Christmas is a festival of hope. And there is nothing our world needs more desperately than authentic hope. We have placed our hopes in all the wrong things. The false gods of human progress, the future, financial security, technology- all have fallen from their thrones. They have been exposed as unreliable sources of hope. To hope in any of them is to know eventual disappointment and to ultimately experience despair. People disappoint us when we place our hopes in them. They fail us or are unable to be our source of happiness. We place hope in our careers, our financial planning, and our abilities. Life’s reversals shock us with the realization that our hopes have been misplaced. Things seldom work out as we have planned. Circumstances, people, ourselves and our talents are not reliable sources of hope. What we need is a hope that is more than wishful thinking or blind expectations that everything will work out smoothly. We need a hope that is vibrant in pain, consistent in grief, indefatigable when people break our hearts, unassailable in disappointments and unflagging in life’s pressures. True hope is inadvertent. It does not come from searching hope. It grows out of two basic convictions: that God is in charge and that He intervenes. The grounding of our hopes should be Christ in the world, and the evidence of our hopes should be Christ in our hearts. Do we have hopes like that? Are our hopes ultimately reliable? This is why a true experience of Christmas should give us lasting hope!