There are numerous verses in the Bible that speak of God restoring the hope of the people and its effect of raising them from despair, chaos, fear, division, and confusion.
“I pray that God, the source of all hope,
will infuse your lives with an abundance of joy and peace
in the midst of your faith so that hope will overflow through the power of the Holy Spirit.” Romans 15:13
It is striking that God is identified as the sole source of hope … and that the infusion of joy and peace – in the midst of our construction of faith – is to the end that hope will overflow, be in abundance, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Hope is a vehicle, an opening, an access portal, to the seeing that the Holy Spirit is at work and that God reigns.
Hope, gained through the Holy Spirit, lifts our perspective beyond the appearances, the empirical evidence, the drama, tragedy, and mesmerisms of our world. God is in control and working out God’s purpose – often far beyond our capacity to understand. Our role is to trust in our relationship with God – not our calculated frames of timelines and outcomes.
To restore our hope,
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- What is informing our hopelessness, our cynicism, our diminished sense of awe and wonder?
- Is it our news sources, our social media, our circle of friends, co-workers, family?
- We care for the quality of what we eat to the nourishment of our body, might we not be more mindful of what views of creation, society, individuals we are ingesting?
- Spending more, and better, time listening to God’s perspectives, promise, and assurance might restore our hope. For hope is something more than seeing a lack of conflict or insecurity. It is not an imagination of some more happy place. It is exchanging human perspectives for divine vision…and then re-ordering our lives — our investment of time, energy, money, prayer – toward that which is derived from that vision.