Now These Three Remain: Hope

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Hope is a key attribute of believing people. It’s mentioned by Paul at the end of 1 Corinthians 13. “Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love.” Last week, we talked about faith.

These days, hope is a substance of high demand and low supply. Historians could probably tell us about many other times of hopelessness. But when you listen to contemporary politicians, meteorologists, scientists, sociologists and the like, they express a great deal of pessimism about our climate, about race relations, about the Middle East, about the drought in California, and so forth.

We specialize in cynicism even in the church. The sky seems to be falling. The wheels are about to come off. Paganism—and perhaps cannibalism!—are just a generation away.

To face such skeptical thought, “hope” is the chief commodity of peddlers and fortune tellers. It’s what advertisers want you to buy. It’s what coaches sell their fans. It’s what politicians offer as the reason to stay the course or to totally upset the apple cart. It’s what average people are searching for: a glimmer of hope promising them that things will soon get better.

Let’s be clear about this kind of hope. It’s cheap hope. It’s the hope that disappoints.

But this is not Christian hope. In Romans, Paul lays out a clear definition of hope and explains why we need it. True hope allows us to move from suffering to glory. True hope helps us see—even with our broken bodies, broken churches and broken societies—what God is doing and will do with and through that brokenness.


May God give us eyes to see the true hope that is ours in Christ Jesus!

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