“And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.” Romans 5:5
What is Hope?
We all long for hope. We can’t live without it. We will fight to hang on to it until our last breath. HOPE. Just four letters that we cling to, but why? We can’t see it, feel it, or measure it in any way, but we need it to survive.
As I’ve prepared Bible studies and read devotionals over the last few weeks, the idea of hope has been repeated again and again. I know it’s the season of Lent, and Easter will be here before you know it, so many pastors are preparing their sermons around the idea of hope. I mean, that’s one word that sums up the purpose of Christ’s death and resurrection. Without Him there is no hope.
The Bible project made a video for Lent describing hope and the different Hebrew and Greek words used in the Bible that are translated into the English word “hope”. The link is at the bottom.
The Apostle Paul had a lot to say about hope. The Greek word for hope is “Elpis”. The book of Romans was written to Greek speaking Romans who were familiar with Greek mythology, specifically the story of Pandora’s box. If you’ve read the story, you know that everything escaped except Elpis–hope. Of course, the Greek myth relied on the world’s definition of hope, but early Christians in Rome would have made the connection between the mythological story and the true hope they had in Christ. They were living in a time when persecution led to many deaths. Let’s face it, life in ancient Rome could be tough for anyone. Yet Paul wrote:
Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” Romans 12:12
Hope in what?
I tend to be an optimistic person…okay, a very optimistic person. Over the past year, our family has faced some challenging times and people close to us have faced pretty hopeless situations based on the world’s standards. Of course, the world’s standards when it comes to hope can be pretty low. If looking at my own situation wasn’t depressing enough, I made the mistake of watching the news. Ouch!
Rick Warren made a good point in his Easter 2010 sermon: “Optimism is personal trust in yourself. Hope is personal trust in God. Optimism is what you think you can do. Hope is what you think God can do.”
People without Christ can have optimism, but not true hope. So often I find myself caught in the trap of optimism. I look at what I can do to make the best of difficult situations, and I tend to tie my ego to my success rate. Occasionally I may ignore reality, but more often I try to change reality to fit my plan for making things better. It still doesn’t work. I’m just trying to satisfy my need to control the situation (see my post on Limitless Obedience) and make people happy.
It’s easy to trade the world’s shallow optimism for the real hope. Even though our optimism may get overwhelmed by reality, some people still prefer to drown in an ocean of optimism rather than admit their need for hope in God. I’m not just talking about non-Christians. There are people sitting in churches every Sunday with smiles to hide the exhaustion they feel because they’re trying to play Superman and relying on themselves to bring people hope.
Faith and Hope
So why do we need faith in God to have hope? The simple answer is change and time. Hope based on faith cannot change because God does not change. His truth is eternal, and His hope has eternal value. Faith happens now because of our hope for the future.
“Faith has to do with things that are not seen and hope with things that are not at hand.”
-Thomas Aquinas
Our faith helps us trust God with the reality of the world we live in…a world only He can fix. Our hope depends on trusting God will do what He said he would do. Ultimately, we have hope in our salvation. Christ died for a reason…so that I could spend eternity with Him. For some of God’s children, that is the only hope they have. That is their hope and future as promised in Jeremiah 29:11, and it is enough.
So many have misquoted that verse (and many others) to make it sound like God will make us prosper on this side of heaven. If God has seen fit to bless you financially in this life, praise God. If he hasn’t, praise God. Hope pays no attention to the numbers in your bank account. Just as hope can’t be measured, God often offers us prosperity in other ways that can’t be measured, like love and peace. Those are the answered prayers of limitless hope.
Matt Naylor from Farmers Weekly surveyed older farmers in his local community in England seeking advice for new farmers. One farmer said, “Always build sheds 100% bigger than you think you can afford, and they might be half big enough to do the job.”
Even though the farmer was talking about an earthly harvest, what if we applied that to our spiritual life. What if we prepared our hearts like that farmer prepared his sheds? The circumstances may be against you, but God is in the miracle business, most importantly the miracle of salvation. The circumstances are beyond our control, but the circumstances don’t define our hope, God does. We can rest in knowing that our eternal hope is secure.
Are we ready to give up our optimism to experience limitless hope through Christ?
