living hope - more than words

"our circumstances are temporary,

and our God is enough"

I have said before that I treasure words. As a person who loves reading written words, listening to spoken word, and who enjoys writing and using words as a way to express and encourage others and to personally process feelings and thoughts - words are a bubbling fountain of utmost importance to me. Words are a source of hope.

1 Peter 1:3 states, "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead..." A living hope... what does that mean?

I Googled "living hope" and came across the words of theologian John Piper:

"What is "living hope"? The New Testament idea of hope is very different from our normal thinking about hope. We say to someone: Will the MN Wild win the Stanley Cup? And they say: I don't know; I hope so. In other words, hope, as we typically think about it, is a desire for some future thing which we are uncertain of attaining. That is not the way Peter, or the rest of the New Testament, thinks about hope. When Peter says in 1:13, "Hope fully in the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ," he does not mean we should desire it and be uncertain of it. The coming of Christ is a matter of complete confidence for all the writers in the New Testament. So the command, "Hope fully," means be intensely desirous and fully confident that Jesus Christ is coming again with grace for his people..."

"Peter calls it "a living hope." What does that mean? The opposite of a "living hope" would be a "dead hope," and that calls to mind a similar phrase in James 2, namely, "dead faith." "Faith without works is dead" (2:26), James says. That is, faith is barren, fruitless, unproductive (2:20). So "living faith" and, by analogy, "living hope" would be fertile, fruitful, productive hope. Living hope is hope that has power and produces changes in life. This is what "living' means in Hebrews 4:12, where it says, "The word of God is living and effective." So Christian hope is a strong confidence in God which has power to produce changes in how we live."

Piper goes on to say, "Words by themselves don't produce hope. There has to be some assurance that they are true."

Whatever you are facing in your day today, calamity or creativity, calm or chaos - please think about the living hope you have in Christ. It's not a dead, pie-in-the-sky, I hope the Cubs get some decent pitching or the object of my affection responds to my text messages kinda hope; We have a living hope to help us in whatever situation, mood, or mentality we find ourselves in today. xo

The Power of Hope