Daily Devotional

September is one of my favorite months for the year. It’s usually the first breath of cooler fall weather after the monotony of Fresno’s unrelenting summer heat. It’s also a season of celebration for us: both my children, two of my wife’s siblings, and my dad all have birthdays this month. But September also means FOOTBALL. The NFL is back! Someone once remarked that the average American male experiences two seasons: football season and severe depression.

If you’re a Minnesota Vikings fan, though (as I am), football itself can be depressing. If you don’t follow football, the Vikings are the perennially “good-but-never good enough” team. The Vikings have a top-7 winning percentage across their history, but have never won a Super Bowl. Every year, we say “This is our year! I hope we win the Super Bowl this year!” And for 64 seasons, that hope has never materialized.

The use of the word “hope” in this context is interesting. I’m certainly not expecting the Vikings to win the Super Bowl each year; I really mean something like “I would like my team to win.” And this is the way we normally use the word “hope,” to describe a wish or a desire. “I hope I make it in time.” Want to soften the force of a sentence? Just add “I hope:” “I’m going to pass this exam... I hope.”

This sort of “wishful thinking” is decidedly NOT the way the Bible talks about hope. In theology, hope is one of the three “theological virtues,” alongside faith and love (1 Corinthians 13:13). But hope probably doesn’t crack the top 10 on our list of “most Christlike character qualities.” I’ve talked to plenty of Christians who wanted to grow in their faith or become more loving, but very few who wanted to be more hopeful.

Yet Scripture is filled with the language of hope: in the New Testament alone, “hope” appears 86 times. When the Bible does talk about hope, it’s never in our modern sense of wishful thinking, but in the sense of confident expectation. The object of biblical hope is the future and total fulfillment of God’s promises: we are “waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). We look forward to Christ’s return, our glorification, the “making all things new,” not with wishful optimism (like wanting a football team to win the Super Bowl), but with absolute certainty. We know how the story ends.

That anticipation of future events affects the present, too. Hope is not mere knowledge of what’s coming next, but an expectation, an eagerness, a longing for those things. Peter says we have a “living hope” (1 Peter 1:3): a future imperishable inheritance that gives us joy even in the midst of trials (vv. 4-6). Paul makes the same point in Romans 8:18-25: we are able to endure “the sufferings of this present time” because the whole creation “waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.” This hope enables us to live such that we “wait for it with patience.” How different is this from a blind, wishful optimism! True biblical hope always changes the way we live right now. C.S. Lewis defines it as “a continual looking forward to the eternal world... you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”

But hope is not something automatic; it’s something that we must cultivate. We cultivate it by reminding ourselves of God’s promises in Scripture: “that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Romans 15:4). We cultivate it through prayer, that most tangible way of fixing our eyes on eternity: “rejoice in hope... be constant in prayer” (Romans 12:12). And we grow in hope most often through suffering: “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3-4).

We live in a world that is wasting away from lack of hope. By the available polling data, my generation, Gen Z, is the most pessimistic, the most anxious about the future, of any modern generation. And maybe understandably so. We live in a chronically online era, when our news feeds are bombarded with stories of tragedy, natural disaster, vitriolic hate, unspeakable evil, wars and rumors of wars, instability, uncertainty. To experience all this without God is to be without hope. Yet we have the antidote to this epidemic of hopelessness! The gospel offers real hope, not as “everything will be okay” wishful thinking, but real, concrete promises that the world WILL be set to rights. What if we could be the ones in the crowd whose eyes are not cast downward, forever doomscrolling, but whose eyes are fixed heavenward, eagerly awaiting our blessed hope, Jesus Christ! How powerful would be our witness... how needed is that message!

Let me conclude with three thoughts by way of application:

• Would those around me describe me as a “hopeful” person? Has this most-neglected of the virtues fallen off my radar? I know I find myself complaining far more than expressing hope.
• Am I cultivating hope in my own life? Am I dwelling on God’s promises in Scripture, renewing my perspective with him in prayer? Romans 8 is my favorite chapter for cultivating hope; maybe give it a read.
• Am I sharing my hope with others? Am I living out the words of 1 Peter 3:15, “always being ready to give an answer for the hope that is within me?”

Church family, may we be people known not only for our faith and love, but also for our hope.

"English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers."