Hope: A Life Shaping Cetainty
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You can’t live without hope.
There are things you know with your mind that are not operating at the very center of your being. Paul in his prayer is asking the Holy Spirit to take what we know with our mind and use it to dominate our thinking and imagination to such a degree that our behavior would be changed.
Paul asks the Holy Spirit in verse 18 to saturate and smite your heart with hope? It’s there in verse 18. “I pray that you will know the hope to which he has called you.” The hope.
Now what’s hope? The biblical concept of hope is very poorly served by our English word hope. The Greek word hope appears 80 times in the New Testament. However, our English hope is a very poor vehicle for it. Our English word connotes uncertainty. Right? If someone says, “Do you know that’s true?” what are you going to say? You’re going to say, “No, I don’t know it’s true, but I hope it’s true.”
See, the word hope means uncertainty, but the biblical definition of hope is a life-shaping certainty of something that hasn’t happened yet but you know will.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
2013 Auburn vs. Georgia game
Our believed-in future determines how we live now. Human beings are hope-based beings. We are ultimately and unavoidably shaped now by our believed-in future. What we believe about our future is the main determinate of how we process and how we experience and how we handle circumstances now. Let me just give you proof of that.
Imagine two guys, and they both have the same job. The job is a terrible job. It’s a menial job. It’s a boring job. Long hours, no vacation, for one year. It’s all the same. The circumstances are the same. It’s boring, menial work. It’s terrible lighting and terrible working conditions. It’s 80 hours a week. It’s no vacation for one year. So they’re having the very same circumstances.
Oh, but one thing. One guy is told, “You’re going to be paid $15,000 for this year of work,” and the other guy is told, “You’re going to be paid $15 million for this year of work.” It’s funny, because they’re in the very same circumstances, but it’s not the circumstances. They are experiencing their circumstances in totally different ways because of that future.
The guy who knows he’s going to get $15,000 is bored, is unhappy, he’s grumpy, he can’t stand it, and maybe a quarter of the way through the year he quits. The other guy whistles while he works. He goes to work, always gets there on time, is very happy. He works all day and he goes through his whole year. Why? It’s not the circumstances that actually make you feel the way you feel. It’s not the circumstances that actually affect the way you live. Your believed-in future completely determines how you process and how you respond to the circumstances now. You literally can’t live without hope.
Viktor Frankl, a Jewish doctor who survived the death camps in Germany during World War II wrote about his experiences and in particular the effect of hope. He noticed that some prisoners just withered up and died while other prisoners stayed strong. He tried to figure out why, and this was his conclusion.
“If a prisoner lost faith in his future, he was doomed.” He gave this example.
“One of my friends in the camp had a dream that the war would end March 30. He was convinced the dream was a revelation, but as the date drew nearer, it became clear from the news reports the war was not ending. On March 29 he began running a temperature. On March 30 he lost consciousness. On March 31 he was dead. His loss of hope had lowered his body’s resistance to all of the diseases in the camp.”
You literally can’t live without hope. You can’t stay healthy without something to look forward to. Depression is linked to hopelessness. Your believed-in future, the hope of your heart, is the real thing that forms the way in which you live now, but we just don’t see it.
Let me go even further. Your ultimate hope in your ultimate future is the most formative force in you.
Let’s look at one more example from Viktor Frankl.
He observed that some prisoners withered up and died while some prisoners went bad. They informed by collaborating with the enemy. Some prisoners stayed not only strong, but also true to their fellow inmates.
He tried to figure out what it was in the ones who stayed strong.
“Life in a concentration camp exposes your soul’s foundation. Only a few of the prisoners were able to keep their full inner liberty and inner strength. Life only has meaning in any circumstances if you have a hope that suffering, circumstances, and even death cannot destroy.
One of the prisoners who achieved this was once asked, ‘Why are you being so nice to people and so kind to people in a death camp? Why even try?’ ”He replied “I always remember my wife …” (Who was dead, by the way, and he believed was in heaven.) “I always remember that at any time my wife might be looking down on me, or God might be looking down on me, and I don’t want to disappoint them.”
Frankl said that’s not just a sentimental little interesting psychological trick. If you put your ultimate hope into anything in this life, into your job, into money, into your family, into your health, into your status, then suffering and circumstances can take it away, and your life will always be characterized by a ground note of anxiety. You’ll always be anxious. The only way you’re going to be able to face life under any circumstances is to put your ultimate hope into something suffering and even death can’t take away, something eternal.
Paul here says there’s another way. There is a hope God calls you to. God has an incredibly bright future for you. If you connect your heart to that future, you will live a life of greatness.
Let’s continue to seek wisdom concerning our hope.
First of all, he says, “I want you to know the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.” Paul wants you to know the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints. How does that land on you? You may say; “that sounds great because it sounds spiritual but I’m not sure what it mean”
First of all, the word saints means all Christians.
The second word to look at is this word inheritance. Inheritance is an interesting word. Inheritance means your worth. It means the essence of what you’re worth. It means the substance of your wealth.
Whose inheritance are we talking about here? It doesn’t talk about your inheritance and my inheritance. Paul is talking about God’s inheritance. To even use the term inheritance with God is astonishing.
Here’s what I mean. Imagine trying to buy something for Bill Gates. What do you get the man who has everything? In fact, let me go a step further. Imagine trying to give Bill Gates something so great that once he got it he said, “Oh my gosh, this is worth more than almost everything else I have put together. This is my most treasured possession.”
What could you get Bill Gates that would be so unique and so valuable everything else he had paled, and it would really be his most treasured possession? I don’t know how you could do it. It’s probably impossible.
But something more impossible than that has happened, because God is the wealthiest individual in the world. He owns all of the stars and all of the galaxies and all of the planets, yet Paul says God has something so valuable to him it could be called his inheritance, so valuable to him that all of the stars and all the earth, everything else he has, is almost nothing by comparison. God has an inheritance. What is it? It’s the saints. It’s us. What’s Paul asking for?
Paul is praying that the Holy Spirit would come in and give us a spirit of revelation so we would see the riches of God’s glorious inheritance in us? Paul is praying that you would be smitten by our value to God.
Until you are astounded by how rich God feels when he looks at you, that our value to him as the people of God is that great, you’re not going to live the life you ought to live.
This is connected to hope, and here’s the reason why. C.S. Lewis has a great little essay called “The World’s Last Night,” and he has a little stream of logic in there that goes like this.
He says we all need to feel affirmed. The least potent way to get affirmation is to give it to yourself. You can say, “You’re great. You’re really great. You’re talented. You’re beautiful. You’re great.” He says that helps, but when an outside person gives you one affirmation outweighs about three thousand of your own. If you say, “I’m great, I’m great, I’m great,” you don’t feel nearly as good as when someone else, some other human being comes and says, “You are great.”
But he says there’s another kind of affirmation that outweighs that, and that’s when you overhear someone affirming you. What if you listen in on a conversation and the person doesn’t know you’re listening and you hear them say, “He’s great”? That’s more potent than if he tells it to your face, because who knows his motives for telling it to your face. When you overhear somebody affirming, you say, “Oh my gosh, he really does believe that about me.”
So he says is the most potent overheard affirmation but he says none of that is like what’s going to happen on the day God and you meet face to face and you see the delight in his eyes. On the day he declares his love to you, you will know in that moment that everything you’ve ever wanted, you were wanting this. In everything you’ve ever longed for, you were longing for this.
This isn’t “pie in the sky by and by.” Paul says unless the Holy Spirit smites your heart with that, unless you connect your present with that future, you’re not going to live with the joy, you’re not going to live with the above your cirmcumstances. You’re not going to live the great life you could live if you were connected to that hope. So first of all, the Christian hope is a personal hope.
Secondly, the Christian hope is a material hope. He says, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might 20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand yin the heavenly places
If you want the best picture of your future, look at the risen Christ. Why? The Bible says the risen Christ is the firstborn from the dead. If he’s the firstborn from the dead, there’s your future. And it’s a material future. This is one of the places in which Christianity differs sharply from every other religion on the face of the earth.
Eastern religions believe the material world is an illusion and when we die we leave the material world. Most Western religions have believed in something like a paradise, that we discard the material world and go off into a spiritual paradise. The Christian hope is seen at the end of the book of Revelation. At the end of the book of Revelation, we do not see individuals rising out of this material world into heaven; we see heaven coming down to purge and purify and renew and restore the material world.
What if that’s your believed-in future?
The more that’s going to affect the way in which you live now.
First of all, it has enormous implications for suffering. Christianity is not that you’re just going to get a consolation for your suffering.
Suffering means either things you had in this world were taken from you, or suffering kept you from having the things you wanted. Suffering keeps you from having the life in this world you wanted, or it takes away the life you had.
Heaven is not a place of consolation for those who have suffered but a place where suffering is undone. It is the place where everything sad becomes untrue.
The Christian hope is not that you get a kind of spiritual heavenly experience that consoles you for the life you never had and always wanted. It gives you the life you’ve always wanted. It’s a real life. It’s a life of eating. It’s a life of dancing. It’s a life of hugging. All of the things you ever wanted a million times over come back to you. What does that mean?
Imagine losing some object that really is important to you. It could be anything. You lose it, and you can’t find it, and you’re heartsick about it. You can’t believe it. You can’t replace it. Then suddenly you get it back. You find it.
Because you lost it, you appreciate it more than before you lost it. Because you lost it, you enjoy it more. It’s almost as if the experience of the lostness and the time of the lostness, now that you have it back, is taken up into the joy you have in it now, and the lostness only makes the joy greater.
If it’s true (and it is) that our future is a material future, that suffering is not just consoled but it’s undone, then that means even the worst suffering you experience in this world will only make your eventual joy greater for it having happened.
That’s the real defeat for suffering. We’re not just getting a consolation for the suffering; the suffering in the end will only serve to make your ultimate glory, your ultimate joy greater for having happened. That’s astounding.
The second implication of a material hope is not just an implication for how you handle suffering, but Christianity gives you the most astounding resources and motivation for working for a better world, and especially for justice in this world.
If Christianity is true (and it is)? If our future hope is a material hope (and it is)? Then this world matters. This world matters to God, and he’s going to do something about it, so get with the program.
When Martin Luther King Jr. did his “I Have a Dream” speech, the reason it was so powerful was it was completely infused with the material hope of Christianity. He did not get up there and say, “I want to create a society in which everyone has the freedom to define what is right or wrong for them.” He did not get up and say, “Today I have a personal choice.” No, he said, “I have a dream.”
What was that dream? I
“I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed …”
That’s Isaiah 40. He’s talking about the future glory of God coming, the Messiah bringing in the kingdom, the Messiah bringing in the justice of God.
Then he says,
“This is our hope. […] With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” “We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no … we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Amos 5:24.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s hope was the hope.
The early Christians had cultural power to change that brutal Roman Empire. Why? Why did they stay in the plague-stricken cities and take care of the poor and the sick when everybody else was leaving? Their hope shaped them so they could stay. They didn’t care if they died. Their hope made them who they were, gave them the cultural power, gave them the personal power. It was a personal hope. It was a material hope. If you connect to that, there will be a greatness about you. To the degree you connect to that you will change.
If it’s true you can only handle troubles in the present moment by looking to a believed-in future, what was Jesus’ living hope that got him through his suffering? He was pierced for us. He was crushed. He was forsaken. He was whipped. He was nailed. What got him through it? What was his living hope?
looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.
What was it? It tells you right there. It was for us. In Isaiah 53 it says he was crushed, he was oppressed, he was afflicted, he was pierced, but the results of his suffering he shall see and be satisfied.
Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.
One of the great lines in the Bible. He lost everything, yet he thought it was worth it because of the results. What are the results? Us.
To the degree you realize you were his living hope, to that degree he’ll become yours. To the degree you’re melted by the thought that what got him through his suffering … The only thing he didn’t have before he suffered that he did have after he suffered … I mean he had the universe. He had everything. The only thing he didn’t have was you. Therefore, you and I were his living hope. That’s what got him through it. If he loves you like that, if he values you like that … To the degree you realize you were his living hope, to that degree he’ll become your living hope.
You know that place where Viktor Frankl said he had that little man in the prison camp who said the way he was able to maintain poise and kindness to other people was he was thinking of his spouse looking down on him from heaven? What about this ultimate Spouse, this ultimate Lover, who has done all this for you, looking down? Think of the impact of that. Let it have the impact.
First Peter tells you over and over again, “Everything depends on this.” There’s a place in
Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.
where it says, “Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded” How? “Set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed.” That will affect everything. That’s what you have to connect to. Let us pray.