Unusual Hope

Last week I sat at lunch with a young family with two little children.  These were kids that I found so interesting.  The one sang and hummed quietly to herself-as though everything was right with the world, and the other was full of energy and adventure calling himself a 'superhero' and he fully believed it!

It was a great feeling being with them, and I didn't realize it at the time, but I was also filled with hope.  Hope for this family, hope for the future-just a positive sense of good things to come.

It was a good meal.

Today I was reading from 1 John 3:1-3 where it says "How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God.  And that is what we are!  The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.  Dear freinds, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known.  But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.  Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure."

Hope changes you.  It causes you to see your world with expectation.  Where challenges exist, hope can give you the strength, creativity and perseverance to overcome.  Hope allows you to approach others with grace because you are living from a strong center.  But the hope I'm describing here is the kind that helps us to act differently, whereas the hope depicted in the passage from John talks of the person actually being changed, and this is significant.

Putting our hope in Jesus is a hope that actually purifies us--it changes us into something that is pure.  This is not something we can do for ourselves but is something that God does for us.  In Jesus we become different people.  It seems kind of unusual to imagine that hoping in something actually changes who you are, but there it is in black and white!  So what does this mean?

The reason that having hope in Jesus changes us is because we actually have a living presence in us who is at work doing the transforming within.  The Holy Spirit is at work in us teaching, strengthening and pointing us to Jesus in everything in life.  Hope in Jesus actually changes us as people because through the Holy Spirit he is living within us.

To most people this sounds just weird.  Even to Christians the depth of this truth is lost or minimized, and it's easy to see when you look at how hopeless many of God's children actually feel.  But I want you to know that hope in Jesus is real hope to make a difference in real life. 

But it all starts in you.  Your world, the one that seems so broken at times, will be changed beginning with the changes God has brought in you.  His desire is to shine through you to bring about changes in others--to bring hope to them.

Jesus, your children are so grateful you saved us, but most of us don't really believe that we can make a difference, or that you can make a difference in our world through us.  We admit that we want to just sit on the sidelines and watch and don't allow the hope you've given us to move us into more.  Don't stop changing us. . . .and grow desire in us that will overcome our fears.

BT