How hope full are you?  Be honest with yourself.  Do you need to resolve to behold your hope?  Do you need to ask someone else from your church to help you feed and fuel your hope?

Have you got any dimmer switches at home?  You know how they work you can dial down the brightness of the lights in a room to suit the mood or the migraine. You and I have dimmer switches on our hope for the new creation.  What is your hope set to at the moment?  Things make us dial down the brightness of our hope; illness, tiredness, stress, family pressures. But our hope matters because hope is what we have to offer a hopeless world.  

In Isaiah 65v17-25 the prophet wants God’s people to turn up the volume to 11 on our hope of glory and he does that through giving us a smorgasbord of images of the new heavens and new earth.  Each of them is grasping for a glorious beyond our imagination, heavenly reality expressed using limited earthly language and pictures.

And he (17)Begins with an invitation – “See” or behold or look.  He calls God’s redeemed people to look at their certain future hope and home.  Some of you will have heard the phrase “Too heavenly minded to be any earthly good.”  I get the sentiment behind it that we can have our head so in the clouds about then that we are no use now, but I don’t think that’s our problem. I also think theologically that’s rubbish!  Instead we need to be so heavenly minded that we are earthly use, because that’s the only way we will be.

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