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News Archive

The audacity of hope

Posted by Mark Elder on 10 Mar 2009

It's not just the title of Barak Obama’s book outlining his ideas and his political philosophy, but it describes his "Yes we can" mentality, which was pivotal in his incredible and inspirational rise to the White House. Hope is used in the public arena to imagine a future that is better than the present and is much in vogue at the moment...

In his historic speech to congress last week, Gordon Brown used similar futuristic imagery as he attempted to engage the Washington power brokers in sharing his vision of a belief in a future that will help people through these credit crunch days.
But what is Christian hope all about? What do we hope for in the future? And how does it differ from Obama or Brown’s ideas? The first thing I want to say is that Christian hope is not merely hopefulness in a better future – in fact the future, at least the short term, may get worse – nor is it some sort of psychological optimism. Rather, it is rooted in historical events, the character of God, His covenants with His people, and the life of Jesus, especially the resurrection. In a nutshell, Christian hope looks backward first at what God has already done, the difference those future-shaping events have made at both a personal and cosmic level, with a realisation that God’s track record is such, that the future can be faced with confidence. Simply put, The Christian view of the future is not fatalistic, but grounded in the truth that “God will do it because God has done it.”  C S Lewis, warming to his eternal destiny, said “we are only shadows of our future existence.” Well, I think life here is pretty good, so I think we’re in for a treat. 
So what can we realistically hope for? Here’s a few nailed down certainties: Jesus has this planet’s future in His hands; He has given all believers many wonderful gifts, including eternal life; He will come again (in His timeframe) to judge the living and the dead; One day, on this earth, those who own the name of Christ, will rule with him; and in the meantime, He has resourced His church with love and power to live dynamically and counter-culturally. This last idea is based on the future kingdom sometimes becoming the present kingdom, rooted in the notion that Christian believers have the capacity to usher in a future reality in the here and now. So we believe in life before death as well as after death.
Are these ideas audacious? Not if your life is built around the God of the Bible. Try 1 Corinthians 15 to whet your appetite. In one chapter, Paul reasons that God’s actions in the past, witnessed by many, give real, concrete hope for all of our futures. We need to understand that our futures are ultimately determined not by events or circumstances, but by the actions of our all-powerful God. Thank goodness for that.