “A shoot shall come up from the stump of Jesse.” Not a towering cedar. Not a rebuilt kingdom overnight. Just a thin green shoot—fragile, surprising, almost laughably small. A symbol of life where no life should be.
    This is where hope likes to make its entrance.
    And Isaiah isn’t the only one to insist that hope grows in hard places. Paul writes to the Roman church—a community frayed at the edges, wrestling with conflict, longing for endurance. He doesn’t wait until their issues are resolved to talk about hope. He tells them that the God of hope fills them with joy and peace in believing. Not in escaping. Not in pretending everything’s fine. Hope comes right in the middle of their struggle.
    Paul’s vision is stubbornly grounded. Hope is not what happens after things get better. Hope is what God grows while things are still hard.
    Then Matthew brings us John the Baptist. Once again, the setting is not a palace or a sanctuary—it’s the wilderness. The wilderness is where you go when life is stripped down to essentials. It’s the place without comfort, without distraction, without illusion. And yet that’s where God chooses to announce the arrival of His kingdom. In the dry place. The empty place. The hard place.
    It’s almost as if God is trying to teach us something by repetition. Again and again in Scripture, God makes beauty out of barrenness, strength out of weakness, beginnings out of endings. And each time, one question comes creeping back into the room:
    Why does God insist on doing His best work in the places that look the least promising?
    Why choose a stump instead of a sturdy tree? Why choose a divided church instead of a thriving one? Why choose the wilderness instead of the city gates?
    Maybe because stumps tell the truth. They don’t pretend. They don’t hide. They don’t offer illusions of strength or success. A stump is honest about its limits. And honesty is a surprisingly fertile soil for hope, because God loves to begin where we finally admit we can’t fix things on our own.
    Maybe because when hope grows out of a hard place, we know it isn’t our doing. We didn’t manufacture it. We didn’t force it. We simply witnessed it. Hope becomes a gift, not an achievement.
    And maybe—just maybe—God chooses hard places because that’s where His people most need to see Him. Not at the top of the mountain, but in the valley cut low by disappointment and loss. Not when life is easy, but when the ground feels scorched. Not when we feel strong, but when we feel like a stump—cut down, tired, unsure of a future.
    This is the strange, beautiful promise of Advent: God loves to surprise us with life in the very places we thought were done. When everything looks barren, God whispers, “Watch this.”
    Because hope doesn’t avoid hard places. Hope grows in them.

    God Plants Hope in the Most Unlikely Soil (Isaiah 11:1–10)

    Isaiah doesn’t give us ideal conditions for hope. He hands us a stump—Jesse’s line cut down, David’s glory long gone, political promise sawed off at the base. It’s the sort of image that should make the faithful hang their heads and say, “Well… that’s that.” If God wanted to restore Israel, He could’ve done it through a thriving tree, something sturdy and impressive, something you could point to and say, “See? There’s potential.” But Isaiah refuses to indulge our preference for easy hope.
    He stands before a stump and says life is coming.
    A shoot will grow. A branch will bear fruit. The Spirit will rest upon Him. The world will be healed by Him.
    Hope begins—not in strength—but in the raw, stripped place where strength has failed.
    That’s the deep nerve Isaiah touches. This isn’t botanical optimism. It’s theological rebellion. It’s the insistence that God doesn’t need the conditions to be right before God begins something new. God does not wait for the soil to soften or the weather to improve. God chooses the hard place, the least likely place, and plants hope there.
    Think of the stump not as what’s left, but as what God starts with.
    Israel felt like a people with no future. All the visible markers of God’s promise had been chopped down: the monarchy broken, the temple threatened, the land unstable, the people dispersed. And into that hopeless landscape Isaiah announces that God is not out of ideas. The roots that remain are enough for God to work with.
    This is Advent’s first deep truth: God has never been intimidated by barrenness.
    We tend to believe the opposite. We think God works best when we’re at our best—when we feel steady, successful, spiritually polished. We expect God to grow something beautiful in the well-watered gardens of life. Isaiah flips that expectation upside down. God brings the Messiah out of a stump. A Savior out of obscurity. Redemption out of ruin.
    If God starts there, imagine where He might start with us.
    Every one of us carries our own stump story—something that once felt promising but now looks impossibly cut down. A place in our life that feels hollowed out, stripped to the roots, no longer offering the appearance of growth. And yet Isaiah dares us to consider that this may be exactly the soil where God intends to plant hope again.
    The shoot in Isaiah’s vision doesn’t grow because the stump is strong. It grows because God is faithful. That’s the shift the prophet invites us to make: away from what we can see, measure, or control, and toward the God who specializes in beginnings that make no sense except through His power.
    Advent lifts our eyes to notice that God is already at work under the surface—quietly, patiently, mysteriously—preparing life where we least expect it. And if the Messiah Himself sprang from the stump of Jesse, then the hard places in our own stories are not disqualifying. They’re compost.
    The dead stump of Israel becomes the cradle of Christ’s kingdom. The ruined line of David becomes the birthplace of redemption. The thing everyone thought was finished becomes the place God begins again.
    Hope doesn’t rise because the circumstances are promising. Hope rises because God is.

    Hope Grows While We’re Still in the Struggle (Romans 15:4–13)

    Paul writes to a church that is anything but picture-perfect. Romans isn’t a letter to a triumphant community riding a wave of spiritual success. It’s a letter to a church that’s tired, tense, and tangled up in disagreements about identity, belonging, and how to live faithfully together. If Isaiah gives us a stump, Paul gives us a crowded room full of people who don’t quite know how to love one another yet.
    And into that room Paul does something beautifully unreasonable: he talks about hope.
    Not shallow optimism. Not “give it time and things will get better.” Not “pretend the problems aren’t as big as they feel.” He speaks of the God of hope filling His people with joy and peace in believing—not after the struggle is over, but right in the thick of it.
    Paul won’t let us postpone hope until the situation improves.
    In fact, in Paul’s imagination, hope is born in the very struggle that tempts us to give up. The tension does not cancel God’s work; it becomes the soil in which God plants something new.
    Notice Paul’s verbs. Endure. Encourage. Believe. They all assume that conditions are not ideal. Hope assumes hard places the way a shoot assumes soil. It knows what it’s getting into.
    Paul is telling that early Roman church—and telling us—something counterintuitive: God does not wait until we are harmonious, healed, or fully transformed before hope begins to take root. Hope grows as we learn to trust God in the very places where we feel the strain.
    Which is why Paul anchors everything in Scripture. “Whatever was written in former days,” he says, “was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” In other words: look back at God’s track record. Look at the stories where despair thought it had the final word and God proved otherwise. Look at the stump that sprouted. Look at Israel’s long wilderness that still ended in promise. Look at every moment in Scripture when God’s people were surrounded, small, uncertain—and God drew near.
    Paul insists that hope has roots deeper than the moment we’re living in. Our hope doesn’t depend on how well things are going; it depends on how faithful God has been and continues to be.
    And then Paul prays. It’s not a polite benediction; it’s almost a plea: “May the God of hope fill you… so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
    Abound. Overflow. Radiate hope. Not because the Romans have solved their problems, but because God is present within them.
    Hope isn't a mood we manufacture. It’s a work of the Holy Spirit inside hearts that are still learning how to trust. Hope begins right in the middle of relational fracture, spiritual fatigue, emotional distance, communal disappointment.
    If Isaiah showed us that hope can sprout from a stump, Point 2 shows us that hope can take root even when the community feels divided, strained, or worn down.
    Hope is not the reward for getting your life together. Hope is what God plants to help you get through what isn’t yet fixed.
    Paul imagines a church that hasn’t yet reached unity but is growing toward it—not by sheer effort, but by the Spirit knitting hearts together through the shared trust that God is faithful. That kind of hope spills outward. Paul sees Jews and Gentiles worshiping together, praising together, finding their voice together—not because their differences disappeared, but because hope grew larger than the walls that once divided them.
    This is the miracle Paul invites us to witness: God grows hope in the middle of the mess, and that hope begins to transform people who are learning—sometimes slowly, sometimes painfully—how to love one another.
    Hope is not what happens after things get better. Hope is what God gives so we don’t quit before they do.

    Hope Meets Us in the Wilderness (Matthew 3:1–12)

    If Isaiah shows us hope sprouting from a stump, and Paul shows us hope rooted in the middle of a struggling community, Matthew takes us somewhere even more surprising: the wilderness. The place nobody chooses. The landscape that looks allergic to life. The terrain scratched dry by heat, silence, and absence.
    That’s where John the Baptist appears.
    Not in Jerusalem. Not in the temple courts. Not in the cultural or spiritual center of things. He steps into the wilderness—into the hard, lonely places of Israel’s geography and Israel’s heart—and that’s where he announces the arrival of the kingdom. The wilderness becomes the pulpit for God’s next great beginning.
    There’s a strange comfort in that. Because wilderness is something we all know, even if we’ve never stepped foot in the Judean desert. Wilderness is what you feel when life gets stripped down to what’s painful and what’s true. When you’re not sure what’s next. When the old landmarks don’t make sense anymore. When prayer feels like it’s echoing instead of rising.
    Wilderness is the space where nothing seems to grow.
    And that—astonishingly—is where Matthew says hope walks out to meet us.
    John’s message is sharp, unvarnished, urgent. “Prepare the way of the Lord.” He’s not offering a spiritual pep talk. He’s naming reality. If hope is going to grow here, something in us needs to open. Something crooked needs straightening. Something crowded needs clearing out. Repentance isn’t punishment; it’s softening the soil so the shoot can break through.
    John calls people into honesty. Into humility. Into readiness. Into the kind of spiritual posture that says, “I’m standing in my own wilderness, but God might be closer than I think.”
    And then he makes the boldest claim of all: “One is coming.” Someone stronger. Someone holy. Someone whose presence turns wilderness into beginning—again.
    The wilderness becomes the staging ground for the Messiah’s arrival. Not the city. Not the palace. Not the places where success and comfort make hope look easy. God chooses the hard place as the meeting place.
    Which brings us back to that Advent question that has followed us all through these readings: Why does God insist on doing His best work in the places that look the least promising?
    Isaiah points at a stump. Paul points at a divided church. John points at a barren wilderness. And all three insist that God is already at work there.
    Perhaps because the wilderness strips away the illusion that we can save ourselves. Perhaps because hope shines brighter where circumstances look dimmer. Perhaps because God’s nearness is clearest when we’ve run out of distractions and disguises.
    Or perhaps because God—mysteriously, faithfully—delights in surprising His people.
    John the Baptist doesn’t ask the crowds to fix their wilderness. He asks them to prepare for the One who will step into it with them. Hope isn’t something they conjure; it is Someone who comes. Someone who walks dusty roads. Someone who chooses low places. Someone who begins redemption not in a throne room but in a manger.
    Advent reminds us that no wilderness is too empty, no stump too dead, no struggle too tangled for God to enter. If anything, those are the places God seems to prefer. That’s where hope grows—not fragile and temporary, but fierce enough to change everything.
    Because in God’s hands, even the wilderness becomes holy ground.

    When Hope Grows in Hard Places

    Hope is not delicate. Scripture insists it can survive conditions we’d never choose. A stump. A strained community. A wilderness. These are not the places we expect God to begin anything, let alone redemption. Yet that’s exactly where God plants His promises, roots His faithfulness, and reveals His heart.
    Isaiah teaches us to stare at what looks dead and dare to imagine God growing something there. Paul reminds us that hope doesn’t wait its turn; it rises right in the middle of the mess we’re still trying to navigate. And John the Baptist stands in the wilderness announcing that the very place we feel most alone may be the place God is closest.
    All three voices join together like an Advent chorus saying the same thing: God is not limited by hard places. God is drawn to them.
    Which means the question that has carried us through this sermon becomes deeply personal: Where is God trying to grow hope in you?
    Where is the stump in your life that you’ve quietly declared finished? Where is the relational or emotional struggle that feels too tangled to make room for anything new? Where is the wilderness—dry, quiet, honest—that you’d rather avoid but can’t escape?
    Advent does not ask us to pretend those places don’t exist. It asks us to watch them closely. To hold them open before God. To look again with the strange, courageous expectation that the God who brings shoots out of stumps and voices out of deserts might be doing His work underground, unseen.
    Hope grows where God is. And God has never been afraid of hard places.
    So we step into this week of Advent with the stubborn trust that the story is not over. That the roots run deeper than we know. That the Holy Spirit is still filling, still guiding, still whispering life into the places that feel worn thin. We step forward believing that the Christ who came into our wilderness once will do it again—and again—and again.
    Because hope doesn’t just visit hard places. Hope makes them holy.

      • Isaiah 11:1–10NKJV

New Life Church of the Nazarene
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http://www.newlifenaz.org/
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