by A. W. Tozer
Among those treasures with which we are all endowed by nature, hope stands by itself as being at once the most precious and the most treacherous.
Just because hope is so common we accept it as a matter of course, without realizing how precious it is. Without it life in a fallen world would be unbearable; without it the zest for living would disappear almost at once; without it one hour of adversity would break our spirits and drive millions to suicide. It is not too much to say that if all hope were destroyed within the human breast, the race of mankind would die out altogether in a very few years. Even the procreative drive and the instinct for self-preservation would hardly be strong enough to save from extinction a race from which all hope had fled.
Hope is a nurse and comforter and enables us to go on after every reason for going on has disappeared. Hope has sustained the spirit of a shipwrecked sailor and given him strength to stay alive through the long days that seemed years till help and rescue came; hope has steeled the patriot to fight on and win at last against overwhelming odds; hope has saved from insanity or suicide the prisoner in his lonely cell as he checked off the years and months and days on his homemade calendar; hope has enabled the sick or injured man to wait out the pain and the nausea till health returned and the suffering ended; hope has made light the feet of the traveler hurrying home in near exhaustion to the bedside of someone he loved.
In the dealings of God with men, hope has held a noble place. The expectation that Messiah would come cheered Israel in her years of victory and kept her from despairing in her periods of captivity and dispersal. Those who feared the Lord have often had rough going.
They were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword: They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated-the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and in caves and holes in the ground. (Hebrews 11:37-38)
That is a New Testament tribute to Old Testament saints; but the record of Christian times is fully as grim and sometimes worse. Only the strength of a great expectation enabled the suffering saints to hold out to the end. The cheerful hope of better days allowed them not only to endure the pain but to sing and rejoice in the midst of it.
So strong, so beautiful is hope that it is scarcely possible to overpraise it. It is the divine alchemy that transmutes the base metal of adversity into gold. In the midst of death Paul could be bold and buoyant because he had firm confidence in the final outcome. "For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake," he said, but his heart remained cheerful knowing that "our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all" (2 Corinthians 4:11,17). His lovely little benediction pronounced over the Roman Christians shows how faith and peace and joy live with hope like four fair sisters dwelling in the same cottage: "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit" (Romans 15:13).
Faith is confidence in the character of God, and hope is the sweet anticipation of desirable things promised but not yet realized. Hope is an electronic beam on which the Christian flies through wind and storm straight to his desired haven. To the child of God, hope is a gift from the heavenly Father "who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal encouragement and good hope" (2 Thessalonians 2:16).
The Christian's hope is sound because it is founded upon the character of God and the redeeming work of His Son Jesus Christ. For this reason Peter could call it "a living hope" (1 Peter 1:3). It is living because it rests on reality and not on fancy. It is not wishful dreaming but vital expectation with the whole might of the Most High behind it.
( The Size of the Soul, Chapter 20 )
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