1 Corinthians 15:19 “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
Everyone needs hope. Those scarred by life’s hurts may try to resist it. But even the most hardened skeptic longs to have something to hope for. It’s the way God made us. Hope is a gift from our Creator to warm our journey as well as walk us through despair. C.S. Lewis says hope is “one of the things a Christian is meant to do.”
So how do we do hope? How do we keep the difficulties in life from smothering our hope? How does hope work in a world where headlines detail violent beheadings, Christian massacres, and rampant injustice? When a parent’s dream for his child is snuffed out? When life savings are swallowed up in medical bills? When it looks like the “bad guys” are winning? How does hope lift us up?
Christian hope rests on the Resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ promises us that something good will rise from every grave of disappointment. We do hope when we embrace that promise and depend upon the unwavering character of God to fulfill it.
We do hope best when we turn our myopic expectations from this world to the next.
Paul says if our hope is limited to this life only, we’re in a pitiful state. If our vision does not extend beyond the present, neither will our hope. Until we understand that all we experience in this life prepares us for the next, we will remain vulnerable to hopelessness. No one paints this perspective better than Lewis in the final page of the Chronicles of Narnia when the children are entering eternity:
“But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”
If you are a Christian, you have access to unlimited hope. Hope that reaches beyond the circumstances of your past, present and future. Hope that releases you from the frustrations of life and whispers to you and to me the best is yet to come…
So let’s do it!