Thoughts on Romans - Day 44

                                             Romans 15:13
 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.


        The English language does a disservice to the word hope. We say, "I hope so", "I hope to", "I hope the Brewers win today", etc. and we have no assurance that these things will happen - especially the last one. When Paul speaks of hope and the Bible speaks of hope, it means confident expectation. That is why, quite often when hope  is mentioned it is in the context of Heaven or the return of Christ. Both are certainties, we just don't know their timing as they relate to us but the confident expectation of our being a part of that gives us an over-arching joy and peace as we go through life.

       I recently read a book by Viktor Frankl called Man's Search for Meaning. He was a Jewish prisoner in the Nazi prison camp who happened to be a psychologist so he could analyze the mental affect the lack of hope has on humanity. He states that prisoners who gave up hope were the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine but rather a lack of something to live for. He tells a story of a prisoner who had a dream in February of 1945 that the war was going to end 3/30/45. He was convinced that God gave him that dream. He lived in confident expectation of that until 3/30 passed without the war ending. He suddenly on the 30th became ill, ran a high fever, and was dead on the 31st. To all outward appearances he had died of Typhus but everyone there knew that he had died from a lack of hope.

         Do we understand as Christians how good mentally/emotionally we have it compared to unbelievers. We have a confident expectation that even though we have tragedy, suffering, misfortunes in this life - we don't lose hope. We can have joy and peace in the midst of this. If we lose all our money we know that we have treasures in Heaven that can't be lost. If we experience death of a loved one who knows Jesus, we know that we will see them again. If we experience a deadly disease we know that even if we aren't healed we will get new bodies when we die that will live for all eternity. If people despise us our mistreat us we know that we have a God who thinks we are amazing.

        When I run into people that don't believe this I usually ask them what anti-depressants or nerve medicine they are on because most of the time they are on something. They have to be on something - they are living without hope. What is the defeated Christian life? It is living life with a lack of hope. It is focusing so much on this world that we have lost sight of our blessed hope. Come on Christians, don't live as those who have no hope. We should be different! The power of the Holy Spirit is inside you telling you this is true and enabling you to live with hope. Yield to Him. Pray that He would increase in our lives and we would decrease.

      Lord, help me today not to get distracted by the temporal but rather to focus on the eternal. Help me not to hope in the English sense but rather in the biblical sense. Increase my faith. May You increase in my life and may I decrease! Amen