Hope is a wonderful thing. It is, in fact, that inner spark that makes life possible even in the darkest of days. It is a knowing, a conviction, that there is the possibility of change, movement, growth, even of reversal of present conditions, that enables us to persevere and continue to live as if…, because we are convinced that it is not a matter of if, but when.

            I have a lot of experience with hope, I am a Philadelphia Phillies baseball fan. Every year about this time, as the team is spending time training in the warmish gulf air of pre-spring Florida, I become full of hope. Hope that this will be the year. The year that they finally will rise above mediocrity and once again make it to the World Series. But most every year, at least for the last 15, that hope begins to fade in the summer heat and is finally dashed by the reality of too few games in the win column. Sometimes, like last year, it remains strong into October, sometimes it has fizzled by July. But no matter how short its life-span or how hard it falls, it again rises fresh and strong by the next spring.

            That’s part of the reason I love baseball. In many ways it mirrors life. No matter how many times hope is dashed, how many times we fail, there is always tomorrow, always next season, there is always reason for hope. Of course baseball as an analogy for life falls far short in many ways, but my current spring fever caused by the beginning of spring training has gotten me to thinking about the nature of hope. Hope is at the core of our experience as humans and more specifically as followers of Jesus.

            Christian hope is the knowledge and assurance that in Jesus we have hope. Hope that we are able to overcome our self-centeredness as we learn to mirror Jesus’ self-giving love and obedience to God. Hope that Jesus is still present through the Holy Spirit to enable us to overcome our inherent selfishness that leads to destruction, and instead experience the fullness of the eternal kind of life that comes from giving ourselves away.

            The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, encourages us that “the God of hope (will) fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him…” and that we can, in fact, “overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:13) So we can see that hope comes to us as a gift of God as we learn to trust in him, and that the Holy Spirit gives us power to continue to hope. This is a lot firmer basis for hope than the Phillies have ever given me, and it is a lot more certain than hoping in my own abilities to overcome my failures by sheer force of will.

In living hope,