Scriptures: Proverbs 13:12
Video Link: https://youtu.be/C-GvzmIqEsA
Structure:
- Introduction
- Hope deferred
- Longing fulfilled
- Conclusion
Introduction:
Good morning everyone.
Today we continue our sermon series in the book of Proverbs. Proverbs offers practical down to earth wisdom based on how the world operates. Whenever we read Proverbs, or any Biblical text for that matter, we need to be thinking, ‘How does this point to Jesus?’ ‘How does Jesus fulfil this wisdom?’
The focus of our message this week is Proverbs 13, verse 12, which reads…
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
May the Spirit of Jesus illuminate God’s word for us.
Hope deferred:
As with most of the proverbial sayings, there are two contrasting halves to this verse which give it a nice symmetry. Essentially though, this proverb is talking about one thing: the psychological effect of hope. ‘Longing’ is just another way of talking about hope in this context.
Deferred hope has a negative psychological impact on a person, but hope fulfilled has a positive psychological effect.
When hope is delayed by a long period of time or taken away altogether, it makes the heart sick.
You may remember from other sermons that the heart, in the Old Testament, usually refers to a person’s inner life. The heart is a metaphor for an individual’s mind, emotions and will.
When hope is deferred, a person’s thinking, feeling and motivation is negatively impacted, it is made sick. The greater the hope, the bigger the negative impact if that hope is not realized.
If you catch a bad flu, your body is made sick. You might experience aching joints and muscles. You might be shivering with cold one moment and sweating with fever the next. To say nothing of the headaches, sore throat, hacking cough, running nose and difficulty breathing.
The flu robs you of energy and impairs your physical functioning, so you cannot do all the things you are normally able to do.
It’s similar with hope. When hope is delayed for long periods of time, it impairs your psychological functioning, so you cannot handle daily life as well as you normally would. Even small difficulties, like being stuck in traffic, can seem overwhelming and put you in a spin.
Hope is the capacity to believe something good waits for you in the future. Hope sustains mental and emotional energy.
Believing there is good in your future feeds your heart, your mind, your soul, your spirit so you have the psychological energy you need to get through and face the challenges that come with daily life.
The closer you come to realizing your hope, the greater the energy you feel. But, if someone moves the goal posts, if the finishing line is shifted and your hope is postponed, you become psychologically deflated.
All that emotional energy you were getting from hope drains away, like water in cupped hands. Take hope away and you take a person’s mental and emotional energy away.
Let me give you an example to illustrate what we mean by the psychological impact of hope deferred…
Imagine you have been working away diligently for a whole year without taking a holiday. You have weekends off your regular job, but Saturdays and Sundays are pretty full doing household chores or running around after your family. Life is hectic and pressured.
After a hard year, carrying a heavy load at work and at home, you are tired and looking forward to some time away. In fact, you have had this holiday planned for months. A nice air b n b near the beach, just you and your family for ten whole days.
Whenever the pressure comes on at work, whenever a client complains or the boss is unreasonable, you imagine swimming in the sea or building sandcastles with the kids. The very thought of the holiday gives you the energy to get through the daily grind with a smile on your face.
But then suddenly, just one week before you are due to go on leave, a cyclone passes over the country. There is flooding and slips and the access road to your air b n b by the beach is cut off. There is no way in or out for months.
Your dream of a relaxing holiday has been deferred. The hope you had been relying on to give you the emotional energy you needed to get through each day is gone.
You are not even sure if you want to take your annual leave anymore. It’s too late to try and find another holiday place and if you stay home, you will end up painting the house or checking your work emails anyway. It feels like such a waste.
Now, when a client complains about something, you reply with sarcasm. And when your boss asks you to stay late to get a project in on time, you drag your heels. What’s the point you think to yourself.
And when someone in your household doesn’t empty the dishwasher or leaves food on the bench to attract ants, you snap at each other. You just don’t have the energy to deal with minor irritations. Hope deferred makes the heart sick.
Typically, when we are young, our hopes tend to fly high. But as we grow through life, we face disappointment. Our heart is made sick when the people we trust let us down or when circumstance conspires against us. ‘The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, as Shakespeare put it.
With each disappointment we learn to lower our hope, to clip the wings of expectation and edit our dreams, so as to avoid the pain of more loss. The problem with this approach is that the less you hope for, the less mental and emotional energy you have.
Secular wisdom would say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Don’t commit all your hope to just one thing. Hedge your bets. Have a plan B in case plan A doesn’t work out. We can see the sense in that kind of reasoning, but how does this compare with the wisdom of Christ?
Part of Jesus’ message was: Don’t put all your hope in the temporary things of this world, put the larger portion of your hope in the eternal things of God’s kingdom.
The eternal things of God’s kingdom include righteousness, love, trust, generosity, kindness and so on. Jesus talked about storing up riches for yourself in heaven where rust and moth cannot destroy and thieves cannot break in and steal.
It’s not that you shouldn’t plan a nice holiday or save for a house or find a life partner. We live in this world and we still need things to look forward to in this life, even if they are temporary things.
The point is: Eternal hope lends perspective. Eternal hope helps us to cope better with the disappointments we experience in this world.
If someone you counted on in this life lets you down (a friend or family member maybe), then that sucks. That hurts. It’s painful. But if you also have Jesus as your friend, as your ultimate hope, it’s not the end of the world. You are not alone.
Longing fulfilled:
Okay, so we have been talking about hope deferred. What about when hope is realized? The second half of Proverbs 13, verse 12, says: a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
We heard about the tree of life last week, so we don’t need to rehearse all that again now. Suffice to say the tree of life, in Proverbs, is used as a metaphor for wisdom and wellbeing.
In the context of Proverbs 13, to say a longing fulfilled is a tree of life, is like saying, ‘it is good for you, psychologically, when your hope is realized’.
A longing fulfilled restores your mental and emotional energy. It gives you confidence and strength to cope with the vicissitudes of life. In fact, a longing fulfilled enlarges your capacity for hope.
Earlier, I asked you to imagine looking forward to a well-earned holiday only to have your hope deferred by a cyclone. Well, it wouldn’t be fair to leave you in limbo like that so let’s pick up the story again.
By this stage, three days have passed since you heard the disappointing news that you cannot gain access to your air b n b by the beach. It is now two days before your leave is due to start. You are still deciding whether you will take the leave or work through like a martyr and take it out on everyone around you.
Then the phone rings. It’s a friend you knew from youth group days. Your friend lives in a different town to you now. Tauranga, as it happens. They are going to be away for the next two weeks and wondered if you would be interested in house sitting for them. “I know it’s last minute, but you would be doing us a huge favour”, your friend says.
You can’t quite believe what you are hearing. You quickly gather your thoughts. “Let me just check my diary… Yes, we could make that work. Happy to help.”
After putting the phone down, you take a moment to reflect on the providence of God. You thank him for his goodness.
In an instant your hope is restored and your emotional energy returns. You take your family on holiday to the sunny Bay of Plenty, have a wonderful time and come home refreshed and ready to carry on.
There’s a true story, of hope deferred and longing fulfilled, in the gospel of Luke. Luke chapter 8 reads…
40 Now when Jesus returned, a crowd welcomed him, for they were all expecting him. 41 Then a man named Jairus, a synagogue leader, came and fell at Jesus’ feet, pleading with him to come to his house 42 because his only daughter, a girl of about twelve, was dying.
Nothing threatens a parent’s hope like a seriously sick child. Jairus is longing for his little girl to live. All his eggs are in one basket. He has placed all his hope in Jesus.
As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years,but no one could heal her.
Talk about hope deferred. Here is a woman who has been on a roller coaster of disappointment for twelve long years. This woman has suffered terribly during this time. She may have experienced ongoing physical pain from her bleeding.
She would most likely have dangerously low iron levels, resulting in tiredness and diminished immunity. Which means doing daily tasks, like carrying water, cooking meals and so on would be much more demanding. Not only that but she would be more susceptible to illness and infection.
As if the physical trauma of her complaint was not bad enough, this woman would have been excluded from community life as well. If she wasn’t married, then she would have no chance of finding a husband and if she was married, she would not be able to get close to her husband or have children.
Under Old Testament law her bleeding made her ritually unclean so she would not be able to participate in worship. She was probably poor as well, having spent all her money on doctors who could not heal her.
It was a pretty miserable existence for her. But despite twelve years of disappointment, the woman put what hope she had left in Jesus.
44 She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped. 45 “Who touched me?” Jesus asked. When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.” 46 But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”
The healing comes at a price. It is free to the woman, but it costs Jesus. Here we have a picture of God’s grace. Grace may be free but it’s not cheap.
47 Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched Jesus and how she had been instantly healed. 48 Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”
We might wonder why Jesus calls this woman out so publicly. I mean, hasn’t she suffered enough humiliation and embarrassment. Wouldn’t it be more winsome for Jesus to use his discretion and say nothing.
Well, Jesus is not trying to embarrass her. To the contrary, Jesus wants to complete the woman’s healing. She has received physical healing by touching Jesus but what about the social and psychological healing she needs?
By inviting the woman to publicly confess the truth of her healing, Jesus is restoring her to the community. Now, she can be included again. That’s social healing. And by affirming the woman for her faith, Jesus is giving her honour, dignity and respect. That’s psychological healing.
Perhaps Jesus is also helping the community think differently about women and about women’s health generally.
The Lord has fulfilled the woman’s longing. Jesus has been a tree of life for her.
But spare a thought for Jairus, the father of the sick girl. Every passing minute must have felt like an age to him. The interruption and the slowness of the crowd is deferring his hope.
49 While Jesus was still speaking, someone came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” he said. “Don’t bother the teacher anymore.” 50 Hearing this, Jesus said to Jairus, “Don’t be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed.”
‘In the chilly hours and minutes of uncertainty, I want to be in the warm hold of your loving mind.’ (Donovan, Catch the Wind.)
Jairus is very much in the warm hold of Jesus’ loving mind in these minutes of uncertainty. The temptation here is for Jairus to abandon all hope, but Jesus calms Jairus’ fears and keeps his hope alive. Jesus encourages Jairus to believe something good is waiting in his future.
51 When Jesus arrived at the house of Jairus, he did not let anyone go in with him except Peter, John and James, and the child’s father and mother. 52 Meanwhile, all the people were wailing and mourning for her. “Stop wailing,” Jesus said. “She is not dead but asleep.”
53 They laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. 54 But he took her by the hand and said, “My child, get up!” 55 Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up. Then Jesus told them to give her something to eat. 56 Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened.
Jairus’ hope had been deferred but now the longing for his daughter’s life to be restored is fulfilled. Jesus is a tree of life to Jairus’ whole family.
These twin stories in Luke 8 serve as a pattern for us in our journey of faith with Jesus. We come to Jesus in hope that he will help us in some way. But Jesus does not always give us what we want at first. Sometimes we have to wait.
In the waiting, we are sifted and refined.
Last week, we heard how God prevented Adam and Eve access to the tree of life in the Garden of Eden. That is not how the story ends.
In John’s Revelation we read: To those who overcome, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.
We need to maintain our hope in Jesus, for he is our tree of life. In Christ our deepest longings are fulfilled.
May the Lord heal your heart and fulfill your longing for him. Amen.
Questions for discussion or reflection:
What stands out for you in reading these Scriptures and/or in listening to the sermon? Why do you think this stood out to you?
- What is hope? Why do we need hope?
- Can you think of a time when your hope was deferred? What happened? What psychological effect did it have on you?
- How might we measure mental or emotional energy? What are your mental and emotional energy levels like at present? What do you need to fill your emotional tank?
- What are you looking forward to (or longing for) at the moment? Where is your hope placed? How vulnerable is your hope?
- Reflecting on the story in Luke 8:40-56, who do you identify with most? Why?
- What does it mean to put your hope in Jesus? How do we maintain our hope in Christ?
Tawa Baptist 