Holding Onto Hope
This week we begin Part 8 of our series through the Bible with “Letters to Churches: Strengthening Community.”
There’s so much in the world that’s discouraging, disheartening, and disappointing. This is true nationally, globally, and perhaps in your own life. That’s why it’s so important to hold onto hope and to believe things can be better and to do what you can in your circle of influence to make a positive difference.
Pastor Doug shares what the Apostle Paul has to say about hope in his letter to the Romans.
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Holding Onto Hope
Alexander Pope wrote, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”
Hope is quite a word.
Everyone from poets to politicians to preachers recognizes there’s power in the word, “Hope.”
As Cape Cod reflects the beauty of spring with tulips, daffodils, and cherry tree blossoms, it’s a reminder of hope, renewal, and new beginnings. There’s so much in the world that’s discouraging, disheartening, and disappointing. This is true nationally, globally, and perhaps in your own life. That’s why it’s so important to hold onto hope and to believe things can be better and to do what you can in your circle of influence to make a positive difference.
Christian hope is not wishful thinking, but a confident expectation, it’s to trust and wait expectantly. As one of my mentors liked to say toward the end of his life, “I used to think hope was the icing on the cake. I’ve lived long enough to learn hope is the cake.” No matter what’s going on in your life, don’t give up and hold onto hope.
“Hope is a skill; it requires practice. Hope is an organic thing; it requires cultivation. If you become an expert at nothing else, let it be hope.”
Margaret B. Moss
Derek Thompson’s article in the April issue of The Atlantic titled, Why American Teens Are So Sad – Four Forces Propelling the Rising Rates of Depression Among Young People, begins, “The United States is experiencing an extreme teenage mental-health crisis. From 2009 to 2021, the share of American high-school students who say they feel “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 percent to 44 percent, according to a new CDC study. This is the highest level of teenage sadness ever recorded.”
Many of the forces fueling hopelessness and sadness in teens are also fueling them in people of all ages. 1. Social-media use – the more time you spend on social media the more hopeless, sad, depressed, and anxious you tend to be.
2. Sociality is down. the biggest problem with social media might be not social media itself, but rather the activities that it replaces. Today’s teens spend more than five hours daily on social media, and that habit seems to be displacing a lot of beneficial activity. The share of high-school students who got eight or more hours of sleep declined 30 percent from 2007 to 2019. Compared with their counterparts in the 2000s, today’s teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver’s license, or play youth sports. The pandemic and the closure of schools made teen loneliness, hopelessness, and sadness worse.
3. The world is stressful—and there is more news about the world’s stressors. Stress is not a new phenomenon, but the amount of news we hear about threatening or frightening events is much greater and more vivid.
4. Modern parenting strategies. Anxious parents, in seeking to insulate their children from risk and danger, are unintentionally transferring their anxiety to their kids.
I’d add a fifth force – a lack of faith in God as the foundation for one’s life.
The increase in hopelessness, sadness, and loneliness not just among teenagers but in all age groups is increasing at the same time as the number of people who say they don’t have a personal relationship with God that anchors and guides their life, who aren’t a part of a faith community in which they find friendship, encouragement, and support, don’t attend worship, and don’t read the Bible which is filled with Hope and talks about Hope in the midst of the challenges of life.
This is not to say that if you’re a Christian, you’ll never experience feelings of hopelessness, sadness, or loneliness. We all have times of trial. However, many people are depriving themselves of the greatest source of hope that’s available to anyone who will receive it.
Hope and its siblings “hoped, hopeful, hopes, and hoping” appear 148 times in the Bible. “Hopeless,” appears once (Jeremiah 2:25). I did a study of the word “hope” in the Bible and the Book of Psalms has more references to hope (26) than any other book in the Bible. The Psalms are the prayers and songs of the people, and they encourage us repeatedly to “Hope in God.” For example,
Psalm 9:18, “But the needy will not always be forgotten, nor the hope of the afflicted ever perish.”
Psalm 31:24, “Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the LORD.”
Psalm 33:18, “But the eyes of the LORD are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love.”
Psalm 39:7, “My hope is in you.”
Psalm 43:5, “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”
Psalm 71:5, “For you have been my hope, O Sovereign LORD, my confidence since my youth.”
Psalm 119:74, “May those who fear you rejoice when they see me, for I have put my hope in your word.”
Psalm 130:7, “O Israel, hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem.”
The book with the second most references to hope might surprise you, it’s the book of Job. Job suffered the loss of all his children, virtually all of his property, and his good health. Job struggles mightily with maintaining a sense of hope in the face of such overwhelming suffering and adversity. Eventually Job emerges from the storm of his terrible trial with a deeper personal relationship with the Almighty far beyond what he had previously known. Hope helped to pull him through.
We turn to the New Testament for the book with the third most references to hope which is Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Writing about Abraham (Romans 4.18), Paul says that “Hoping against hope, he believed” that what God had promised him would come to fruition. Sometimes we have to hope against hope – in spite of the evidence we see, we cling to hope that things can be better or different.
Romans 8:24-25 states,
“For by hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” There seems to be a relationship between hoping and waiting. In Spanish, the verb “esperar” means both to hope and to wait. We hope for something because we do not yet fully possess it. There’s also a relationship between hope and dealing with suffering as Job demonstrates and in Romans 12:12 where Paul says you’re to “rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering.”
As Paul is nearing the end of his letter to the church in Rome he returns to the importance of hope in Romans 15:4-13,
“For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope. May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God. For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, “Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name”; and again he says, “Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people”; and again, “Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him”; and again Isaiah says, “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.” May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
As you can see, Hope is a word that appears frequently on the pages of the Bible.
Paul says the God we worship is the God of steadfastness, encouragement, and hope.
There are so many scriptures that encourage us to have hope – to hold on, to persevere, to keep on believing. The joy and peace so many people are lacking is found in believing in the God of Hope. We don’t just have a glimmer of hope, but through the power of the Holy Spirit given to us we may abound in hope. Reading the Bible, we’re encouraged by the steadfastness of women and men facing tough times who held onto hope and God’s promises.
When the world says, “Give up,” Hope whispers, “Try it one more time.”
Writer Ann Lamott put it well,
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come.”
Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Seabiscuit, spent seven years on her book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption. On a May afternoon in 1943, a US Army Air Force bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil and gasoline. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared. It was that of a young lieutenant, the plane’s bombardier, who was struggling to a life raft and pulling himself aboard. So began one of the most extraordinary odysseys of the Second World War.
The lieutenant’s name was Louis Zamperini. In boyhood, he’d been a cunning and incorrigible delinquent, breaking into houses, brawling, and fleeing his home to ride the rails. As a teenager, he had channeled his defiance into running, discovering a prodigious talent that carried him to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as the youngest member of the US Olympic Team and within sight of the four-minute mile. But when war had come, the athlete had become an airman, embarking on a journey that led to his doomed flight, a tiny raft, and a drift into the unknown.
Ahead of Zamperini lay thousands of miles of open ocean, leaping sharks, a foundering raft, thirst and starvation, enemy aircraft, and, beyond that lay a trial even greater. Zamperini would spend 47 days at sea before being captured by the Japanese. From then until the war’s end in 1945, he was engaged in a brutal struggle to survive. He was imprisoned at infamous prisoner-of-war camps on Kwajalein Atoll (nicknamed “Execution Island”) and the secret interrogation center Ofuna. Murderously sadistic guards, starvation rations and bloody dysentery all whittled away at his body and soul. Finally, he wound up at Naoetsu POW camp northwest of Tokyo, where a psychotic prison official known as “The Bird” made it his mission to break Zamperini.
Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini would answer desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; brutality with rebellion. Unbroken is a testament to both the utter depravity of humanity and to the resilience of the human mind, body, and spirit.
Louis Zamperini is a notable example of what actor Christopher Reeve said after the horseback riding accident that left him paralyzed: “Once you choose hope, anything’s possible.”
When Unbroken came out, I read a book review of it by Maria Flook in The Boston Globe She wrote, “Back home, Zamperini suffered flashbacks… but his new wife introduced him to the Rev. Billy Graham at a Bible tent meeting. His government-issue Bible had “made no sense to him,’’ but “born again’’ his post-traumatic stress symptoms disappear. He earned a living as a Christian speaker on ocean liners and ran a nonprofit boys camp. He visited a Japanese prison to forgive his jailed captors.” The reviewer then laments that, “Finding God is an all too familiar ending,” as if Unbroken was a work of fiction rather than the true account of what happened to a real person whose courage and hope were beyond amazing and whose relationship with God gave him a sense of peace and hope after suffering through torture and torment so awful it’s hard to read about it, much less to personally experience and survive.
Samuel Johnson wrote,
“Hope is necessary in every condition. The miseries of poverty, sickness, of captivity, would, without this comfort, be insupportable.”
Romans 5:2b-5 proclaims,
“We boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”
Biblical hope builds its foundation on faith. Hebrews 11:1 states, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for.” We cannot have one without the other. Faith and hope are complimentary. Faith is grounded in the reality of the past; hope is looking to the reality of the future. Without faith, there is no hope, and without hope, there is no true faith. Whatever your situation, circumstance, trial, or test – you can face it better with hope. Hope is an attitude and a stance toward life that you need to courageously choose and cultivate again and again. “All it takes is one bloom of hope to make a spiritual garden.” Terri Guillemets
My dad is flying into Boston to spend a week in Maine and we’re going to celebrate his 90th Birthday on Saturday with 40 family members and friends.
My dad loves musicals and in Damn Yankees his favorite song is You Gotta Have Heart, which includes the lyrics, “You’ve gotta have heart, All you really need is heart… When the odds are sayin’ You’ll never win That’s when the grin should start… You’ve gotta have hope Mustn’t sit around and mope… Nothins half as bad as it may appear… Wait’ll next year and hope.”
Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier.
Without hope life is meaningless. Without hope life is meaning less and less. If you need help finding hope we have people you can talk to or groups you can join or opportunities to get involved so let us know.
Remember, Hope Helps. Hope is risky. It feels safer to live without it. If you don’t hope, you can’t hurt. But hope shapes a vision of a better future. It gives you the ability to endure and keep going. Don’t surrender to the safety of despair. Hold on to Hope!
Blessing:
“We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Albert Einstein, Romans 15.13
Questions for Discussion or Reflection
- On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being Very Hopeless and 10 being Very Hopeful, where would you place yourself? Why would you rate yourself at that number?
- What are the reasons or causes for how hopeless or hopeful you feel? Can you specifically identify them?
- How would you define “hope?”
- Think of an image that illustrates what hope looks like – what do you see?
- From the sermon and your own knowledge, what does the Bible teach about hope? Where is hope found?
- Why is holding onto hope important for your life and your faith?
- What is one practical step you will take to be more hopeful? For example, “Greatly reduce the time I spend on social media or watching commentary on TV.”