The time between Christmas and New Years is often spent taking mental inventory of the passing year while envisioning a hopeful future. For some it may simply be more of the same with an added twist of enjoyment here or there while others are barraged with new unexpected realities where hope is their only security.
The word hope has been reduced to a passive definition of wishful thinking where we cross our fingers and “hope” for the best. "I hope it doesn’t rain this weekend." “I hope youdon’t get sick." I suggest we need a vocabulary make-over.
My life is founded on HOPE.
3What a God we have! And how fortunate we are to have him, this Father of our Master Jesus! Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we’ve been given a brand-new life and have everything to live for (HOPE), 4including a future in heaven—and the future starts now! 5God is keeping careful watch over us and the future. The Day is coming when you’ll have it all—life healed and whole.
1 Peter 1:3-5 (Message)
Hope exists and is sustained through the radical result of God raising Jesus from the dead. Because of what Father God has done through the death, burial and ressurection of Jesus - my future is no longer vague and uncertain. I have an inheritance kept for me in heaven. We have a profoundly reliable future that speaks hope for today.
We best understand our present in light of God's past and promises. What God has begun, He will finish.
Hope, then, is not simply emotion, attitude, or a feeling. It is a transforming grace experienced as we express our confidence in His finished work that defines us.
We have a Living Hope, Jesus. Today Father God invites you to enter each day free of the burden of the day before. We are not enslaved to cause and effect. The past does not hold us and determine our future. Our lives take shape in the reliability of God’s promises.
Such confidence, such hope makes it possible to live resolutely. Peter continues to write from vs.13 on with imperatives: "prepare your minds for action . . . discipline yourselves... be holy, love one another deeply..." He gives practical instruction to live in hope. And evidence of that God-given hope continually shows up in a transformed life.
We don’t define hope so much as we live it.
Our hope is alive, and it has more than mere definition; it has a name: the risen Lord Jesus Christ.
C’mon Man! “don’t give up”
“Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.” unknown
One of Thomas Edison's famous quotations about his attempts to make the light globe: "If I find 10,000 ways something won't work, I haven't failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”
Recommended Reading
The Hope Habit: Finding God's Goodness When Life is Hard
Whatever happened to hope? If you feel trapped by your circumstances and can’t see a way out, Terry Law wants to show you a new paradigm—the paradigm of hope, which he defines as the confident expectation of the goodness of God. This is not cheap optimism, a pep talk sprinkled with Bible references. This is real hope, the kind that knows “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”