3rd November, 2020
Ministering: Pst Dele Olubi
Last week, we started a teaching on hope and established that it is an essential weapon in Christian warfare. As Christians, who love God, we are not hopeless because love hopes (1 Corinthians 13:7). When God speaks, He does speak into the future and that is hope for us. Without hope, you do not have life.
In the last teaching, it was also established that faith helps us to be rightly positioned, brings us to the point of conviction and is the substance of hope. We saw that faith is not passive, rather it is tangible and active. We looked at the story of Abraham who still had hope when there was no reason to. Today, we shall learn from a few more characters in the Bible who had hope.
Simeon in Luke 2:25 had hope and he is one of the unsung heroes of the Bible. God had spoken that he would see His Christ and he hoped for it. Though Simeon never received the promise directly, he embraced it from afar having seen it in the scriptures. His life shows that there is a link between hope and the fulfillment of our assignments on earth. He was kept alive by the consolation of the promise which God gave to him and that is the power of hope. Hope preserved him such that death waited until Jesus was born.
Anna was another person in Simeon’s category. She had hope that she would see the redemption of Jerusalem before she died (Luke 2:36-38). She was in the temple for many years, waiting in hope for the fulfillment of what God said to her. Note that waiting requires a lot of energy and the strength needed to wait is acquired when you get a glimpse of the glory that lies ahead. Martha is another example, she believed that Lazarus would rise again (John 11:20-25). She had hope that resurrection was possible. As Christians, we ought to remain focused as we wait for the actualization of our expectations. Jesus was focused because he had a glimpse of what was ahead of Him. John 17:5 shows that there was a discussion between the Father and the Son which communicated an expectation.
Jesus did not just come to the earth because he had to; He was able to endure shame because he had something to look up to. You will handle things inappropriately if you do not see a future in them. Hope places us under restrictions that require us to wait. Many people who cannot wait have left and ended up in destruction.
God’s word is important because it serves as the vehicle by which hope is conveyed. The words we hear either build hope in us or pull down our walls of expectation. Therefore, we must be careful of what we hear. As we listen to the testimonies of others who have waited in hope and have received the promise, hope is built in us. You need a community around you to keep your hope alive.
However, there is one thing we must earnestly wait for, that is the coming of the Lord. It is a cardinal hope for us. The Lord will come again and when He does, He will crush death. The entirety of our Christian walk requires hope for us to keep moving and for God’s promises to be fulfilled in our lives.