“Now in this hope we were saved, but hope  that is seen is not hope, because who hopes for what he sees? Now if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with patience.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Faith is a word that is essentially connected with the message of the Gospel that can be hard for someone who has not yet embraced it to understand. The nature of Gospel faith is often misunderstood—including by Jesus’ own followers. Another Gospel concept that can be similarly challenging to wrap our minds around is the word hope. Gospel hope is often mischaracterized as little more than wishful thinking. Yet that falls woefully short of what it actually is. Let’s talk a bit about hope, why it is so essential to the Gospel, and what it actually means.

Paul starts out here by saying that it was in this hope that we were saved. What hope? Well, remember what we talked about just yesterday. Even as creation itself groans and longs for redemption, and specifically our redemption, so do we. In v. 23, Paul says that we who have the Spirit—that is, those who are following Jesus, who have placed their faith in Him—groan with all of creation for the redemption of our bodies. When we are saved, we receive the gift of life in Christ in the hope that one day our bodies will be redeemed, renewed, and made completely whole.

That’s what we are looking forward to in Christ. For all of our looking forward with hope, though, our bodies have not been redeemed. They still wear out. They still break down. We still die even as the funeral service I will perform this afternoon attests. So, we rather emphatically have not received the object of our hope. What gives?

Well, the time for that hasn’t come yet. We’ve talked before about why God doesn’t just fix things the way we wish that He would. When that happens, it’s game over. And He can’t start doing a little bit here and a little bit there. There’s no logical limiting principle to this work. As soon as He starts fixing one part of the brokenness, He’ll have to fix the next, and the next, and the next, until suddenly the whole thing is fixed.

Okay, but why doesn’t He just do that? Because fixing the whole thing means stopping us from sinning. As Jesus declared, as the narrative of Scriptures makes patently obvious, as simple observations of human history clearly demonstrate, the primary source of the brokenness in the world is not some external thing that we could put a metaphorical band-aid on and everything will be better. There isn’t some set of rules that will do the job if they just get enforced rigorously enough. No one really wants to live in that kind of a totalitarian state anyway. No, the source of the brokenness is in us. It is part of us. We are sinners by nature. Paul has already thoroughly explained that earlier in the letter.

Be that as it may, why doesn’t God just bring things on to their end so that the time for His properly fixing everything can get here. Because, again, that means the end of all things. All decisions at that point are final. God doesn’t want for anyone to miss out on the chance at salvation, at being on the right side of redemption when it arrives. The apostle Peter addressed that in his second letter. “The Lord does not delay his promise, as some understand delay, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance.”

So, we long for the redemption of our bodies, the redemption of creation itself, for this future that is vastly superior to the present in every way. But the time for that glorious day has not arrived yet. We have faith that it will because we have come to trust in God’s word. Why? Because we have come to understand that it is true. We trust that when He says He is going to make all things new that He will. After all, Jesus said that He would rise from the dead, and that’s exactly what He did. Thus we are left with this longing and anticipation for a future that will be better than today. That’s hope. The opposite of hope is dread. The Scriptures only offer something to dread for those who don’t ultimately receive God’s offer of salvation in Christ. For everyone who does, there is only hope.

Hope is something we can’t see yet by definition “because who hopes for what he sees?” That’s not hope. That’s just having whatever it is. That is hope fulfilled. We are left now with the waiting. “Now if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with patience.”

Why does this matter? What good is hope? How is this any different from fanciful, wishful thinking that is ultimately meaningless and just leaves the one doing it sadder when the future turns out to be rubbish after all? Isn’t it better to adopt a posture of realism, of fatalism, even? Doesn’t despair make more sense than hope as a rational posture on the world? To ask the question again: What good is Gospel hope?

Well, fatalism, pessimism, realism if you want to call it that (although I would rather heartily dispute that word used in this way), despair all make sense if Jesus didn’t come walking back out of that tomb. It only makes sense if there is no God as the Scriptures reveal. Absent that, there’s no reason to live at all but for the ones we make up for ourselves. And, if we’re just making up reasons to live, how is this any different from the “wishful thinking” that a Gospel hope is caricatured as being by its critics? It’s certainly darker and more pessimistic in tone, but that’s about it.

If we’re all playing make believe, then, it seems like it would be better for the world to play a game of make believe that results in the world becoming a better place. Secularism certainly hasn’t made the world a better place. Meanwhile, although religion itself and broadly defined has contributed more than its fair share to the problems of the world, pretty much every positive change in the world over the last 2,000 years has had a group of people driven by the kind of Gospel hope Paul is talking about here at its heart.

That’s what a Gospel hope does. That’s why this Gospel hope matters. The word Paul uses there at the end of the passage to describe our waiting is the key to understanding this. He said we eagerly wait for this better future “with patience.” The Greek word translated there does not imagine some idle, passive waiting. It does not involve merely sitting on our hands while we watch the world burn. Neither is it a sitting around hopefully waiting for heaven to arrive while doing nothing of significance to better the world around us. This word describes the patience of a farmer or of a military unit on a forward operating base. One commentator describes it as a “militant patience.”

Okay, but what does this mean? The kind of patience Paul is talking about here is an active patience. It is a faithful patience. It is a hope-filled patience. Our trust in this future that will be better than the present is so great that we feel the confidence to start living now like we will be living then. We start doing things now to hasten the world toward that end. We prepare ourselves and the people around us to the extent we are able for when that day arrives.

And what does that all look like? Well, in God’s kingdom where our hopes will all be fulfilled, all of our interactions will be characterized by love. So, we start doing that now. The fruit of the Spirit Paul describes in Galatians 5 will be normal, not exceptional. So, we start living now like they are normal. We make sure that our lives are filled to the brim with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And this isn’t something we just do in isolation either. As one of my members pointed out one time: all of these virtues assume community. That is, they aren’t possible to practice without other people around.

In God’s final kingdom where hope becomes sight, justice will be perfect. Ignorance will be a thing of the distant past. Relationships will be right in every way. There will be no need that goes unmet. Selfishness will be gone. Disease and pain will not be things we can conceive of any longer. So, knowing that day is coming, we start doing things now to help them along in that direction. We work for justice. We feed the hungry. We clothe the naked. We care for orphans and widows. We visit the prisoners. We heal the sick. We educate the ignorant in the truth. We proclaim the Gospel so that others can join us in this great and world-changing hope.

Oh wait, those are the things Christians are already doing and doing in greater numbers than anybody else is doing because of this very Gospel hope. Gospel hope matters. A lot. And if you don’t have it, if you haven’t experienced it, what are you waiting for? Change that today.