What Comes After Hope
Good Morning Friends,
So what keeps us going against all the evidence? In good times we could just be hopeful about our lives. But in trying times, one needs something spiritual….something active to influence change. One must take a step, sometimes alone but better with another person believing in What Comes After Hope.
Scripture: This is God’s Word on the subject: “As soon as Babylon’s seventy years are up and not a day before, I’ll show up and take care of you as I promised and bring you back home. I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for.
Jeremiah 29:10-11 (The Message)
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11 (ESV)
Because of this decision we don’t evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don’t look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with the Messiah gets a fresh start, is created new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with himself through the Messiah, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what he is doing. We’re Christ’s representatives. God uses us to persuade men and women to drop their differences and enter into God’s work of making things right between them. We’re speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; he’s already a friend with you.
Corinthians 5:16-20 (The Message)
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.
2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)
Message: Friends, we must make our case for hope with acts of hope. Even in our despair and failures and lack of power across time, lives can be extraordinarily changed. Here hope and history work in tandem. No it is not the history you see on the evening news. It is the countless battles won over smallness and defeat over despair, it is surviving the suffering, withstanding cruelty, and overcoming loss. Oh the lost battles exist but there is something more out there that is unseen in the evening news. It is about the history of how individuals come together to produce an action that is creative and new and marvelously alive. It’s a history that undermines most of what we have been told about authority and violence and our own powerlessness. It is what happens before laws are changed. It is a power, joy and unstoppable stirrings written on the hearts of people that quietly topple evil. Friends that is what comes after hope. Prepare for it. Listen for it. Rejoice in it for it is a gift of God forgiving our sins and offering the eternal love that powers the transformation of everything. Do not for one minute think that the future is going to inevitably look like the present. It won’t. The change will start with hope. But then there is devotion and will and action of love and forgiveness. The future is bigger than our imaginations. That is why we must always continue hoping.
Pray we not forget what we have fought for and why. Pray for those in captivity in the modern Babylons. Pray we keep going and never quit. Pray we realize that despair is almost always premature. Pray we help create a climate of hope that overcomes the foul weather of fear. Pray we wake up every day of our lives in amazement at all the miracles of life and the changes that occur making it even more amazing. Pray we rejoice in how God makes things right and new. Pray we walk the path into this being one step at a time…one by one…together.
Blessings,
John Lawson
P.S. Correction: Zlelponith, sometimes known as Hatzlelponi is the name of Manoach’s wife, the mother of Sampson. The name was omitted from the list in a previous devotion on the hope of the women in the Bible once thought to be barren.
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