HOPE
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PRAYER
Hope it’s an illusive thing for many. Trying to narrow down a definition can be just as illusive.
This past week I posed this question on Facebook and in conversations:
How would you describe or define “hope”?
How would you describe or define “hope”?
The answers were varied:
“Hope is an active word! As my Mom would say, ‘God helps those who help themselves.’” - Katharyn.
“Hope is to anticipate with joy, and as of yet unrealized outcome.” - Aaron.
“Making a specific, thoughtful and mindful plan for a good outcome.” - Natalie
“Hope = Positive Expectation” - Emmett.
One friend made an acronym for it: “Healing Open to People Everywhere” - Craig
“Hope keeps you going…when you don’t have hope things are bleak and seem impossible. God is hope and is in your heart, Hope is love.” - Gloriana
“Hope is a belief that your plans for the future will succeed.” - Cami
“Hope means no matter how dark or bad things seem there is a rainbow ahead and things will get better.” - Rita
“The expectation that something good will happen.” - Anne
Around Christmas we see a lot of signs about Hope, Joy, Peace, and Love…Hmmmm, that’d make a good Advent Series - oh wait, that is our Advent Series!
Hope, according to our friend Webster comes in two forms - a verb, and a noun.
As a verb:
HOPE: to cherish a desire with anticipation : to want something to happen or be true
hopes for a promotion
hoping for the best
I hope so.
As a noun:
HOPE:
1archaic : TRUST, RELIANCE
2a: desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment
came in hopes of seeing you
also : expectation of fulfillment or success
no hope of a cure
when they were young and full of hope
b: someone or something on which hopes are centered
our only hope for victory
c: something desired or hoped for
great hopes for the coming year
As I started to prepare for this sermon, I thought it would be pretty straight forward, but it is obvious that it’s not.
So how about in the Bible? How is hope defined there?
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
The noun does not appear in the Gospels. The five times the verb appears in the Gospels two times it carries the idea from the Old Testament of “trust”. The other three could be translated as a positive wish.
The word does begin to show up more in the epistles, which makes sense since the Christian hope is grounded on the resurrection of our Lord Jesus.
Paul let us know that Hope was among the three things that abide:
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
It would seem that faith and hope are inextricably bound together.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
Paul puts it this way in his letter to the Romans. He writes in Romans 8:23-25:
And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Now many of you have taken it upon yourselves to read through the entire Bible cover to cover, and you have no doubt noticed that as you venture through the Old Testament that you do see the word “HOPE” and most often it is trust, but as you get further along, and especially in the prophets you begin to sense a change that points to the future. A future hope!
One of the more popular verses I see talking about hope from the OT:
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
In the Old Testament that hope points more and more to the expectation of a savior... of the Messiah…and to the future the further you get along. God is the ultimate object of our hope. And this hope is grounded in God’s actions, specifically, the fulfilling of promises made throughout and kept. Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of the promise, as he comes to our world in fulfillment of the many promises and prophecies.
In the New Testament, Jesus has arrived, yet we still see that expectation of the future. The Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary put it this way:
hope is the confidence that what God has done for us in the past guarantees our participation in what God will do in the future. This contrasts to the world’s definition of hope as “a feeling that what is wanted will happen.”
In Paul’s letter to the Romans there are 3 great “Therefore” chapters, Chapter 5, 8, and 12.
Chapter 5 begins with this promise:
Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
So for us as Christians, when we speak of hope, we’re not speaking of something etherial and intangible. Our HOPE has a proven track record from the beginning of Creation through the end of time as promised in God’s eternal Word.
It is because of His resurrection that we who trust in Jesus can be sure of our own resurrection. It is because of God’s fulfillment of the eternal Word in the past that we can trust in the fulfillment of His promises in the future.
HOPE:
Is active
Is trust - belief - knowledge
Is given to us in JESUS!
HOPE during this Advent Season is more than hoping for what we want for Christmas. It is not passive, it is active as many of my FB friends pointed out.
HOPE is trust and belief and knowledge. It is trusting in one that is trustworthy because we’ve seen the fulfilled promises throughout the Scriptures. It is belief because it is in someone we can’t see right now. It is knowledge, because we know who Jesus is in our personal experience,
HOPE is give to us in JESUS through the HOLY SPIRIT.