May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Romans 15:13

Are you wondering how 2024 will play out? So many unresolved situations, long prayed about circumstances but no answers yet, grief carried over, and yet you feel happy to have a new year of possibilities about to begin. The transition can be hard because you must leave things behind, both good and bad. Or the transition from one year to the next may seem like something you need. 

Whatever your condition, the hope you have in Christ, a hope not based on circumstances, is an enduring quality about Jesus you can embrace. When I think of Hope, the hope found only in Christ, I know His Hope is real, and it lives in Truth. 

People can present situations way too optimistically usually to please the hearer. False hope is when you cause hope in a person when you both know there is a strong chance of the situation not turning out that way. In error, humans often choose this.

False hope, when finished leading you on, leads you to despair.

The pain of life can have a good outcome if you turn your eyes to the One True Hope in Christ. 

The Bible speaks of 2 kinds of hope:

• Eternal Hope. Eternal means it is going to last! It has power and strength to lead you through circumstances that seem larger than your ability to endure. Without beginning or end, God is eternal. He is everlasting(2 Corinthians 4:16-18).
• Living Hope. It’s living because it lives inside your spirit grounded in a Living God. Because of the resurrection, Jesus is our living Savior, our living Hope(I Peter 1:3-6).

Hope makes life
worth living,
worth striving for,
worth fighting against the darkness,
worth every ounce of intention to hang on to,
and diminishes skepticism with quiet confidence and overrides doubt.

There’s no easy path to get to this point.

We may go through storms, dark tunnels, raging rivers, sleepless nights, and question why. As we cling to Jesus through our tears, we find His promises are true and He is faithful. In the end, we learn, He is our hope.
Hope has, within its nature, longing for more. That’s when a believer looks to a life promised beyond this. Heaven. Those in Christ have a home in heaven.
Looking forward to heaven is closely aligned with hope.
Hope, for the believer, causes a radically different approach regarding residing on planet Earth. It’s about who is our Hope. Because of Jesus, our circumstances rest on an all-sufficient God. He is able. By His Spirit, we find strength.
Even in the dark nights of the soul, we have a God big enough to absorb our despair and aching souls. He is our Hope. And His Hope is real.

“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”

C.S. Lewis

©Valerie Rumfelt

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