Friday's Five - On Hope

Every blade of grass, each leaf, each separate petal, is an inscription speaking of hope – Richard Jefferies.

If you do not hope, you will not find what is beyond your hopes – Clement of Alexandria.

Whatever enlarges hope will also exalt courage – Samuel Johnson.

In God alone is there faithfulness and faith in the trust that we may hold to him, to his promise, and to his guidance. To hold to God is to rely on the fact that God is there for me, and to live in this certainty – Karl Barth.

The word ‘hope’ i take for faith; and indeed hope is nothing else but the constancy of faith – John Calvin.

Hope

Hope is a promise cherished

Like

A loving word transforms a painful memory

A match struck lights up a dungeon

A tear of love heals the ashes of the past

A sip of beauty dilates a chalice of pain

A tender embrace casts down a mountain of fear

A sweet perfume forgives a sorrowful heart

Hope is a banquet

Hope is a hunger

Hope is a word of grace

Simple Things - Hope

All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope." – Sir Winston Churchill.

Hope

“Remember, Red. Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” So writes  Andy Dufresne in “The Shawshank Redemption”. In one of the greatest movies ever made, the wrongly imprisoned Dufrense gives his friend the greatest advice, even when everything seems bleak and impossible there is always hope.

There is awesome, great power in Hope. Hope can be the motivation that gets us up in the morning when everything around us is bleak. Hope can be the stronghold we trust when we watch our teenage children grow up. Hope is the power to anticipate the future and find pleasure in it.

Without hope we would fall into despair and worry overwhelms our hearts.

What we hope in also defines how we view everything; we see life through the eyes of hope in the imagination of our hearts. Often in the Bible, hope is the word that is used for a positive imagination that is working in your favour.

The heart is where we live from. It is the ground from which our life grows. Having a heart that is full of hope will begin to germinate faith and love in our lives. Hope rooted in the grace of God is the key to all God has provided for us In Christ. As the songwriter Edward Mote wrote:-

“My hope is built on nothing less
than Jesus' blood and righteousness
I dare not trust the sweetest frame
but wholly trust in Jesus' name.”

For the believer, united into Christ all our hope is in Jesus’ blood and righteousness. We can have natural hope in the weather report, the news etc.. But the finished work of the cross is all the hope we need, as it is written in Colossians 1:29 –

“Christ in you – the hope of glory.”

Our union with Christ, living and working through us is the anticipated pleasure in all the grace of God that is freely available to us. To hope in anything over Christ and his grace, is to settle for slice of toast when we can have an eight course banquet.