Where is Your Hope?
I want to ask you to take a minute with me to pause and reflect on this question: where do you put your hope?
(Are you taking a minute?)
… Good job. This question is one of great interest to me. Some of us find our hope in sports teams, some of us in friendships, or relationships, and some of us in money, but I hope that most, if not all, of you reading this thought of Jesus Christ when posed with this question.
Hope is a very interesting concept. We can’t necessarily weigh it, it is not tangible, and we can’t touch it or smell it or taste it. But we all know when hope is there. It is almost like we were made with a 6th sense that enables us to hope. Something that is intriguing to me is the way that our different senses interact and work with each other. If we plug our nose then we don’t taste things right or we can’t even taste at all, if someone is blind or even when we close our eyes our other senses grow in awareness. Even when all the senses are working they do a great deal to help the others out; we hear something behind us and turn to look and catch a glimpse out of our peripheral vision without even taking a second to think about it. Not only are our senses heightened at the loss of another but they are made stronger by the others.
This brings me back to hope. Do we hope in what is tangible? Sometimes, but that is one of the beauties of hope; it doesn’t take a tangible thing for us to have it. However, the tangible things around us do play a huge factor in our coming to have hope. We hope because of what we have seen, what we have heard, and what we have felt. I hope because when I look for truth, and listen for answers, and dig deep into my feelings only one thing remains. Jesus Christ! He is truth; we don’t always remember this – I know I forget it way too often – but we are always seeking it. Those things that you thought about when answering the question about what you hope for – while not necessarily bad things – all fall extremely short except for Jesus.
We use the word “love” for almost everything: we love our hat, and we love our moms. We love our shoes and we love our girlfriends. We are a species that is all about love, we are crying out for it, in the songs we listen to, the books we read, and the shows we watch. We are searching for love. Where does the Bible say love is found? The better question is, who does the Bible say love is? The answer? God. We were created to have hope, and created with a longing for love, and only when our hope is found in the true love of Jesus Christ, will we really have peace. This doesn’t mean that all the problems in our lives will be fixed; rather we are told our lives will most likely be harder. What it does mean is that we are no longer defined by the clutter and the craziness of the things that we say we love and hope in – the things that distract us from Jesus – but rather, we are defined by the fact that we are loved by God and made alive in Christ. Let’s work and fight to live into that hope together.
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