This was a talk I gave at a ladies’ night for our church.
I got permission from the family involved to share this story.
Six years ago, I was terrified. Alone in my car, driving north on an Arizona freeway, I wanted nothing more than to pull over, throw up, point my car in the reverse direction, and drive home. The week prior, I had gotten a nightmare of a phone call: my friend Bonnie, whose baby shower I was in the act of planning when I received the call, had just found out that her baby girl had passed away in utero, at around 32 weeks gestation. It was a highly unusual, non-genetic cause. Bonnie and her husband Lance decided to deliver their baby girl in the hospital the following week, when their doctor was available to induce her. The days leading up to Bonnie’s due date were a flurry of emotionally-laden communications and activity, as I saw the best in Jesus’ bride come out in the form of thoughtful, loving acts of service and gifts of significance, meant to bring comfort to the family.
A day prior to her delivery date, I got another phone call from a friend who told me Bonnie had said I could come to the hospital to participate in the long vigil between her inducement and her daughter’s birth. I was very surprised and conflicted because I was 30 weeks pregnant at the time. Bonnie and I had celebrated and enjoyed our pregnancies together, joyfully talking about welcoming these new little lives into our shared community. I could not comprehend the depth of faith and strength my friend must have had to have wanted me there, a visible reminder of what she had lost, during the very time of the consummation of that loss. But when I asked another friend for advice on whether I should go or not, she told me something I will never forget: “This time is Holy. You’ve been invited into it. Don’t say no.”
So there I was, hands visibly shaking, driving up to the hospital, incapable of thinking of a way I could possibly help. What could I say? How dare I even speak to someone in such a place of grief, in such a time of unbelievable suffering? I had never known my hands and mind to ache with emptiness like that before. I was praying, comfort eating granola bars, and praying some more when a song from the last cd my husband had had on in the car came on, and these words spoke clearly and defiantly into the Arizona desert streaming past my car window:
And I will hold on hope
And I won’t let you choke
On the noose around your neck
And I’ll find strength in pain….
In that moment God spoke clearly to me: Hope. I was going to my friend, bearing hope. I was going to witness death and look straight at her hellacious, painful experience, and help remind her of the Hope we all have, if only by being willing to stand in the dark by her side.
So, the question was, what could I possibly do to help my friend, someone going through life-changing suffering? And the answer, given by God through the Holy Spirit, transmitted via some Mumford and Sons lyrics, was “Help her hold on to hope”. But what is Hope? How does secular culture use that term, and how does the Bible define it?
Worldly hope, as it is used in our American culture, is defined as a wish based on nothing mathematical or scientifically likely. Some examples of this may be: Hope you’re having a good day! Or, I hope my deodorant holds up. It’s essentially an empty, light term that expresses a desire but no guarantees. The Bible, however, defines and uses the term Hope very, very differently. Biblical hope is a confident expectation based on our faith in God.
Psalm 42:5 says, “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my help and my God.”
What does “Hoping in God” mean? To believe God. To believe in His character—His Goodness, His Justice, His Mercy, and His Love. I had a very singular and life-changing experience this year: I began to more fully understand the Gospel. Prior to this experience, I could have told you the Gospel, no problem- I could use the five-finger approach (birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension), I could tell you how the gospel applied to my life, and how important it was to preach it to myself… and I had an ever-growing awareness of how much I needed the gospel, as I am daily convicted of my sins. But until this year, I was missing a vital component: I was convicted of my sins, but I had never been convicted of God’s love. And because I was missing His love, I was missing the element that could give me the joy of Hope. Recite with me the good words of our Brother John in John 3:16, “Because God so loved the world, He gave his only son.” Ladies, I confess to you tonight that I had missed the motivation for the very Gospel itself: God’s love for His children. God’s mystifying, vast love for me. For you. I was looking at the proof and totally ignoring the pudding. If we want Hope, ladies- real, unshakable, faith-fueled hope, then we need it rooted firmly in God’s love for us- the proof of which is the gospel itself. God so loved, that he gave… if we need to have proof that God will keep His promises for a hope and a future, that God is good and intends good for us, we need look no further than the cross.
We need a brief break for a moment of clarification: much of what I say about “hope” can be replaced by the word “faith”- what is the difference, really, between faith and hope? What is their relationship? John Piper explains that faith and hope are interconnected—that faith is the bigger idea, and hope is a smaller component of that bigger concept of faith. “Hope” he says, “is faith looking forward”. Hope is essentially faith in the future tense- when you hope, when you have confident expectation in God’s goodness, you are seeing a situation and the world through the lens of your faith. Because you have faith in God and in His ultimate victory over sin and death, you can look to the future with hope. As the Psalmist says, “I believe that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” This is an expression of Godly hope—a confident expectation that God’s love will be made manifest before our very eyes, based on our belief, or faith, in Him.
So, back to the grammar lesson: if we can replace “Hope” with “wish” in a sentence, we’re frankly misusing Hope. Hope belongs to us, sisters- not to the world. Let’s not let it be misappropriated any more. Hope is rooted in God, first and only. No wonder it’s misused culturally- how can outsiders correctly speak the language of the kingdom? Let us remember that we are God’s children, and His word is our native tongue. The fallen world has it wrong– hope is not based on flimsy, semi-superstitious unlikelihoods. Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness.
As a negative example, Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “Hope is a Thing with Feathers/ That perches in the soul.”
No offense to Mz Dickinson, but she was dead wrong. Hope, real godly Hope, is anything but lightweight. Hope is concrete. It is diamond. It has teeth and sounds like a torn veil. It is vaster and greater than sin, and more real than death. Hope is a galactical world destroyer, an ever-fixed mark on the landscape of eternity. It danced at God’s side during the creation of the world and is strong enough to anchor a human soul.
For a Biblical example of misunderstood or misplaced hope, let’s go to the gospel of Luke. I hate to trot out the old girls at another ladies’ night, but I want to talk to you about Mary and Martha for a minute. Let’s look at each woman, and where she placed her hope. If you remember, Jesus was over at the ladies’ home for a meal. He was talking in the living room, and Martha was fuming in the kitchen. Martha had a vision, I think: an Instagram-worthy table spread, food so good people would rhapsodize over it, a spotless floor, and sparkling conversation. Instead, she was sweating away, mumbling to herself in the kitchen as her sister Mary feasted at Jesus’ feet. So, we see that Martha seemed to believe that her hope, her joy and peace, was set on creating an ideal meal and experience for her guest. Her self-worth was placed firmly in her abilities to shine as a hostess- so her hope was really in herself, not in Christ—whereas Mary was so consumed by love of her Lord she couldn’t look away. All her focus was on the Christ in front of her—and her choice, as Jesus says, WILL NOT BE TAKEN FROM HER. Sisters, Hope in Christ is, indeed, the Better Thing.
What are we tempted to base our hope on? Money? Security? Peace? Control? Man’s approval? Self-righteousness? Our husband’s love, our children’s perfection and health? Can you truly lose all of those things, and yet still have hope?
Yes. Yes you can. Look at Paul. He had education, social prominence, personal security- yet once he met the Savior, he considered everything as loss, as garbage, in order to gain Christ.
With Paul in mind, it is vital to remember that our hope cannot be placed on a specific, tangible outcome. Our Hope is only anchored in our trust in God’s love, His Sovereignty, His justice, His Glory- and His Goodness. The manifestation of that hope is our good—but what is good for us isn’t always a cessation of suffering. It isn’t always a “yes” to our desperate midnight petitions. Therefore our prayers must be akin to the humble, ground-cast mumblings of the centurion, “I believe, Lord, Help my unbelief.” Let that be us, too: I believe, Lord- help my unbelief. Please, help me believe, help me to hope, despite the hellacious results of sin soaking into this unredeemed world. Because at the end of all things, what we need isn’t really a tangible outcome- we don’t need all of our prayers to be answered the way we want them to, we don’t need all of our sufferings to end… we need Jesus. We need to become more like Him, and to love Him more. That’s what our good will look like. That’s why God’s promise in Isaiah 43: 1-2, is so sweet: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. 2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” We will have trouble in this world—but God will never leave us nor forsake us. Therefore we can have hope in the face of any calamity to come. And we can hope past reason, because our hope doesn’t lie in our ability to reason. Our Hope is in Christ, and has its roots in the deep, deep mystery of how a Creator could love His creation so much He would allow His Son to suffer and die so that they may be reconciled to Him again.
The timing of this talk could not be more providential; the world we wake up to is still dark, and cold. The evidence of our eyes would tell us that it would be in our best interests to stay indoors, under our covers, living in a warm, controlled world of our own making. But here’s the great beauty awakening with every slightly earlier dawn: it may still be dark outside, but Easter, the greatest realization of Hope in all of eternity, is coming.
Along those lines, I was given the advice to consult books in preparation for this talk. I asked numerous friends for recommendations for books on Hope. I consulted trustworthy online bookstores and Christian websites I like… and strangely enough, all came up dry. Then one chilly morning a light dawned: I have been reading through the book of Isaiah for Lent, and I suddenly realized that I was looking at the answer I had been praying for: at the risk of making an affliction of myself, the definitive book on Hope is the Bible. I would especially recommend starting with our old weather-beaten friend, Isaiah. Ladies, he gets it. He sees that the world is sin-wracked. Desperate. Tearing itself to pieces. Isaiah spends the first half of the book identifying sin- and the second half declaring salvation. He makes clear that our greatest problem has already been taken care of. Isaiah uses the word “salvation” almost 30 times. This was a man who was shown the depravity, the horror of the fallen world in which he was living—but then God gave him true visions of God’s mighty, perfect plan for salvation. This is true hope, ladies. This is white-knuckled, wild-eyed Old Testament truth telling and Gospel proclaiming. If you need real encouragement- if you are ready to take the hard medicine and pop the bubble of this world’s flimsy take on hope, read the words our brother Isaiah lived to tell: he stared right into the valley of the shadow of death, into sin’s very real deadly maw, and proclaimed that Easter Is Coming.
We all need hope. And we can’t do better than to heed the words of 2 Peter 1:16-21: “You do well to pay attention to it (the Word), as to a lamp shining in a dismal place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.”
So, ladies, let us read the Word. Let us be hedonistic feasters on God’s soulful, nourishing truth, because our Hope is not founded on anything in this world- but is found at the feet of our Savior. Let us commit together to joyously ingest Scripture, to sing rapturously in worship, to pray, and to study. These spiritual privileges will magnify, multiply, and make manifest our faith and the source of our hope.
And now for a call to action. When it comes to bearing the true light that is Hope in Christ to this suffering world, let me be clear: no one else is coming. We- you and I- ARE the only embodied hope that this broken world will ever know until Christ’s return. We are the now-and-future victorious—we are the banner-wavers, we are the image bearers. Charged with a Holy and utterly dangerous Great Commission to enter onto a groaning and blood-soaked battlefield, destroyed by sin and cynical despair, let us confidently march, or, as WH Auden would say, stagger onward, rejoicing. Because we- all of us—HAVE this hope. God’s word in Hebrews says we HAVE this hope as an anchor of the soul, not that we will get it one day, maybe, if we try hard enough- this Hope is a gift we’ve already been given. It is ours, a divine inheritance. And we, the receivers of that Hope, must beg for the courage to stare death in the eyes, to stand by an infant hospital bed containing a tragedy that could break a soul in its sorrowful reality, and still proclaim, by our presence there, in our willingness to face the worst that Satan can do, with simple, sin-shattering hope, that “Easter is Coming.” Because the three men in the furnace knew the truth, and we need to say it, too: But if not, He is Still Good. We need to help each other, to help the hope-frail, to hold on, and to be held. This isn’t the end of the story, ladies. There’s still more kingdom work to be done before we get to go home. If we don’t bear the light of true Hope into this world, no one else will- because no one else can.
Believe it or not, your presence here tonight gives evidence to the hope that is in you. You could be many other places right now, doing much more immediately fruitful and important and entertaining things than listening to some lady from church talk about the Bible. But here you are—faithfully attending a church event, sitting calmly and semi-comfortably in a folded chair, hoping that you’ll hear something worth remembering, confidently expecting that God will bless this attempt to grow in understanding of Him and will somehow strengthen the community of Jesus’ bride tonight. Thankfully, the result of tonight’s hopeful act of yours has very little to do with me—and is all of God. And this is true of every act of hope, every choice based on your confident and joyful expectation of God’s faithfulness to sanctify and bless His saints. Being in a church community despite the fact that sin impacts it, that sin hurts, and causes suffering, that Satan loves to sow division—sticking to it, choosing the people you’re going to sin against and be sinned against by and grow alongside—that, my sisters, is a reckless and beautiful act of Hope. The hopeful do not live in denial of sin, of pain, of annoyances and possible disasters. The hopeful, the confidently expectant, just choose to see all of that through God’s eyes—to see the eternal in the fallen and temporary.
So if your hope feels small tonight, sisters, pray. Pray that if you get a chance to carry hope into a sad or hurting situation, be it a never-ending newsfeed or a friend going through unbelievable tragedy, that you would remember to fix your eyes firmly on the cross, and motivated by your own conviction of God’s love for you, you would have courage to faithfully remind a hurting world that He is Still Good.
One way to be an image-bearer is to be a Hope carrier. Let that light so shine- not with the weak artificial illumination afforded by this world’s false religions and lifeless idolatries—but with the joyful expectancy of the rising sun, great and terrible- because the Son has risen, ladies. Because God cannot lie—and he has promised us a joyful, a beautiful, an impossibly glorious future. Yes, if we choose to enter into the hard, painful moments in other people’s lives, we will experience suffering. But take heart!
We couldn’t even muster up the courage to take that initial step into someone else’s pain unless we already were recipients of the great gift of godly hope. Hope gets us in the door- our hope in Christ is our sole motivator strong enough to prompt us to hard and holy good works, as is mentioned over and over again in 1 Peter, from 1:3 to 4:19… So our Hope, gifted to us by our God and rooted in Him, will motivate us to the type of good works likely to produce suffering… but notice what scripture says about that in Romans 5: 3-4:
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,”
It’s a self- feeding cycle! Our reward for acting on the hope we have, at the end of the day, is even more robust hope. The more we act on the hope within us, the more joyful, confident expectation that we shall see the goodness of the Lord in this land of the living we will have. That’s a Godly, good truth for us to meditate on and trust in as the world around us seems to grow ever-dimmer.
Remember that Hope is not a soft feather flap. It is the death-defeating roar of the Lion of Judah.
The pounding, living heartbeat of Hope is God’s Love. The proof of God’s Love is nothing less than the Gospel itself. And that is our Hope, sisters. Let us Hope in God. As Hebrews 10: 23 says, “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful.”
Romans 15:13
13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.