Choose Hope Part 1: Hope over Pride

This sermon series invites you to believe that hope is not wishful thinking — it’s the power of Jesus rewriting our story. Each week will highlight a different victory He makes possible: hope over pride, fear, affliction, sorrow, guilt, and shame. 

This week we look at God's promise to bless those who CHOOSE HOPE over PRIDE.

Transcript

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God, I'm so grateful for who you are and what you've done in our lives. I'm grateful that you give us, God, direction. Your word teaches us. It is available to us. You do not hide it from us. And so tonight we pray that you'd open our hearts to receive your word, that you would plant it deep in our heart and help it to take root in our heart and bring fruit in our lives. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, it was the late 70s, and a brand new movie had come out called Star Wars. I'm sure most of you at least heard, if not seen, all the Star Wars movies at this time, but I was eight years old and I went with my brother and my dad to see Star Wars. Now, as an eight-year-old kid, I had never seen anything like this. It blew my mind. I mean, it looked like real spaceships flying through space. Even if you watch the films today, they still look very realistic. And I was in awe of this. And I was especially in awe of one of the ships, which was the Millennium Falcon, which Han Solo captained and piloted and flew around. And as we were going, getting closer to the end of the year, and Christmas was coming and all the Star Wars toys were coming out, I asked my parents for one thing, and it was the Millennium Falcon. It was about this big. No way. I was like, but mom, I want it. I don't want anything else. Nothing else. No, no. And I mean, up until the last minute, I am still begging and hoping, hoping that on Christmas morning that Millennium Falcon would be under the Christmas tree. Christmas Eve, we were talking, we had gone to church, and I remember even saying my prayers that night. God, please, please, let there be a Millennium Falcon. And my mom was like, Patrick, you know, it's too expensive. It's not going to happen. My hopes were dashed. I go to sleep, I wake up, come down the stairs, and what happens to be under the Christmas tree, but the Millennium Falcon. My hopes had come true. My mom had been plaguing me this whole time. And I just remember, even to this day, that feeling of joy and overwhelming excitement by seeing something that I had hoped for come true. And this is the story. This is the feeling. This is the idea that is behind this series that we are stepping into called Choose Hope. We've been learning over the past few months about how to discover meaning and pursue peace in our life, but today we move forward in the spring into the Easter season and we continue to journey and wrestle with God what God wants for us. And one of the things He wants for us desperately is that we would hope in Him. That we would place our hope in Him. One thing that is common about every person sitting in this room is that you're going to face trials, temptations, fears, you're going to have failures, you're going to struggle with guilt, shortcomings, challenges in our life. We're going to all deal with these things. We're all experiencing these things, and it's going to put us face to face with a choice. Where do we put our hope? Do we put it in our circumstances? Do we put it in the fears and the things that are challenging us? Do we put it in ourselves? Or do we do actually choose to place our hope in God? And what I want you to see is a few things about hope. One is hope is not something that is given, discovered, or developed. It's not a secret formula or special sayings that will make us suddenly have hope in our life. It is a choice that we make. At the end of this series, there's not going to be a special prayer that I'm going to say, if you just go home and pray this, you're going to have hope. It's choice. It's something we step into. But I also want you to also hear hope isn't something that is future and far off. I'm not hoping that just one day I go to heaven in this Christian life. There are things I'm hoping for today. Things that I'm asking God, just like that Millennium Falcon, for in my life today. I'm placing my hope in something today. I want you to hear hope isn't also based around circumstances. It's not just about that everything in my life is going great, so now I can place my hope in the Lord. Hope is often most found in the most difficult circumstances. Hope is found not in any of these things, prestige, fame, honor, or circumstances. It's found in the Lord. And we're going to build this series off of a passage out of Isaiah 40 that many of you have probably seen. But of Isaiah 40, 31, and it reads this. I'll read a part, verse 30, that's not on the screen, and then I'll read verse 31. It says this even youth grow tired and weary, young men stumble and fall. But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles, they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. This is a concept that the writer of this Old Testament book lays out here, and it's this that we can choose to find hope in our Creator, in our Lord, and when we do so, it actually energizes us. It actually adds life to us, keeps us going. Think about it, maybe right now I'm in my 50s now. I don't have the same charisma, energy, passion that I did maybe in my 20s and in my teens. Right? We do grow weary. The back starts to hurt. You start to have pains that you never experienced before all of a sudden showing up in your life. I remember when we were growing up, our son, PJ, we would go outside and play basketball all the time in our backyard where we were growing up in the States and where he was growing up. And I was, of course, much bigger than him, taller than him, and I could beat him all the time. Every time. Until he was about 13. And he got pretty good at basketball. He got almost my height. He's outgrown me now. And there was a game we were tied until the very last minute. And he had gotten better and I had gotten worse. And at the very last, I scored the winning basket to crown myself again the winner. That moment I decided I'm never playing my son in basketball again. I'm not going to let him beat me. I'm going to retire undefeated because my body is not what it used to be. I grow faint quicker. I grow weary quicker. We aren't perfect. We never will be. And the pressure we put on ourselves to try to be perfect, we can experience, so we can experience some hope can be debilitating more so than it is empowering. But this passage tells us that when we place our hope in the Lord, it renews our strength. It renews our strength. So then how do we choose hope? Because I could just say, okay, I want hope. I'll take it, right? If we had a if we had a survey tonight and said who wants hope in their life, I think we would all raise our hands. But it's not always true that we live with hope at the forefront of our lives. Sometimes circumstances come in and we feel hopeless. We feel helpless. We feel desperate. We're not looking to God and seeing God renewing us, and we're like, what's happening? And the way we choose hope is based on one simple element that's found all throughout scripture, and it's to choose out of faith. Out of faith. Faith is what believing that God will do what he says. It's actually choosing to step into the promises of God. And that's what the definition of hope is that we're going to see here. How do we define hope? It is this: it is the confident expectancy that God will bring good out of every circumstance because he is faithful, powerful, and always true to his promises. Listen to that again. It is the confident expectancy that God will bring good out of every circumstance because he is faithful, powerful, and always true to his promises. You see what it doesn't say? It doesn't say that he will always bring good circumstances. It doesn't say he will always bring good outcomes to every trial in your life. But it says he can bring good and glory for God out of every and any circumstance because of his power, his faithfulness, and his promises. This isn't the idea that everything will always be good or bad things won't happen. It's that God's promises tell us that he won't leave them that way. He can and he will bring good out of every circumstance, and his promises tell us that. Which then would make me want to ask this question. What are the hopeful promises of God? If his promises are what help us have hope, what are these promises? And this is what we're going to be looking at over the next few weeks is these beautiful promises of God that allow us to experience hope. And it's usually a choice, as we mentioned earlier, it's choosing hope. So we're going to have to choose hope over something else. And tonight we're going to look at this first promise found in James chapter 4, verse 6. And it simply says this God says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. That's a promise. God opposes the proud, but he will give grace to the humble. And tonight we're going to look at three stories from the scripture of when somebody chose pride over God. When they chose to live out of certain kinds of pride that we all struggle with. And I chose to start with pride because I'm going to tell you, it is, I think, the choice that we make most of all over hope. Because what is pride? It's trusting yourself more than God. And I'm going to be honest, I do that way too often still. I look at my own life, I look at my own wisdom, I look at my own strength, I look at my own social standing, and I think, I got this one, God. I got this one. My hope is in me, not in God. When I'm at my worst, when I when things are out of my control, yes, I can reach out to God then, but what about when things are good? What about when I'm strong? What about when things are going well? Do I reach for his hope then? So these three stories are going to illustrate somebody who chose pride over God, and we're going to see what happened. The first story is somebody who chose pride over the pride of personal wisdom over the love of God. Think back to the beginning of the Bible when Adam and Eve were told not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It wasn't that the other choices were bad, right? That this was the only good tree. There were plenty of other choices. The driving force behind their choice was the idea that they could be equal with God. They could become like God, similar to God. It was a pride and a desire to gain more wisdom and trust in their own wisdom than in the wisdom of God. Let me tell you the story. You've heard it before, but let me retell it to you out of Genesis 3. It says, In the heart of Eden, there was a breeze that felt like a blessing, and every creature lived without fear. Adam and Eve walked with an innocence that made the world feel weightless. They lacked nothing. Yet pride has a way of whispering, even into the most perfect places. Near the center of the garden stood a tree, unlike any other. It was similar but yet different. God had told them not to eat from it, not because he wished to withhold good things, but because some knowledge carried a weight that they were not meant to bear. Still, the tree stood there, a quiet reminder that trust is a choice. The serpent watched Eve with patient curiosity. It knew the human heart well enough to sense that the faintest tremor of desire was. Eve explained the command from God, but the serpent pressed further, its words aimed not at her hunger, but at her pride. He said, You won't die. God knows that if you eat this fruit, you'll become like him, your eyes will be open, you'll rise higher than ever before. That was the spark. Eve looked at the fruit again, not just as something beautiful, but as something that can elevate her. The idea of being like God stirred a longing that she had not known before. Pride often disguises itself as aspirations, and in that moment it felt noble and even justified to take the fruit. She reached out. She ate. She handed the fruit to Adam, and he joined her. And the world did not collapse around them in that instant. Instead, something inside of them shifted. Their eyes opened not to glory, but what they saw was their own smallness, their vulnerability, their nakedness. Pride had promised elevation, and instead it delivered exposure. They ran, they hid because pride, once exposed, turns quickly into fear. When God walked through the garden, his voice carried sorrow more than anger, and he asked, Where are you? Adam stepped forward, but even then pride clung to him. He blamed Eve, and then Eve blamed the serpent. No one can simply say, I chose this. The consequences that followed were not arbitrary punishments, but the natural outflow of a world where pride had taken root and man elevated himself to the status of God. Harmony was fractured, innocence disappeared, work became toil, pain became part of life. The garden, once a place of holiness and effortlessness, and communion with God could no longer be their home. Then came the hardest moment, leaving Eden. Not as a banishment born out of the rage of God, but as a boundary born of compassion. They could not stay in paradise where the holiness of God was the bedrock of every detail of that garden. Staying in the garden would fill them with constant regret, pain, and despair for the choice that they had made to fracture their relationship with their Creator over a desire to be like Him instead of just with Him. So Adam and Eve stepped into the world beyond the garden, not alone, for God did not abandon them, but now aware of their fragile line between aspiration and arrogance. And pride, once a whisper, now became a burden humanity would carry for all generations. Simple fruit. But it was much more than a fruit, right? It was a choice to trust their own wisdom and knowledge more than the knowledge of God. This is eventually a story, ultimately a story about embracing our own personal wisdom over God's wisdom. God didn't make the rules in the garden to test or to trick Adam and Eve. Instead, he gave them a daily choice to trust him, trust his words, trust his wisdom over their very own. And he does the same for us. Why doesn't he just cause me not to sin, not to trust in my own wisdom more than his? Because he gives us a choice to choose him daily, moment by moment, and in choosing him, we choose hope. But what happens when we choose our own wisdom? It actually brings some things into our life. And you'll see these on the screen. When we embrace pride in our own personal wisdom, it will make my life lacking. You saw what the first thing they noticed? They had no clothes on. They realized what they were lacking in a life versus what they had in God. When I trust my own wisdom, it'll lead me to a place of lacking. But it'll also lead me to make your life painful. The promise there was for Eve to have pain and childbirth. Things were going to become hard. Difficult was the other way that it will make your life. It says, work becomes hard, the toil of your hands. When we embrace our own wisdom, our life will be lacking, painful, and difficult. If we choose our wisdom. The key thought is this pride will cost you more than paradise. It will cost you God's plan for your life. It will cost you God's plan. It wasn't that they just kicked them out of the garden. That whole plan of God having community with them was banished. It was gone in that moment. Pride and personal wisdom will cost you more than paradise. It'll cost you God's plan. Pride, to choose pride in our personal wisdom is one mistake, but there's another mistake as well, and it's pride in our own personal strength. Samson was a child, a miracle, a Nazirite chosen by birth and given strength by God to bring salvation to the nation of Israel. But he chose to have his faith in his own strength. Listen to the story of Samson. This is found in Judges. Long ago, when Israel groaned under the weight of Philistine rule, there was a whisper of hope stirred in the hill country of Zorah. An angel had visited a barren woman and told her that she would bear a son, a son who was to be set apart at birth, a Nazarite, someone to be known as a deliverer. His hair should never be cut, and God himself would be the source of his power. And so Samson was born, and from the moment he could walk, people sensed something different about him. As he grew, that difference became impossible to ignore. His arms were like braided rope, his stride shook the ground as he walked, his eyes burned with a relentless fire. Everybody knew Samson was strong. But Samson knew it too. And that made all the difference. For he started to look at his own strength as his identity instead of to God as his creator for his source of strength. One day, as a young man, Samson walked through the vineyards of Timna, and a lion leapt from the bush, roaring, claws flashing. Any other man would have fled, but Samson didn't even flinch. With a shout, he seized the beast, tore it apart as easily as one might split a loaf of bread, and the victory thrilled him. He told no one, not because he was humble, but because the secret made him feel powerful, special, untouchable. The lion's carcass became the first seed of pride planted deep in his heart. As Samson grew older, he treated his strength like a game. When the Philistines angered him, he tied torches to tails of foxes and sent them racing through their fields, laughing as the flames devoured their harvest. When they tried to capture him, he would snap the ropes like threads and struck down a thousand men with nothing but a donkey's jawbone. The ground would be littered with enemies, and Samson stood in the center of it all, chest heaving, convinced he was invincible. He didn't pray, he didn't ask for guidance, he didn't wonder why he was strong, he simply believed he was strength. Then came Delilah. Her voice was soft, her touch gentle, and Samson, who feared no army, was undone by her smile. The Philistine rulers saw their chance and bribed her to uncover the secret of his power. She asked him outright, and Samson laughed, and he lied to her, and let her bind him and let her test him. And each time this happened, she betrayed him, and he broke free effortlessly. It became a gain to him, a dangerous one, but pride told him that he could never lose because of his strength. So when he finally revealed the full truth to Delilah that his strength was tied to his Nazarene vow to never cut his hair, he didn't believe anything would come of it. He fell asleep one night in her lap, confident as ever. But when he awoke to Philistines surrounding him, he rose with the same old swagger. I'll shake myself free, he thought. But he didn't realize the truth until it was too late. His strength was gone, and the Lord had departed from him. The Philistines seized him, gouged out his eyes, bound him in bronze chains, and sent him to the grinding of grain like a beast of burden. The man who once stood above all others now lived in darkness, humbled and broken. His pride had carried him to the edge and then abandoned him there. This is ultimately a story about embracing your own personal strength over the power of God. God didn't make Samson strong for his own personal benefit. He gave Samson strength to be a deliverer, to be a hope for other people. Yet more often than not, Samson used his strength for personal gain and advancement and for bringing pain into other people's lives. He was the strongest and believed that nothing could compare to him. He had forgotten the source of his strength, which was the power of God. The same can be true in our lives, right? We may not be blessed with the supernatural strength of Samson, but we have personal strengths and things that we are good at. Things that we can use to bring others good, bring God glory and even power over ourselves. Maybe it's your intelligence, your wit, your charisma, your ability to persuade or influence others. We must be careful not to allow all of our strengths to be the source of pride in our life. But remember that God is the source of these strengths. And we benefit most from them when we operate under his authority. So what happens when we put our pride in the personal strength of our own life? It will make your life self-focused. We see often in Samson's life he was out for revenge. Someone would do something to him and he would seek revenge. But it's also eventually going to make yourself blinded to your own weaknesses, to the areas where you're not strong, and eventually lose any strength that you had. It will cost you God's protection. Samson just didn't lose the praise of all the men, the greatest warrior of all. In that embracing of pride, he lost God's protection. It's a horrible place to live. Where does Samson grinding away at a millstone, unable to see, weak, abandoned, broken? That's where pride and his own strength left him. There's another story, and this is in the pride of where you stand with others and your personal standing, you, your personal importance. And this story begins in the upper room at the Last Supper, when Jesus was telling the disciples there was going to be a betrayal. Things were going to go horribly that night, and yet one among them stood up with bold confidence and set himself apart and says, No, not me. Listen to this story out of the Gospels. The room was warm with lamplight and the Passover meal spread before Jesus and his disciples. They had followed him for years, but tonight felt different. It felt heavy, charged, as though the air itself knew something was coming to an end this night. Jesus spoke of betrayal, of the scattering of disciples, and of a coming darkness none of them wanted to imagine. The disciples shifted uneasily, but one, Peter, stood straighter. His heart pounding with a fierce loyalty, he believed he himself had been set apart. He wasn't like the others. He knew he wasn't. He had been the first to declare Jesus the Messiah. He had walked on water even only briefly. He was the one Jesus always seemed to single out, the one who spoke first, acted first, burned brightest. If anyone was closest to Jesus, certainly it was him. So when Jesus warned that all of them would fall away, Peter couldn't stay silent. And he declared, even if everybody else abandons you, I never will. It wasn't just a promise, it was a declaration of his identity. Peter believed he was the exception. No sin could get him, no trial would trip him up, no temptation would cause him to fall. Jesus looked at him with a sorrow that cut deeper than a rebuke. And he said, Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times. Peter shook his head, wounded by this suggestion. And he said, Never. I would never deny you. I would die for you. And he meant it. At least he meant the version of it he imagined. This heroic version of courage came easily in danger, felt noble, but pride has a way of blinding us to our own limits. Hours later, the night shifted dramatically. Torches and shouts split through the sky. Soldiers seized Jesus and chaos erupted. Peter, fueled by the same pride that he had made him boast, drew his sword and struck. He was ready to prove himself. But Jesus told him to stop. That moment shattered Peter's illusion of what loyalty looked like. You see, Jesus wasn't calling for heroics, he was surrendering. And he was asking his disciples to do the same, to live a life of surrender. And suddenly Peter's confidence drained away. As they dragged Jesus away, Peter followed at a distance, close enough to see, but far enough to feel safe. The others had scattered, but Peter still believed he was different. He would stay near, even if only in the shadows. In the courtyard outside the high priest house, he was warming himself by a fire. There was a glow on his face, and someone recognized him and said, You are with him. Peter's heart stuck a beat. The danger was real now, not imagined. He could be arrested if he admitted this. His pride, once so loud, shrank into fear. I don't know what you're talking about, he whispered. A second accusation came, and then a third, and each time Peter denied, knowing Jesus with increasingly desperation, with increasing desperation. The words tumbled out, frantic, instinctive. And at the end of the third denial, the rooster crowed. Jesus, being led across the courtyard, turned and met Peter's eyes. And it wasn't eyes filled with anger, it was filled with grief. Grief for him, not at him. For that was what broke him. In that moment, Peter saw himself clearly for the first time, not the bold disciple, not the favored one, not the exception, just a man, fragile, fearful, and more desperate of grace than he had ever admitted. He fled into the night, weeping not only because he had denied Jesus, but because the pride he had built his identity on had crumbled to dust. This is a story we can probably all relate to. We can spend our lives trying to impress God, trying to do things for him. And we do these things to show how committed we are, how much we love him, to show him just how different I am than anyone else. I'm willing to do more and sacrifice more. And we're actually serving out of pride to create our own standing before God. I want you to hear this. Jesus never demanded service. Instead, he asked for surrender. A surrender to follow Him, to be with Him, to not try and build your life around your own works, but to try to build, not try to build your own kingdom, but instead to join His kingdom. Here's what happens when we put pride in our own personal standing over God. We make our life, your life becomes overcertain. You think you're more capable than you are. We start to have clouded judgment like Peter did. I'll die for you, I'll do anything. Everybody else will go away, but I will not fail. We start to cloud our judgment. And eventually it'll cause you to crumble under pressure. When it becomes reality, when it becomes you by yourself in those moments of temptation and trial, if you're building your life on your own standing and not God's grace, you will crumble. The key thought is this pride will cost you more than your position. It will cost you God's power in your life. You think you have built everything on your power, and when it crumbles, it's not that your position just goes away, but so does the power. I've been in ministry long enough to see men that I had high respect and value for and saw great works of their ministry fail. They became isolated, they fell into sin. They thought this would never happen to me. I'm too important, I'm too, God's using me too much, my voice means too much, I'm the exception to the rule, and yet they failed in those moments of temptation because they had rooted their life in their own personal standing, not in the grace of God. So this brings us back to this promise of God, right from James. God will oppose the proud, but give grace to the humble. In each of these stories, we see each prideful life, we have had a head-on collision with God and be shattered. God's opposition to pride is certain and unbreakable. The truth that plays out in our lives as well. When we choose pride, it will shatter with the same certainty of hurtling a glass jar at a concrete wall, just like each one of these. But why? Because God doesn't do this to prove himself, he does this to point us in a better direction. Trust in yourself only has one destination: brokenness, defeat, death. And God does not want us to go that way. And that is why he opposes pride in our life. That's why he will put a wall up and say, no farther. Hit it and push back. When pride takes over, God will oppose it. That's a promise. And he will bring us to a point back to turn us toward submission, to turn us toward surrender toward his grace, and his grace to the humble. That is also his promise. And we actually see that in the rest of these stories. The beautiful part about each of these stories is they don't end at the low point. Instead, as each one of them gave up their pride and embraced humility toward God in Christ and looked at him for their hope instead of themselves, they found his grace ready, willing, and able to redeem and re-energize their life. The good news of hope for Adam and Eve. When Adam and Eve stepped beyond the gates of Eden, they were humbled and trembling beneath the weight of their failure. The world felt vast and unfamiliar, yet not entirely forsaken. While the soil resisted them and thorns tore at their hands, and sorrow became a companion they had never known, but in that hardship something new began to grow. God did not abandon them to the cold. Instead, he fashioned garments of animal skin and of his own hands and wrapped them in them for warmth and protection, something that they could never have made themselves. That simple, tender act became a quiet promise that grace would follow them even outside of paradise. And then in the rhythm of planting and harvesting and the birth of their children, and in moments when the memory of Eden ached within them, they discovered that though they had lost the garden, they had not lost God. Step by step, promise by promise, redemption began to take root in the very soil that they tilled, and eventually in the seed of their offspring that would bring the hope of the world, Jesus. Says here, God's grace will not leave us in shame. He has a new plan for us. Even when we are at lowest, he has a new plan for us. What about Samson? Samson stood in the darkness of his blindness, grinding grain like an animal. The mighty warrior finally understood how fragile he truly was, how deeply he had taken God's gift for granted. Yet even there, in this place of humiliation, grace quietly found him. His hair began to grow again, strand by strand, a silent reminder that God had not abandoned him. And when the Philistines dragged him into their temple to mock him and his God, Samson leaned against the pillars and whispered a prayer. Not the proud demands of the man that he once was, but a humble plea to the one he knew his strength that never had been his own. God heard him, and in that moment of surrender, God restored his power, not as a reward for his past, but as an act of mercy in his present. And with renewed strength, Samson brought down the temple, striking a final blow against Israel's enemies and finding redemption, not in his might, but in the God who gave it back to him when he least deserved it. And we see here, God's grace will not leave us in pain. He has a new power for us, and it's the power of healing to bring us back. And what about Peter? After the night of his denial, Peter carried this humiliation like a weight that he couldn't shake. Haunted by the sounds of that rooster in the memory of Jesus' sorrowful gaze, even after the resurrection, Peter kept to the edges, unsure if he still belonged among the others. But one morning on the shores of Galilee, as dawn painted the water gold, Jesus called him from beside a charcoal fire, the same kind of fire where Peter had denied him. And instead of rebuking him, Jesus cooked breakfast for the man who had sworn he didn't even know him, a quiet act of grace that softened Peter's trembling heart. Then with gentle persistence, Jesus asked him three times, Do you love me? Offering Peter a chance to answer love for every denial. And in that moment, Peter realized that grace wasn't just forgiveness, it was restoration. Jesus didn't merely welcome him back, he entrusted him with purpose again, telling him to go and feed his sheep. And so the man who once crumbled under fear rose renewed, empowered not by his own works, but because Jesus had made, met him in his failure, and lifted him into redemption and turned him into the rock. Peter, the rock, which the church was founded upon. And I want you to hear this. God's grace won't leave us in humiliation. He has a new purpose for you. Maybe tonight you find yourself like Adam and Eve. You've thought you're wiser than God, or Samson, you're stronger than God, or Peter, you have been building your whole life on your standing and what you can do. And you've hit that wall and your life has shattered at some point. I want to challenge you tonight to not try to pick those pieces back up and put your life back together. Instead, to turn to God and let him build something new in your life. Which brings us to the question of the day. Where is your pride keeping you from experiencing God's grace? Where is your pride trying to pick these pieces back up over and over again? Keeping you from experiencing God's grace of redemption, renewal, and hope in your life. Maybe you've lived your whole life in this cycle of brokenness and repair, trying to make things better this time by your own wisdom, strength, and standing. And yet you haven't realized that you are continually coming up against the promise of God to oppose the proud. The only way life gets back together in a way that lasts is in a way that restores it to the way God designed it. And that's grace, submission, and surrender. And that is choosing hope. Let's pray together.