Despair and Hope
From November 2025 to February 2026, we journeyed together through a sermon series on despair and hope. Check out the summary below, with quotes from the sermons by Pastor Michelle and Pastor Jacob.
1) November 16, 2025 | Matthew 26:36-46 | Mike Ford
2) November 23, 2025 | Isaiah 53:1–12 | Pastor Jacob
Even this is in God’s hands: “After 39 chapters of despair, Isaiah’s tone changes. There’s a sudden, brilliant blaze of hope. God is going to do a new thing. God is going to send his servant to the peoples. He’ll teach them how to live in peace. He’ll bring them back to God. And we who are Christians know that this servant does come, in the person of Jesus. But not for a long, long time. Not in the 8th century, while Isaiah is still alive. Not while the armies of Assyria and Babylon are marching through the land. Not when the Jewish people are carried away into exile, and not during their troubled return. Instead, they wait for the one they’ve been promised for hundreds of years. And what’s remarkable to me is that, during that time, they don’t lose hope. Not entirely. Not all of them. They have prophets who just keep saying that somehow this—even this—is happening under God’s eye. Even this is in God’s hands.”
3) November 30, 2025 | Ecclesiastes 1:1-11 | Pastor Michelle
People have lived through this before: “The way I read Ecclesiastes depends so much on where I’m at. When things are great, it’s not much of a book for hope. But when things are terrible, when I’m swept up by despair, I hear real hope in it. Think about the phrase, ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ Do you hear that as a statement of despair? Or a statement of hope? When life is great, it can sound like a downer. But I remember in 2020 when everyone kept using the word ‘unprecedented.’ An ‘unprecedented pandemic.’ The ‘unprecedented lockdowns.’ Pretty much everything was called ‘unprecedented.’ We all started to feel like we were living through something brand new, something no one had ever experienced before. And that was terrifying. But Ecclesiastes disagrees. ‘There is nothing under the sun.’ In 2020, this was a word of hope. Humans have endured this before.”
4) December 7, 2025 | Lamentations 3:1–33 | Pastor Jacob
God still rules: “The astonishing conclusion that the writers of Lamentations come to is that, somehow, even after all this, God still rules the world, and God is still good. It’s not all they say. And they don’t say it easily. But right in the middle of Lamentations, there’s this simple, quiet confession of faith: ‘But there’s one thing I keep in mind. One thing that gives me hope. God’s faithful love hasn’t ended. His mercy is never done. It’s new every morning. Great is your faithfulness! God is my inheritance. And so, I tell myself, ‘I’m going to hope!’’ That’s the heart of Lamentations. It’s as if the people are waking up under their makeshift tents or in the rubble that used to be their houses, looking around at what used to be their city, and saying, ‘We didn’t see God’s goodness yesterday. And we can’t see it today. But we know God wants good for us. And we know God will bring it about. So we’re making the choice to hope.'”
5) December 14, 2025 | 2 Kings 6:8–17 | Pastor Michelle
God works in ways we can’t see: “If our hope is based only on what we can see, then some circumstances will make it impossible to hope. To human eyes, Elisha and his servant are in a hopeless situation. The enemy has surrounded their city, and they’re done for. But God is working beyond what they can see. I wish that more often in our lives, God would just open our eyes in an instant, so that we could see God’s power and presence as clearly as Elisha’s servant does. But what I’ve found is that more often it’s in hindsight that I can see how God was at work. And it’s holding onto those stories of God’s faithfulness in the past that helps me hold onto hope in the present.”
6) December 21, 2025| Matthew 2:13-23 | Pastor Jacob
God still comes into our world: “As I was reading the stories of Jesus’ birth this week, I was struck by how many times angels appear in them. By my count, there are six individual angel appearances, one angel army, and one angel-adjacent star. In other words, a lot of angels. And when we hear these stories, we tend to get dazzled by the angels. ‘Wow!’ we say, ‘God must have been doing something on that Christmas night that was completely unique. Nothing like that could ever happen now.’ And friends, let me be clear, God was doing something special. But the world God was coming into was not some other world. It’s our world, full of ordinary people living their ordinary lives. There’s a pregnant teenage girl. A baby born into poverty. Homeless guys. Taxes. Government agents raiding houses in the night. Refugees fleeing across the border. It was happening then, and it’s happening still. And God is still sending messages to earth, speaking to people in dreams, steering and guiding us, and protecting our little ones, just as God was then.”
7) January 4, 2026 | Psalm 13 | Danilo Sanchez
8) January 25, 2026 | 2 Corinthians 4:6–12 | Pastor Jacob
At our lowest, we feel God’s power: “In 2 Corinthians 4:8–9, Paul describes the spiritual state that he and his coworker Timothy are in. Things look really, really bad. The Greek word being translated as ‘hard pressed’ refers to being caught in a crowd with people pressing in on every side. ‘Perplexed’ means being surrounded by obstacles. ‘Persecuted’ refers to being hunted down like an animal. ‘Struck down’ refers to being punched and knocked to the ground. This is how Paul is feeling spiritually. And he knows what he’s talking about, because he’s also literally experienced all these things. He’s been mobbed, imprisoned, chased down, and beaten up. And he’s come very close to losing his hope. But down there at the bottom, in that stampeding crowd, with no way out, with his enemies catching up, knocked on his face, Paul discovers something. The power of God is in him. And he hasn’t been crushed. He hasn’t been defeated. He can get up and keep going.”
9) February 1, 2026 | Romans 5:1–5 | Pastor Michelle
Suffering builds endurance: “I’m reminded of Rapha’s first day of preschool this fall. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he was suffering, but starting school was definitely a trial for him. It was big and new and hard and scary. He spent at least a month in dread of it, explaining to us how he’d prefer to stay home forever. When we finally got to school that first day, he cried and clung to me like his life depended on it. And that was a tough moment for me as a parent. It was tempting to think, ‘He’s just not ready. Let’s forget it and try again next year.’ But I knew deep down that he was ready. He just needed to get through the scary beginning to find out that he could do it. And he did. Watching Rapha learn how to endure helps me understand what Paul is talking about—how God works through the hard things to build us up as Christians.”
10) February 8, 2026 | Hebrews 10:32–11:1 | Pastor Jacob
Stay confident in your hope: “I don’t know what ‘those early days’ were for you, when you ‘first saw the light.’ I don’t know whether this was a moment or a season of your life, whether it happened once or many times. But I do know something about your faith journeys. I know most of you have been walking this walk for a while now. And it’s gotten hard. You’ve prayed for help, but your prayers haven’t always been answered in the ways you expected. And maybe, little by little, you’ve lost some of the confidence you had at first. So this morning, I want to reflect back the hopes I’ve heard you express, based on the stories you’ve told the congregation. And I want to say to you what the writer of Hebrews says to his audience: ‘Don’t throw away your confidence. Remember. Hold on. Believe in what you can’t yet see. And keep going to the end.'”
11) February 15, 2026 | Romans 8:18–39 | Pastor Michelle
The Spirit is praying for us: During my labor with Rapha it took everything in me plus everything in Jacob to stay in the moment and not start thinking, ‘This might last for three days!’ I did plenty of literal groaning through each contraction. When my family adopted my brothers from Ukraine, the process was much longer, and our groaning was more figurative. It was a lot of crying out to God in prayer, hoping my brothers would finally come but having no idea when it would actually happen. And this is where we are as Christians—in the pain of labor, in the long waiting of adoption. So what do we do when it seems like we might be stuck here forever? Paul says we try to pray but we don’t even know what to pray. And so we groan and, as we do, God’s Spirit searches our hearts and prays for us with sighs too deep for words.
12) February 22, 2026 | Ephesians 6:10–20 | Pastor Jacob
Put on the full armor of God: “We feel despair because we live in what Paul calls ‘this dark world,’ and we’re struggling against ‘rulers,’ ‘authorities,’ ‘powers,’ and ‘spiritual forces of evil.’ But God hasn’t left us alone in the darkness. God has given us his own armor to wear. Yes, the powers keep lying to us. But when we know the truth of Jesus and speak truthfully like him, the powers have no power over us. The powers keep trying to lead us off the narrow way. But when we know the righteousness of Jesus and do right like he does, the powers have no power over us. The powers keep telling us to treat our neighbors as enemies. But when we know the peace of Jesus and are ready to tell everyone about it, the powers have no power over us. The powers keep insisting we put our faith in them. But when we know the faith of Jesus and have faith that he is who he says he is, the powers have no power over us. The powers keep trying to imprison us. But when we know the salvation of Jesus and heal and free and forgive others as we have been healed and freed and forgiven, the powers have no power over us. And the powers keep accusing us. But when we know the Spirit of Jesus and let the Spirit speak through us, the powers have no power over us. And that, friends, is our hope.”