The phrase “a thrill of hope” may, as it did for me, take you back to childhood Christmas Eve church services and the anticipation of Christmas Day. My family would always attend a Christmas Eve service in the evening before going to dinner and trying our very best to go to bed early—when, in reality, my younger sister and I would stay up watching movies and dreaming of Christmas late into the evening. Most children pay little attention to the Christmas hymns sung on Christmas Eve because their little hearts and minds are too excited for what they know is coming the next morning, and I was no different. But even as a child, that line from the hymn “O Holy Night” struck a chord with me.

I started looking into the history of this hymn, and it’s a bit complicated—it began as a French Christmas hymn that was later translated into English for American use, but it was banned in France for a long time because of some religious disagreement and the war for French independence, and it caused conflict in America during the Civil War. The song itself could tell many stories over its long life. But as I started studying this, one consistency rose to the surface: every person, army, and country who reached for this hymn needed “a thrill of hope.”

When we come to the Christmas story in the beginning of the New Testament, we step into a pretty hopeless scene. No word from God has been recorded for almost five hundred years. God’s people were under tyrannical rule in Israel. They had been promised for centuries that one day God would send a Redeeming King for His people, but they had been waiting, waiting, and waiting. Years underneath a king that didn’t know their God, years reading the Law and practicing the feasts and festivals, years going to the temple and sacrificing for sins and relying on a priest to advocate for them on their behalf—imagine the longing they felt for the fulfillment of God’s promises. We may not be waiting on a king or freedom from oppression, but we’ve all tasted the waiting. We wait for answers to our deepest desires, the fulfillment of God’s goodness to us, the end to chronic pain, the end to being childless, the end to being single, the end to grueling graduate school, the end to financial stress—the list goes on and on. We’ve all tasted the hopelessness that accompanies endless waiting. It’s exhausting.

Imagine you’re a shepherd living in that in-between-testaments time. You’ve heard the stories; you know God’s promises, but the hope that God will come through is starting to wane. You’re wearied of waiting. Until one night, the skies break open in blinding light, throwing you to your knees, and thousands of angels appear to tell you that the waiting is over. Just out of sight, an angel is telling Mary, the mother of Jesus, that her womb has been chosen by God to carry the Savior of the whole world. All of the hopelessness, all of the confusion, all of the questions silenced in the face of the God of Heaven, coming down to do everything He promised He would do, and more. His presence brought peace. His touch made the blind to see. He spoke life to the overlooked. He knelt in the dirt with the ashamed. He brought purity and worship back into the temple. For every need, He provided; for every pain, he brought healing; for every question, He answered with plenty. He came, not to save the people from their political enemy, but to set them free from the enemy of their soul: sin and death. On a canvas of dark hopelessness, Jesus appeared, and with Him, the weary world rejoiced.

Before Christ, we all lived in the darkness. No purpose to define our days, no anchor in God’s ultimate goodness, no ability to live a godly life, no hope that one day pain and evil will see its end. The book of Ephesians tells us that we were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Ephesians 2:12). Just as the birth of Jesus was a thrill of hope to a weary world, the gospel has come to you and me to awaken us to the same kind of hope. No longer are we strangers to God, but because of His rich mercy, we are called children of God. No longer are we people without hope, but we belong to the God of Hope. No longer do we stand guilty before God, but clean, whole, complete, and blameless. Child of God, He has already met your deepest need. Preach the gospel to yourself again today. You are His. No matter how dark it seems, hope is coming. Hope is already here. His name is Jesus.

Is that dark hopelessness stretching its hands over your life? Have you, like the weary world, long waited for pain to relent? Depression clouds our minds. Anxiety makes us so forgetful. Grief knocks us off our feet. Disappointment introduces so much shame. Over our weary lives, the gospel speaks a word of great hope. Even when you can’t see Him, there is a God who speaks light into darkness. There is a God who stands above time, who works all things according to the counsel of His will. There is a God who knows the stars in the sky as intimately as the hairs on your head, for whom nothing is ever impossible. And one day, He will make all things new. Because of Jesus, hope is always on the horizon—let us, the weary world, rejoice!