People can live without a lot of things. For thousands of years, people lived without cars, computers, televisions and microwave ovens. People can even live without a sense of hearing or sight or taste or smell. People have been known to live without an arm or a leg or even an eye.
But people cannot live without hope.
Life is hard. We don’t need a psychiatrist to tell us that, we know it experientially. We all experience the aches and pains of getting older. At some point in time, people let us down and life doesn’t turn out the way we thought it would.
Without hope, people give up, sit down and begin the process of dying. Hopelessness breeds despair, hope gives life.
Abraham and his wife, Sarah, did not have an easy path to walk. They’d been barren for so long, bereft of anything tangible. All they had to cling to was a promise from an unseen God. But cling to it they did, with all their might, for they knew that without the hope from that promise, they might as well throw in the towel.
Hope is vital to existence. And the truth about people is that, because we cannot live without hope, we do not live without hope. We all have hope. The issue with which we must all come to terms is where we place it.
Put your hope in another human and you’ll be let down. Put your hope in your children and you’ll be let down. Wealth, job, status, house, car, golf game, even church — none of these are designed to bear the weight of your hopes.
Only God can fill that role. The God of hope gives us hope in the form of a promise and a track record of faithfulness that remains unbroken for thousands of years. He may have let Abraham and Sarah sweat it out for a while, but He never let them down. In fact, generations later, this God would be referred to as “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
That would be Abraham and his son and his grandson, the founders of the Nation of Israel.
And we’ve never heard of anyone who put their trust in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob getting to the end of life and saying, “I wish I had trusted Him less. I see now how hopeless this whole God-following endeavour really is.”
God doesn’t just offer hope and sustain hope, He actually becomes our hope — the only kind of hope that can see us through the really tough stuff in this life.
Prayer
Lord God, just as You prepared and called Abram out of obscure beginnings, so too You laid Your hand upon me and called me to a glorious destiny. But along the journey I realise that there are times when You will take me to the end of my own resources to teach me that only Your resources are sufficient. You call into being that which did not exist and bring life out of barrenness. You have implanted a living hope within me, and You teach me again and again, sometimes through hardship and uncertainty, that any other hope will let me down. By Your loving power, may I put my hope in those things You have promised and not in the people, possessions and positions of this fleeting world. I thank You for the living hope I have received through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
And we can be sure that what we put our hope in, is trustworthy and will never let us down!
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