Chapter Seventeen--Hope
Chapter Seventeen
Hope
ex·pec·ta·tion: wishing with confidence that something is about to happen
The bottom line: true hope, the kind that will never disappoint, is never hope in a thing, but hope in a person.
As I was thinking about this final chapter, I was debating with myself how to properly end our reflection on what big kingdom living looks like. It hit me that the most radical thing about big kingdom living is its hopefulness. The reason you may miss this is because there are so many people who are momentarily motivated by unreliable hope. So, until the source of their hope proves to be unreliable, they function quite hopefully. Because of this it may look like there are more truly hopeful people in this fallen world than there actually are.
When it comes to living with hope in a world that is terribly broken, there are only two classes of people. The first is people who are living in temporary, soon-to-be disappointed hope. They have attached their hope to something that will ultimately fail, and so it is just a matter of time before their hope is undone. The second class is people who are living with valid reason for hope. Their hope is not facing some impending doom because it has been placed in something that will never disappoint. It is only when you are living for the big kingdom that you have this kind of hope.
Disappointing Disappointment
Why, you may be asking, is real hope so rare and so radical? Have you taken time to examine the world that you live in? Think about it. There is not much in your life that will not disappoint you in some way. Consider the following real-life example.
Ben and Emily sat before me so incredibly energized and hopeful. They gazed into one another’s eyes so intently that it was hard for me to get their attention. In fact, I think there were moments when they forgot that I was in the room. They were in my office for premarital counseling, but I don’t think they really thought they needed it. They were jumping through the hoop of counseling so their church would allow them to use their facility for the ceremony. They professed to be deeply respectful and committed to one another. Emily said their communication was excellent, and they had been pretty successful at solving the problems that had come up between them. As Ben and Emily sat tightly together, hand in hand, and with big smiles on their faces, I was afraid for them. They were putting so much of their personal sense of well-being, meaning, security, and hope in the assurance that the other person would pull it off. Their hope rested in the belief that the other person would not disappoint them.
Six months later they were in my office again, but this time Ben and Emily were not sitting so close. The smiles on their faces were gone. They had faced the shocking reality that each was a sinner married to a sinner. They had made poor choices and experienced broken promises. Unresolved conflicts had left a legacy of hurt that now made their communication difficult. Their issues weren’t huge. They were the garden-variety weeds of life in a fallen world. But the thing that stood out to me was that their hope for their still-young marriage was gone.
Disappointing World, Radical Hope
This once-hopeful couple had reason for disappointment. There had been failure. Things hadn’t turned out as they had imagined. They did have problems to deal with. You see, the music of life in this broken world is often played in a minor key, because it is the music of disappointment. Think about it for a moment. There is almost nothing you have been involved with that hasn’t disappointed you in some way. That house you bought has proven to have problems that you never anticipated. Every friendship you’ve ever had has disappointed you in some way. Your job hasn’t always left you encouraged and excited. When you first began to attend your church, perhaps you thought it was the greatest church ever. Now you’ve been involved long enough to bump into many of its flaws, and your appraisal is much more realistic. You were raised in a family where disappointment was a normal reality. Such is life in a fallen world. In fact, it is accurate to say that disappointment is the universal experience of every human being, and sadness is the emotion that no person has ever escaped. Because of this it needs to be said that one of the most radical things about the big kingdom of God is that it is a kingdom of bright, shining, personally motivating, eternal hope. The hope of this kingdom rests on something that is so utterly fixed and secure that it will never, ever disappoint.
So What’s Up with Hope?
Have you ever wondered why no one has ever written a book on how to become depressed? Why no one has ever written a book on the seven best ways to become fearful? Or why no one has ever written “Seven Steps to a Highly Effective Life of Disappointment”? None of these books has been written because they simply haven’t been necessary. Life in this terribly broken world is hard. It often feels like for every step forward you take three steps back. Sometimes it seems like just as you are about to realize your dreams, they evaporate before your very eyes. Often it looks like the bad guys are winning and the good guys just keep on getting hammered. There are moments when it seems like crime pays and honesty doesn’t make good on its debts. When you take a long look at what is happening around you, it really isn’t stupid to conclude that hope is the dedicated occupation of fools.
But open up your mind, put down your fear for a moment, and think with me. If you’re married, admit it, you have not been summarily happy with every aspect of your spouse or with everything your marriage has experienced. For all the joys and blessings, there are ways that your marriage has been a struggle, even right up to this moment. Or think about your job. It has disappointed you. Perhaps it’s your relationship with your boss. You seemed to connect and complement so well at first, but now there are tensions that you really don’t understand. Or perhaps it’s your fellow workers. You feel like you are more in a competition with them than a community. Or maybe it’s the work itself. Perhaps it never became as engaging and fulfilling as you imagined it would be.
There has never been a parent who isn’t disappointed in some way. We dream of what it will be like to have children, and we dream about how they will turn out. But, we never realize our dreams. Our children struggle in ways that we never foresaw, and we struggle with our children in ways that we would have thought impossible before they were born. Somewhere in the process the old idealism withers, and we all just hope we can survive the process and still love one another.
Or maybe you have hit the wall with the friendships around you. Perhaps you’re incredibly lonely and you wonder if anyone really cares for you. Or maybe you’re hurt because some professed friend has betrayed you. Maybe you are tired of relationships that are surface-y and meaningless, never getting down to the level where real friendship should always hang out. Or maybe the disappointment is with yourself. Perhaps you seem all-too-skilled at doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, robbing promising friendships of their future. For every one of us, our experience of friendship has been disappointing in some way.
It could be that the biggest disappointment in your life is your church. You read in the Bible what the church could be, but it never seems to achieve that. There are lots of fellowship and ministry opportunities, but it all seems like a poorly designed system of pseudo-spiritual busyness. You’ve participated at every level, but there is something missing.
It is possible that your biggest disappointment in life is you. You have never been the person you wanted to be or accomplished what you wanted to accomplish. In your quiet and logical moments, you know you have no one to blame but yourself. You let yourself off the hook when you should have held yourself accountable. You blamed others when you should have shouldered the responsibility yourself. And you were all too able to rationalize your poor performance by citing the tough situations around you. When you have moments of self-insight, it’s hard not to be disappointed with the you that you have become.
Yes sir, there are lots of reasons to be discouraged. There are lots of things to fear. None of us has lived a life free of disappointment. In light of this, one of the most radical things about the big kingdom of God is that it is a kingdom of bright, shining, eternal hope.
Disappointing Hope
There is an important big kingdom principle that Paul lays out almost surreptitiously in Romans 5:1—5:
Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
Paul is celebrating the implications of God’s accepting grace on our daily lives. He says that God’s grace even gives us reason to be hopeful right in the middle of suffering. Often suffering is the very thing that removes our hope, but not for Paul. What gives Paul hope is not that the situations and relationships of his life are easy and working well. No, his hope lives at a deeper level. That is how he is able to retain his hope even when he finds himself in circumstances that are both difficult and painful.
It is at this point of the discussion that Paul slips in this subtle, but explosive principle. Here it is. If your hope disappoints you, it is the wrong kind of hope. You see, hope in God never disappoints, precisely because it is hope in God. This means that hope placed in any other thing will always end up disappointing. Let this principle sink in for a moment. Allow yourself to consider how far-reaching and life-altering its implications are.
What do we mean when we say we are hoping for something? Essentially, hope is a desire coupled with a logical or confident expectation of fulfillment. But hope is much more than this. When I place my hope in something, I am attaching my sense of well-being, identity, meaning, and purpose to that thing in some way. In this way I “need” my hopes to become realities because I have connected my life to them. You must realize that every human being does this. If you are still alive and able to think and feel, you are putting your hope somewhere. Some kind of hope gets every person out of bed in the morning. This is also why disappointment is such a universal human experience, because most of what we hope in isn’t able to deliver. So we keep shuffling our little deck of hope cards, thinking that sooner or later we will come up with an ace. But the deck we’re holding doesn’t have any aces in it! When your hope disappoints you, it is because it is the wrong hope.
Another Way
But hope does have another way. Big kingdom living is living with guarantees. God’s kingdom will come. It’s my kingdom that won’t. His will will be done. There is a good chance that mine won’t. He will bring all things to a glorious conclusion. Every promise he has ever made will be fulfilled. Everything we have encountered, experienced, and endured has a goal to it. There will be a final accounting. An actual time is coming when evil will be once and for all defeated. All of God’s children will attend the funeral of death, because death is going to die. Mercy will reign forever. The meek will, in fact, inherit the earth. Peace will live forever and ever. There will be a real day when suffering, sorrow, sin, and pain will end.
The problem is that when you elevate your little kingdom desires to “needs,” you no longer live with guarantees. But God has not promised to deliver all the things you have hoped, desired, and convinced yourself that you cannot live without. You have attached your happiness to a deeply romantic marriage, but God hasn’t promised to give you one. You have connected your identity to a long and successful career, but God has not promised to deliver it. You have glued your well-being to your physical or material health, but God hasn’t guaranteed you either one of them. You have placed your value in being a successful parent with trophy children, but God has not contracted to deliver your family dream. Of course these things are all wonderful to desire and worthwhile to experience, but they are out of your control, and your Redeemer has not guaranteed to give them to you.
Further, when these things control your heart and command your hopes, you will tend to judge God’s faithfulness, not by whether he has been true to his promises, but by whether he has given you the things that you have set your heart on. But this is right where the redemptive quandary lies. If God gives you the things that are playing a role in your life that only he is supposed to play, wouldn’t he be encouraging in you the very addictions from which his grace is meant to free you?
In fact, I am convinced that much of the resistance we attribute to the enemy is actually the resistance of the Lord. He stands against us, not because he doesn’t love us, but because he does love us. He stands in our way because what we want is spiritually in the way of what he wants for us.
The brand of Christianity that presents God as the ultimate guarantor of our felt needs always becomes hopeless and self-defeating. You see, we struggle with hopelessness and doubt because the “good” things we want seem constantly beyond our reach. The irony is that we are already receiving the best things from his hands, but we don’t even recognize it.
Your hope is absolutely attached to what kingdom you are serving. If your life is defined by how many of your little kingdom purposes you can realize, you will tend to be stressed, controlling, anxious, disappointed, and fearful. You have defined your life by what you cannot control and by what God has not promised. Sadly, it is all very self-defeating. But if your hope no longer rests on your personal wisdom, strength, and character, if it no longer rests on the acceptance and performance of other people, and no longer rests on the belief that circumstances, institutions, and situations will not fail you, then you are beginning to move toward reliable hope.
Big kingdom hope rests on one place and one place alone—God. It is the deeply held and daily acted-upon trust that God is the ultimate source of all that is wise, true, loving, and good, that what he is doing is best, and that what he has promised is reliable. The only hope that will not disappoint is hope in a Person. Big kingdom hope is about entrusting my past, present and future, my identity, meaning and purpose, and my motivation for daily functioning to God and resting unafraid in him. Sure, I will still face the disappointments of life in this fallen world. But, I will not panic, I will not run, and I will not quit, because my God is present even in my disappointment, and he will never change!
When you wake up with this kind of hope, when it shapes how you deal with people and circumstances, when your hope really is in God and God alone, you expand everything you touch to the size of his kingdom.
Each morning that greets me is full of hope,
Not because I am successful at what I am doing,
Or because the people near me appreciate me,
Or because circumstances are easy,
But because God is and he is my Father.
To look at the morning in any other way
Is to believe a lie.
To live in hope is to live in truth;
To live in truth is to bring Him glory;
To bring God glory in my daily living
Is the highest form of worship. (PDT)
The final question: where do you tend to look for daily hope?