Christian Living

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I heard a quote recently from a well-known preacher and it radically changed the way I live my life. In essence, this is what they said: hope sets the atmosphere that attracts the promises of God. When I heard it, something within my soul awakened and I felt like a teenager being given the keys to their very first car. As soon as you hear the clanging of those metal keys hitting against each other, you desperately want to take that baby for spin; it doesn’t matter where you go, you just want to go and go there fast. It was like I was given keys to a new car sitting in my life’s driveway.

Sure, I’ve read Scriptures about hope and heard a great many sermons about it too, but this time felt different. For the first time, I was faced with the ugly reality that I was a master at wishing and a novice at hoping.

The modern definition of hope is synonymous to wishing, which is probably why it’s often been relegated to folklore stories and fairy tales. But for a Christian, hope is living and active, and a fundamental aspect of our lives. Whereas a wish is a desire rooted in optimism and quite passive, Godly hope is dynamic and it eagerly waits for the promises of God to be fulfilled. You cannot say you have faith and not hope because faith brings substance to the things we hope (Hebrews 11:1). Faith and hope cannot be separated. Martin Luther said it like this: faith originates in your understanding of God but hope activates our will; By faith we begin, by hope we continue.

For a long time I was afraid to hope because I feared disappointment. Wishing, or closing my eyes and praying really loudly without expectation, was easier and a shorter, less painful fall into disappointment than from the height actual expectation. Although it seemed like a safe plan, I spent a decent amount of my Christian life going in circles, getting nowhere, like a hamster in a wheel. My faith wasn’t growing and with every up and down in life, I was constantly being tossed around. Talk about whiplash. I blamed God for all His unfulfilled promises in my life and I grew even more fearful of the future, and the cycle continued. Without hope, faith cannot endure and without faith, you cannot persevere through the trials that come with life. Faith helps us navigate daily life and hope is the soldier that fights to remind us that it gets better. You need both to set an atmosphere that attracts the promises of God.

So, how do you know if you’re hoping or not? Although hope includes the act of wishing, or desiring something, a wish does not equate hope. Unlike a wish, hope is transformative and not something that leaves us twiddling our thumbs in wait. Here are a few ways you can identify hope:

1) Hope leads you into the fruits of the Spirit. In case you didn’t know, anxiety is not a fruit of the Spirit. Hope reminds us that God has plans to prosper us and this should bring us into a place of joy and peace (Romans 15:13). As hope is activated and strengthened in our life, regardless of the circumstances, we will be able to find ways to smile and continue on with great expectation because our confidence is in the characteristics of God rather than in the characteristics of our problems or concerns. It builds our faith for today.

2) Hope changes your perspective. Hope transforms how we see our problems and how we see ourselves in our problems. Without hope you may feel defeated and want to throw in the towel when life throws you a curve ball, but with hope you cannot remain in despair very long without it coming along and reminding you that you will make it. Hope is difficult to destroy and even in the worst of times, if we listen carefully, it reminds us that the testing of our faith will bring us into maturity and complete faith (James 1:2-4). No longer are trials something to be feared or grumbled about but moments to rejoice over because we’re not powerless in them.

3) Hope moves you forward. I know when I’m struggling to hope when I can no longer look to the future with excitement. In seasons in my life when hope is awakened, even though my circumstances may tell me that all is lost, it’s easier to expect God’s goodness than to wallow in the mire. There is nothing passive about hope and it doesn’t cause us to sit in the mud and complain about all the terrible things happening in our life. God surely cares for us and is ever-present in our difficult moments, but it’s based on His goodness as a Father to never leave us and not on our circumstances. He gives us hope to mobilize us to get up, clean ourselves off, and move forward.

4) Hope always points to Christ. 1 Peter 1:3 refers to Christ as our living hope. Every expectation and plan should begin and end with Christ. We wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies, and in this hope we are saved (Romans 8:23). True hope kicks us into gear and keeps us from being consumed by the affairs of this world and reminds us that there is eternal life and inheritance upon Christ’s return. The finale to the second act of this life’s play is unfathomable and beyond our wildest, glorious dreams.

The Word of God is the best source of hope for us because it’s dripping with the promises of God. We all struggle at one time or another to hope; life surely knows how to dish out some pretty intense storms and it’s not always easy to fight our fear and anxiety. But like everything else, developing hope, especially in intense opposition, is a journey that God wants to walk with us on. God doesn’t call us to the “safe” route or merely wish for the best, he calls us to a bold, mind-boggling confidence in His promises for us. His heart isn’t to throw you over a cliff and demand that you fly, but to give you a door to hope regardless of whatever dark room you find yourself in – but if and when you walk through that door is up to you.

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