Enjoy Life, Enjoy God
HOPE DEFINED
October 14, 2011
What does it mean, "You have to have hope?" What? Hope in what? When we have hope, what do we have? Is hope nothing more than a gut thing, a feeling?
For in this hope we are saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.
--Romans 8:24,25 TNIV
The hope that Christians proclaim is more than a feeling, it is a substance to buoy a life that risks faltering. Yet Paul gives us a wakeup call--we can't hold on to hope, for to see it, to possess it tangibly--that no longer is hope. The hope that we in Christ "possess" is the promise of God in Jesus Christ, an earnest of life itself.
Yes, in Christ "Ya gotta have hope." But that hope grounds itself in the surety of who God is in claiming us as his. So...in that sense, you gotta have hope.
Joyfully,
Dale Patterson