“Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; be persistent in prayer.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

As a longtime fan of the Kansas City Royals, I know what wishful thinking is. A decade ago now, all the metaphorical baseball planets aligned, and we were genuinely really good. Since then? And for most of the thirty years before then? Not so much. In just the last 25 years alone they’ve lost more than 100 games seven times, and gotten close to that grim marker of a truly terrible season another four times. And yet in almost every season there’s a stretch when they actually look like they’re going to be a real baseball team. The fans start getting excited. And you let yourself think, “This is finally the season they’re going to turn it around.” But they almost never do. Instead, we have learned to be patient in affliction and persistent in prayer. Real hope, though, has not given us much reason for rejoicing. As it turns out, all three of these ideas are commands Paul issues next in his list of lifestyle characteristics of a follower of Jesus. Let’s keep rolling with him.

The next command Paul gives to the Roman believers is to “rejoice in hope.” We understand what it is to rejoice. Sticking with the baseball analogies, we lived in Denver, CO when the Rockies last made it to the World Series. We were at Game 4 of the NLCS when they completed their sweep of the Arizona Diamondbacks to secure their chance to get swept by the Boston Red Sox in the World Series (and we had tickets to Game 5…). But as disappointing as the World Series itself was, that night, as first baseman and future Hall of Famer, Todd Helton, was perched in victory over a Diamondbacks player whose face was in the dirt after a failed attempt to slide into first to beat the throw, the whole city rejoiced.

Being able to rejoice is a good feeling. It’s the feeling of knowing you have won. That elation is made all the stronger by the fact that the anxiety of losing has been entirely relieved. There is great peace in rejoicing because as far as you are concerned, everything is right with the world. Sure, there were some bumps along the way. There always are. But you have overcome those bumps and achieved the goal for which you were aiming.

Hope, on the other hand, is something that’s a bit harder for our culture to understand. It often gets confused with wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is imagining a future that is better than the present, but without any real evidence or rationale that such a belief is justified. When you hope for the best, but don’t have any particular reason to do that, much less confidence the best is going to come to pass, you are engaging merely in wishful thinking, not biblical hope.

When the various authors of the New Testament, including Paul right here, talk about hope, they have something else in mind entirely. Hope is the commitment to act today in light of a future that is better than the present. Hope in the Scriptures is a reasonable decision to live like Jesus has already conquered sin and death because of His promise to do so in the future. We trust in that promise because this same Jesus predicted and pulled off His own death and resurrection. If He was right about that, we don’t have any reason to doubt that He is also right in His promise to restore all things.

Our culture has given up any kind of a belief that the future will be better than the present. That is, we have given up hope as a culture. This is obvious from the stories we tell. When we tell stories about the future, they are always dystopian. The future is a hellish wasteland in which basic decency has flown out the window and people are all basically out for themselves.

If our personal picture of the future is bleak and hopeless like that, what will that do to our behavior in the present? Well, it’s not going to make it better. If nothing we do today is going to make tomorrow any better, we’re not going to be looking to do good things now. We’ll look to do mostly selfish things because looking out for ourselves is the only real good we can achieve. We’ll start to lose any real sense of the value of the lives of the people around us. If nothing and no one matters in the future, then it and they don’t matter now.

But if the future is going to be better than the present, if all the brokenness and sin that torment our lives now will be gone, then we can safely and confidently begin behaving toward that end now. If our efforts to accomplish the good of God’s kingdom will one day be rewarded, we can be kind to others now without fear that we are wasting our time. We can proclaim the Gospel without fear of the response of the people around us. We can be compassionate and merciful knowing that our efforts in the small will become realized in the full when that day arrives. Hope like this is a powerful thing that can have a powerfully good impact on our present world.

Well, if this hope is a real thing; that is, if Jesus’ victory over sin and death and His restoration of all things really is coming, then we shouldn’t just embrace this position, we should rejoice in it. We should live toward that day with excitement and intentionality. We should delight in doing good to others. We should exult in working for justice for the oppressed. We should be excited about showing mercy and compassion to those who are suffering. Serving those who are struggling under the weight of hopelessness should be one of the most exciting things in the world for us to do. When good will be the final state of things, participating in that end now should be the most fun we ever have. We should rejoice in hope.

More than that, biblical hope leads us to be patient in affliction. Even though the future is going to be better than the present because of Jesus’ victory over sin and death and His restoration of all things, the present is not there yet. Our world is still suffering under the weight of the brokenness of sin. And the powers that benefit from that brokenness are highly motivated to keep things that way for as long as they can. When we rejoice in hope by actively pursuing the good of God’s future kingdom, we are going to experience pushback and persecution from the forces of sin in this world in the manifold of forms they take. To put that more directly, affliction is going to be a natural part of the life of a follower of Jesus.

This is not a state of affairs that should disturb us or threaten our peace because we know it is temporary. Hope is the enactment of that knowledge. Because of that, we don’t have to get unnerved by affliction. We don’t have to rage against it. We don’t have to let it depress us or lead us down a path of anxiety. We can be patient when it comes.

Wait, so does that mean we just sit there idly while we suffer? Not at all. That’s not what biblical patience is. Biblical patience is never idle. Biblical patience is waiting with hope. It is actively embracing the call of God to love our neighbors and proclaim His kingdom regardless of the obstacles that rise up in our path because we know that our efforts are not ever in vain. When we are patient in affliction, we are actively working for justice for the oppressed. We are lifting up the fallen. We are helping those who are struggling bear their burdens. We are showing compassion to the downtrodden and mercy to the suffering. We are working to bring healing to the sick. We do all of this in spite of the hard times we are facing personally because we know that in the end, Jesus will return to complete the work we have been doing in His name, rendering worthwhile all of our efforts.

But we can’t do any of this under our own power. Thus the last command here: “Be persistent in prayer.” When we pray, we are actively seeking a deeper, fuller, richer relationship with God. We are growing our connection to Him. We are learning to rely more fully on Him. All of that gives us greater access to His power and presence. That power and presence are what we need to sustain us through seasons of affliction. That power and presence can become the substance of our rejoicing when we turn our attention to hope. We cannot do any of that on our own. We have to stay tapped into our source of power. Prayer is the way we stay tapped in.

In a story I’ve been working through with my Bible study group on Wednesday nights, the disciples asked Jesus why they weren’t able to heal a certain boy by driving out a demon that was tormenting him. In Mark’s version of the story Jesus tells them that “this kind does not come out except by prayer.” His point was not that prayer is some kind of a talisman, but rather He was pointing to prayer as the means of our staying connected to the power of God. And when we are operating by that power, “Nothing will be impossible for you.” That seems like a pretty good power to have access to. So, let’s be persistent in prayer.

Three more commands; three more world-transforming ways to live out our faith in Jesus. We’ll keep rolling again next week. Maybe even with bigger bites. We’ll see. Tomorrow, stay tuned for a reflection on another example from the culture of why the Gospel is so good.