“Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is it that keeps you going each day? What sees you getting out of bed even on days you don’t feel like it? Perhaps it’s a sense of duty, and that can certainly do the trick. But there isn’t a lot of fun in that. And duty only works for so long. There’s a better way, but we can’t do it on our own. Let’s look a Paul’s next little blessing, talk about this better way, and how we can walk it.

Paul’s prayer for the people, the blessing he is calling down on them is for the God of hope to cause them to overflow with hope. We’ve talked about the idea of hope before. Hope is essential to life, and I don’t just mean for believers. Hope is the enacted belief in a future that will be better than the present. The opposite of hope, the belief in a future that will be worse than the present, is despair, and despair is no way to live.

As followers of Jesus, we serve the God of hope. He has promised a future in His eternal kingdom for all those who have put their trust in Him. In this kingdom all wrongs will be made right. Sin will be banished. Bodies broken because of the effects of sin will be restored. Peace will reign. Relationships will be right. Even creation itself will be made whole. It will be better than our present in every way. When we put our trust in this God, hope is part of the package. If you are following Jesus and don’t have hope, you aren’t really following Jesus at all. You don’t understand who it is you have signed up to follow.

Despair is a tool of the Enemy to keep us trapped in sin. People who have given into despair don’t necessarily turn to suicide, although some certainly do. They turn to cynicism. They give up trying to fight sin and just start giving into it. They work to undermine the hope of the people around them. They do things to hold off the future they believe is coming as long as they can. They obsess over this life. This can make them seem like wonderful people to be around when things are going well, but at the first sign of trouble, Mr. Hyde comes out and he is not nearly so pretty.

When hope is present, however, joy and peace are the natural byproduct. We go through our lives with a sense of wholeness. Even when our circumstances are not what we would like them to be, we know that the future is secure and will be better than whatever it is we are facing. The result of this confidence is peace. We are not overly bothered by the hard things. We rejoice at the good ones even as we know they may not last forever as they are. More hard things may yet come. But good will win the day.

God does all of this in and for and through us not just so that we can have hope to enjoy for ourselves. He does it so that we can overflow with hope. He wants us to have a hope so strong that it pours out of us and into the lives of the people around us. People who are themselves without hope or whose hope has grown dim can enter our presence and go away with their hope restored or even given hope for the first time. When Jesus calls His followers to be the light of the world, this is the kind of thing that light accomplishes.

We must be clear as we can be, though, that this hope does not come from us. We don’t generate this hope ourselves. On our own we might manage to drum up some wishful thinking about the future, but this will never rise to the level of actual hope. It is only when we have the assurance that our God will carry us safely to the glorious end of His kingdom that real hope rises. This is the power of the Holy Spirit in us.

Now, what about the hope that people who follow other religious teachings with their alternative views of a future beyond this life? Isn’t that as good as what we have? The quick answer is, “no,” but the longer answer invites us to examine the thing they are hoping for and the impact that has on the way they live now. In other words, compare and contrast the different hopes to see which one comes out on top.

Buddhists hope to merge with the unity of the universe and finally realize they are nothing. They may occasionally do things like take long and highly publicized walks to promote peace, but theirs is a peace of emptiness that comes when we give up all emotion and desire. It is a peace of absence, not that comes from the fullness of knowing there is a God who loves us and who desires the absolute best for us. We hope in a future that is full and rich and abundant. There our emotions will not be gone, they will be redeemed. Our desires will not go away, they will become fully aligned with God’s good and right desires and be able to be eternally met.

Hindus hope for basically the same end and that they will escape the cycle of rebirth. Reincarnation comes because you didn’t quite get everything right in your last life. In other words, being alive itself is a sign of futility. Practically speaking, while you will work to escape your own cycle of rebirth, helping others escape theirs doesn’t look like you might expect. If someone is suffering because of their circumstances, helping them out of those hard circumstances is not necessarily a good thing to do. If they are being punished for past transgressions, your bringing relief to them now could actually interfere in the cosmic justice they are facing and keep them locked in their own cycle of rebirth. This can lead to a kind of callousness toward the suffering of others that does little to make this world better.

Muslims hope for heaven, yes, but not necessarily an equitable one. Men hope for their forty virgins in what is a remarkably carnal future. Women are perhaps supposed to hope to become one of those virgins? I’ve never actually heard what women are to hope for in Islam. Unfortunately, though, the only way to guarantee this future is to die in pursuit of Jihad which a great many Muslims interpret as dying in a physical battle to advance Islam across the world. This has led to untold amounts of violence and unnecessary killing and murder. The world is most decidedly not made any better by this.

Christian hope is an entirely different creature. It offers something better and more substantive than all of these in the future. It also makes us better in the present. It leads to our making the world better in the present. And indeed, Christians pursuing the hope of the Gospel, empowered by the Holy Spirit, have been responsible for vastly more present good than the followers of any other religion. In this great contest the competition is not even close. We win like Kansas dominated Iowa State in basketball last night.

Quickly here at the end, let me make mention of the context of this blessing from Paul. All of this is unfolding in the context of a healthy and united community of faith. That is, it is all happening within the context of the church. Christian hope is not a solo affair. We don’t pursue it on our own. We don’t experience it on our own. Nothing about it isolates or separates us from other people. It is experienced fully in community. If you want this hope and all of its fullness, the church is the place you need to be. Those are the people with whom you need to be. Community like this isn’t always easy, and it can certainly be messy (which has been the substance of the last chapter and a half Paul has written), but with the Spirit’s power and presence in our midst, it will ultimately be good.

If you want this hope, get in a church. Serve with the people of that church. Build and maintain strong, healthy relationships. Worship with them. Weep and rejoice with them. Pursue the advance of the kingdom of God with them. Pray with them. Study the Scriptures with them. Do all of this and more and your hope will never fade.