CLIMB THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

Moses... came to Horeb, the mountain of God... God ... said, '...the place on which you are standing is holy ground.'

Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo... And the Lord showed him all the land.

The Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, 'Thus you shall... tell the people of Israel: You have seen... how I bore you on eagle's wings and brought you to myself.'

The glory of the Lord went up from the midst of the city, and stood upon the mountain.

Jesus took [them] and led them up a high mountain apart. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun.

A cloud... overshadowed them... And a voice from the cloud said, 'This is my son, my chosen... listen to him.'

God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.

Let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

He said to them, 'Follow me'.

It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established as the highest of the mountains.

(Exodus 3:1 and 5; Deuteronomy 34: 1; Exodus 19: 3; Ezekiel 11: 23; Matthew 17: 1-2; Luke 9: 35; Acts 2: 36; Hebrews 12: 1-2; Matthew 4: 19; Isaiah 2:2 -- all RSV)

One of the recreations of urban dwellers is to go for a long drive into the country, or to the mountains. Do you find, as I do, that it is restful for the eyes to have an occasional long view, instead of the shorter, limited view of suburbia? We need these times to break away from the routine of family life, of business life, of church life, and to take a long view, an overview of our total lifestyle. Have my priorities of time been wisely allotted? Have I made enough time for communication with my spouse, my children, my parents -- my Lord? Was that distur bance in my life so cataclysmic or, when viewed from the mountains, is it possible that God was shaking my earth just slightly so he could have more of my attention?

Think of some mountain-top experiences from scripture -- Abraham, called to give his son, but the Lord's promise, 'I will provide'; Moses, terrified at being called to a new responsibility and the Lord's promise, 'I will be with you'; Jesus, on Mount Hermon, on the way to probable death, experiencing transfiguration and being affirmed by his Father that the way. of the cross was the way that led to glory; the disciples on Mount Olivet who were assured by the ascending Christ of his power through the presence of the Holy Spirit.

We are called to follow the steps of the Master up whatever mountain he has chosen for us. A man climbed a mountain as far as he could, then he marked the place, and returned, exhausted. On bewailing his misfortune a wise listener reminded him that each climber who makes a path and leaves markers makes it easier for the next people to go further.

May we each faithfully climb our particular mountain, making paths for others to follow which will lead them to higher peaks. Then may we have compassion on those who are hemmed in by the valleys of spiritual shortsightedness, limited by boulders of self-centredness, trapped by the forest of an unforgiving spirit. May we be empowered by the spirit of unconditional love, taking to others the message of a new view of life, seen from the mountain of the Lord.


Christ of the upward way My guide divine, Where thou hast set thy feet May I place mine; And move and march wherever thou hast trod, Keeping face forward up the hill of God.

Walter John Mathams

When you begin to pray aright you are on an ascending path. It will carry you to even greater heights, but as you climb you will become increasingly aware of your own littleness and of the immensity of the prospect. You will see your surroundings in relation to a higher heaven and a more distant horizon: mountains of difficulty will sink to molehills, ways will appear where no way declared itself and the sources of many streams be revealed.

Hugh Redwood, Practical Prayer

If one wants to climb mountains one must have a good base camp, a place where there are shelter and provisions, where one may receive nurture and rest before one ven tures forth again to seek another summit. Successful mountain climbers know that they must spend at least as much time, if not more, in tending to their base camp as they actually do in climbing mountains, for their survival is dependent upon their seeing to it that their base camp is sturdily constructed and well stocked.

M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Travelled

I have often felt that my life was rather akin to mountaineering, with a clear goal to reach the highest peak. There may be a fairly long journey to reach the foothills before the real climb can be started. On the way up, the goal is often hidden from view by clouds, or by lesser peaks, but the original sight of the summit keeps us pressing on, despite weariness and even discouragement.

As I went down from the present peak into the valley between the mountains, I was often shadowed by the very peak I was enjoying. This I interpreted in a sense of failure and this often led to despair... I see now I was wrong... The going down was merely an initial moving forward towards the next higher ground.

Helen Roseveare, Give Me This Mountain

There is a path of service in which I would lead you where the grass is green, the pastures verdant. No foot has preceded you there. It is virgin territory. You shall walk with me because there is none other gone before to mark the way.

0 my child, you have crossed a bridge. Reach not back. Move on ahead and press into the fullness of all I have prepared for you. It is the blossoming of that which long ago was planted and for many years has been nurtured. It is waiting for you to step forward and receive.

As I have told you so often, keep your heart fixed on me. Only thus will you have the needed stamina to keep your own soul from falling into discouragement. Only by my power will you be able to stand. Focus on my footsteps.

Frances Roberts, On the Highroads of Surrender

How do you spot a miracle? Just look for a mountain. Look for a problem or a difficulty, because often the first way God reaches us is in a moment of pain.

Trouble never leaves you where it found you. It changes you, permanently. It either makes you bitter and tough and hard and cold and angry, or it'll turn you into a soft, gentle, compassionate, understanding, generous human being.

You know, if you've got a problem, I predict it's the beginning of a miracle, because what is the reason for mountains that God lets us run into? Some mountains are there to block us so that we won't run madly ahead and get ourselves in trouble. If a mountain is there to keep us from going into enemy territory, then the mountain indeed has been turned into a miracle.

Robert Schuller, Living Positively

She perceived that no-one who finds herself up on the slopes of the Kingdom of Love can possibly dogmatise about what is seen there, because it is only then that she comprehends how small a part of the glorious whole she sees. All she can do is to gasp with wonder, awe and thanksgiving, and to long with all her heart to go higher and to see and understand more. Paradoxical as it may seem, as she gazed out on dazzling vistas, so glorious that she could not look at them steadily or grasp their magnificent sweep, she often thought that the prayer which best expressed her heart's desire was that of the blind man, 'Lord, that I might receive my sight! Help me to open myself to more light. Help me to a fuller understanding'.

Hannah Hurnard, Hind's Feet on High Places, an allegory of a girl, formerly crippled, now walking on the High Mountains



Enlarge thou me in love, that with the inward palate of my heart I may taste how sweet it is to love, and to be dissolved and, as it were, to bathe myself in thy love.

Let me be possessed by love, mounting above myself, through excessive fervour and admiration.

Let me sing the song of love, let me follow thee, my beloved, on high; let my soul spend itself in thy praise, rejoicing through love.

Let me love thee more than myself, nor love myself but for thee; and in thee all that truly love thee, as the law of love commandeth, shining out from thyself.

Thomas a Kempis

Lord, forgive me for being blinded so often by the pressures of this world. Open my eyes so that I can see the mountain path up which you are calling me. Help me to keep my eyes on the risen Christ who knows the way I take and will never leave me comfortless. Thank you for your knowledge of me, of my gifts, of my dreams and for the way in which you incorporate them into your greater plans for your kingdom. Lord, I want to keep my eyes on the glistening peaks of your perfect will and your perfect love. I give myself to you again, for you to use on the mountains or in the valleys, as a guide or as a rescuer, as a sweeper of the paths or keeper of the rest-houses.

I praise you, Lord. I stretch out to reach you -- and find that you are there, ready to hold my hand. I praise and worship you.



A Benediction

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all now and forever. Amen.

Rowland Croucher, ed., High Mountains Deep Valleys, chapter 45

PROCURE ME POSSIBILITY!

Do I make my plans like a worldly person, ready to say Yes and No at once? As surely as God is faithful our word... has not been Yes and No.

Test me, Lord, probe me, scrutinise my heart and mind: Your love is always my study, and your constancy my companion.

I mimic the deaf in hearing nothing, I mimic the dumb in not saying a word, I mimic the one who, since he hears nothing gives no sharp answer in return.

I mean to sing to the Lord all my life, I mean to play to my God as long as I live. May these thoughts of mine give the Lord as much delight as he gives me.

Dear friends, if our consciences do not condemn us, we approach God with confidence, and we obtain from him whatever we ask for, because we are obeying his commands and doing the things that please him.

My heart exults, my mind rejoices and my body can dwell secure, knowing that you will not hand me over to Sheol and not put your friend within danger of the grave. Instead you will show me the path of life, the unbounded joy of living in your presence.

The Son of God, Jesus Christ whom we preached to you... was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him.

God is love and whoever continues to love keeps in union with God and God with him.

(2 Corinthians 1: 17-18, RSV; Psalm 26: 2-3, JB; Psalm 38: 13-14, JB; Psalm 104: 33-34, JB; 1 John 3: 21-22, Goodspeed; Psalm 16: 9-11, JB; 2 Corinthians 1: 19-20, RSV; 1 John 4: 16, Goodspeed)


It is prayer which alone makes good sense of the past, illumines the present and makes the future hopeful. In the first half of life we are immersed in doing. We test our strength and innocence against the flood of experience which comes upon us, even over us. We taste in order to become wise, we enter in so that we know, we seek in the hope of being found. There are so many possibilities presented to us that we hardly contain our impatience, an impatience which later surprises us, gives cause for regret. We don't call 'procure me possibility'; we hope only for sufficient time to buy up all the experience possible.

In the second half of life we emerge from this welter of sensation to find that our necessary immersion in the world has left scars upon us. There are some regrets, there is some emptiness and longing. We are not satisfied; whatever we were looking for, that was not it. Our successes have not filled us, though we own that they were worth the labour. Our failures have dimmed the bright image of ourselves we entertained. We look about us with a view both widened and restricted by our experience. The fine things we hear ourselves saying have no corresponding beauty within. We paint ourselves into a corner with the varnish of appearance, even as God troubles our hearts with truth.

Now is the time of emergence. God comforts us by leading us into prayer. Some old securities and certainties he renews with paradox. Pride and hardness of heart he commutes into vulnerability. The love which we dwelt upon but which was not within us he puts into hearts renewed in tenderness. The creation we largely ignored in pursuit of more glittering prizes he fills with grandeur. We were afraid of dying and he allowed it to touch us in failures and disappointments, and having fallen so far, he raises us to comfort and joy. He satisfies longing and makes it increase. The cry of wretchedness is the cry 'procure me possibility'. God knows the wretchedness, hears the cry, answers it in and by prayer. The life of prayer discovers true riches.


From the Christian point of view everything... should serve for edification.

The sort of learning which is not... edifying is precisely for that reason unchristian. Every thing that is Christian must bear some resemblance to the address which a physician makes beside the sick bed.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

Salvation is humanly speaking the most impossible thing of all; but for God all things are possible. This is the fight of faith, which fights madly for possibility. For possibility is the only power to save. When one swoons, people shout for water, Eau-de-Cologne, Hoffman's Drops; but when one is about to despair the cry is, Procure me possibility, procure me possibility.

Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

We are free when we are living in a homeland, not when we are straying and breaking away. We are free when we are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. We are free when we belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose.

D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

For only to faith is God alone of value, and God is God in that he desires nothing but faith... and just as faith is a trust which reaches out into the darkness, so God is the presence, affirmed in spite of every experience of his absence, of the one being who is worthy of faith, never disappoints, never fails, and deserves total reliance.

Gerhard Ebeling, Luther

It is from within us, deep down within us, that the new life proceeds and that means that anything which is not an expression of us will not be an expression of God either. In some sense the converse is also true. What is not an expression of God will not be a true expression of us.

Simon Tugwell, Reflections of the Beatitudes

If the soul loves God, its heart will not be turned in upon itself or preoccupied with its own pleasure and glory.

Rather, it will be intent upon giving honour and glory to God and upon giving him pleasure.

Francis Kelly Nemeck and Marie Theresa Coombs, The Spiritual Journey

We learn about sin only on the basis of the proclamation of grace and pardon.

Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity

He who is truly alive is free to die... the people who find death intolerable are those who have never been more than half alive... Death followed by resurrection, life through dying is the way things are. It is the principle of all existence. Hang on to what you have of life and you are lost. Let go, do the necessary dying and a fuller, richer quality of aliveness will be given to you.

John V. Taylor, Weep Not For Me


Being a child of yours, dear Father, is the best adulthood I've ever had! It's richer, by far than any combination of status, promotion, glittering things, beauty prizes and being 'special'. It gives me liberty to laugh at myself with enjoyment. Indeed, now I can grin and bear, laugh and be happy because you appreciate the joke and the joy better than I do. I am freed from envying the talent which others possess. I can say 'I don't know' without feeling the world reddening with embarrassment. 'Truth in the inward part' is what you give and it's wonderful, it's freedom! I see that I'm more ordinary than I thought and that others are deeper, more interesting, more loveable than I used to think. And the poor, dear God, the poor! I see them, more and more. For these wonders and for all the possibilities that he will yet draw from them, may God be praised!

Amen.

A Benediction

On your head let there be humour,
In your breast let there be peace,
Out of your eyes much seeing,
Out of your words much ease.

Rowland Croucher ed., High Mountains Deep Valleys (Albatross/Lion 1991/1994) chapter 39

HOPE IN TIME OF ABANDONMENT

Hope in time of abandonment - (Jaques Ellul)

What, then, can I hope for, Lord? I put my hope in you. For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. O God of our salvation, who art the hope of all the ends of the earth. Don't stay so far away, O God; my God, hurry to my aid! May those who attack me be defeated and destroyed. May those who try to hurt me be shamed and disgraced. I will always put my hope in you; I will praise you more and more. I will tell of your goodness; all day long I will speak of your salvation, though it is more than I can understand. Remember my affliction and my bitterness, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. 'The Lord is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in him.'

So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he interposed with an oath, so that through two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible that God should prove false, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to seize the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.

Blessed be the God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and to an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you...

Rejoice in hope. (Psalm 39:7, GNB; Psalm 62:5 and 65:5b, RSV; Psalm 71:12-15, GNB; Lamentations 3:19-24, RSV; Hebrews 6:17-20 and 10:23, RSV; 1 Peter 1:3-4, RSV; Romans 12:12, RSV)


To hope is as human as to love. We were made to face the future just as we were made to face each other. Even in the darkest situations we still hope. Once off the coast of Newfoundland a mini-sub sank. Divers managed to locate it and tapped on the side to see if there was any sign of life. In Morse Code a message came back: 'Is there hope?'

'Is there hope?' is a question we all ask, whether in the crises of life -- 'Is there hope, doctor?' -- or in the daily despair of a difficult marriage, prolonged unemployment or useless employment.

Unlike optimism, Christian hope doesn't opt out when faced with harsh realities. The reason for the realism of Christian hope is the fact that it is cast in the mould of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.

Christian hope can face any situation, because it is not based on changeable circumstances, but a settled conviction that nothing can overtake us that Christ hasn't taken care of. It is willing to risk all on the reality of the resurrection. We welcome the future, because it bears the face of Jesus.


Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always to be blest.

Alexander Pope

Hope -- the uncertain goddess.

Pericles

Hope is the enemy.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

In the subsequent years of ministry in England I have often been asked: 'What is the greatest difficulty you faced in moving from India to England?' I have always answered: 'The disappearance of hope'. For the elderly and middle-aged there is, for the most part, only the hope of keeping reasonably comfortable amid the disintegration of so many of the familiar values. For very many of the young there is only the terrible spectre of nuclear war, with nothing beyond.

Bishop Lesslie Newbigin, The Other Side of 1984

Can true biblical hope serve as a warning against false hope? In a society filled with immanental hope of social engineering, of human potential, of political revolution, we need to hear the great themes of Old Testament hope. Our hope is in the Lord, who is also our salvation; all other hope is hopeless.

David Hubbard, from an article entitled Hope in the Old Testament

With this third world war which might break out one day, with this wretched gathering which our planet now is, despair returns to tempt me. The idea that we'll never be done with it, that there's no purpose, only petty personal ends for which we fight. We make little revolutions but there's not a human end. Nothing concerning man, only disorders. One can't think such things. They tempt you incessantly, especially if you're old and can think, 'Oh well, anyway, I shall die in five years at the most'. In fact I think ten, but it might well be five. In any case the world seems ugly, bad and without hope. There, that's the cry of despair of an old man who'll die in despair. But that's exactly what I resist, and I know I shall die in hope. But that hope needs a foundation.

Jean-Paul Sartre less than a month before he died in 1980

All utopias of the kingdom of God or of man, all hopeful pictures of the happy life, all revolutions of the future, remain hanging in the air and bear within them the germ of boredom and decay -- and for that reason also adopt a militant and extortionate attitude to life -- as long as there is no certainty in the face of death and no hope which carries love beyond death.

Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope

My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus' blood and righteousness,
I dare not trust my sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus' name,
On Christ the solid Rock I stand,
All other ground is sinking sand.

Edward Mote

Who could believe in a God who will make everything new later if it is in no way apparent from the activity of those who hope in the One who is to come that he is already beginning to make everything new now?

Edward Schillbeeckx, God the Future of Man

The hope towards which the Bible moves promises a new creation that radically transcends man's own possibilities. But in promising this it also encourages him to take the steps that are within his power in the direction of this goal, and to refrain from the steps leading in the opposite direction. Anyone who wants to reach the new world across the sea will start off for the port of departure on his own feet and with the means of transport at his disposal in this old world, even though he realises that very different forces will be needed before he can land in the new world and become its citizen. The promise of the hope of God is finding strength to meet a double disappointment: some tell people to put their trust in the next world, and disappoint them by declaring that the present is hopelessly unalterable; others claim that they can realise the heaven of total salvation by their own strength, and disappoint because they ruin the present in a completely inhuman way. On the other hand man, who is of his very nature orientated towards the future, can -- trusting in the word of promise -- remain radically hopeful within the relativity of 'a step at a time'.

Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament

To us is given the promise of eternal life -- but to us, the dead. A blessed resurrection is proclaimed to us -- meantime we are surrounded by decay. We are called righteous -- and yet sin lives in us. We hear of ineffable blessedness -- but meantime we are oppressed by infinite misery. We are promised abundance of all good things -- yet we are rich only in hunger and thirst. What would become of us if we did not take our stand on hope, and if our heart did not hasten beyond the midst of the darkness upon the path illumined by the word and Spirit of God!

John Calvin

Hope leads us into life, into the whole of life. It encourages faith so that it does not degenerate into faintheartedness. It strengthens love so that it does not remain enclosed within itself and with those who are like it. Thus Charles Peguy said:

Hope leads everything.
For faith only sees what is.
But hope sees what will be.
Charity only loves what is.
But hope loves what will be --
In time and for all eternity.

Jurgen Moltmann, The Experiment Hope

Pardon for sin and a peace everlasting, your living presence, to cheer and to guide; strength for today, and bright hope for tomorrow - these are the blessings your love will provide. Great is your faithfulness...

T.O. Chisolm (1866-1960)


As we grow in faith, love, and hope, help us to understand that no planning for the future, however necessary, no programme, no matter how carefully conceived, can relieve us of the necessity of going forward into a future that cannot be planned of risk, of danger, of hope in your incalculable grace.

Lord, be for us the truth on which life and death are built, the hope that cannot be destroyed, the freedom from which love and justice flow and the joy that has eternity within it.

Amen.

Terry Falla, Be Our Freedom, Lord

God of hope, we confess that we have fallen prey to false hopes; hopes of success, prestige, influence; we have invested ourselves emotionally in them only to be disappointed,

We pray for those we see deceived by the illusions of false hope; led by false shepherds, political and psychological messiahs who promise much, but deliver little.

We praise and thank you for our true hope, a sure and certain hope in your Son, and pray that each morning we might rise ready to live each day in the light of the last day. Help us not to be nostalgic for the past nor possessive of the present, but to hold each day open to the future heritage of your Kingdom. Amen.



A Benediction

And now unto him who is able to keep us from failing and lift us from the dark valley of despair to the bright mountain of hope, from the midnight of desperation to the daybreak of joy; to him be power and authority, for ever and ever. Amen.

Martin Luther King

Still Waters, Deep Waters ed. By Rowland Croucher pp. 123-128

HOPE

We always thank God... because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you,

Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God. Therefore prepare your minds for action; discipline yourselves; set all your hope on the grace that Jesus Christ will bring you when he is revealed. Continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. 'The LORD is my portion,' says my soul, 'therefore I will hope in him.'

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. 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.

Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

Colossians 1:3,5; 1 Peter 1:3-4; 1 Peter 1:21; 1 Peter 1:13; Colossians 1:23; Lamentations 3:22-24; Romans 15:13; Romans 5:5; 1 John 3:2-3.


Victor Frankl was a young psychiatrist who had just begun his practice when the Germans took over his native Vienna and shipped him and his fellow-Jews off to a concentration camp. Then began the awesome task of survival. With his trained psychiatric eye he noted that many prisoners simply crumpled under the pressure and eventually died. But some did not, and Frankl made it his mission to get to know these special people and discover their secret. Without exception, those who survived had something to live for. One man had a retarded child back home he wanted to care for. Another was deeply in love with a girl he wanted to marry. Frankl himself aspired to be a writer, and was in the middle of his first manuscript when he was arrested: the drive to live and finish the book was very great. Frankl did survive, and has contributed greatly to our understanding of the human 'will to meaning'. He developed a process called 'logotherapy', which, expressed as a simple question is: 'If the presence of purpose or meaning gives one the strength to carry on, how do we human beings get it touch with it?'

The Bible's answer - for an individual or a church - is, in one word, HOPE. Humans are 'hopeful beings'. Where there's hope there's life. That's because our God is a 'God of hope' (Romans 15:13). 'My hope is in the Lord' was the Psalmists' confident affirmation.

The God who called Abraham and his family to leave the land of Ur and go to the unknown land of Canaan is the same God who is ahead of us, too, beckoning us to the land of 'not yet'. 'Hope' or its equivalents are mentioned 125 times in Scripture - often linked with faith and love (1 Corinthians 13:13, Colossians 1:4,5, 1 Thessalonians 1:3, Hebrews 10: 22-24). We can 'place our hope in the living God' (1 Timothy 4:10). Those who do not know Christ personally are 'without hope' (Ephesians 2:12, cf. 1 Thessalonians 4:13). On the other hand hope is so much an essential part of Christianity that Paul says without it the Christian is the most miserable of all persons (1 Corinthians 15:19).

In fact, the notion of hope is woven like a golden thread through the whole fabric of God's creation. An experiment by psychologists at the University of North Carolina found that rats soon drowned if they were put in a large bottle without an apparent escape. But put the rat in a jar with the lid half cut away, and it will swim for about 36 hours before drowning from exhaustion!

In 'South Pacific', Mary Martin sings 'I'm stuck like a dope with a thing called hope, and I can't get it out of my heart.' Nor can any healthy living organism.

The essayist Pope put it well: 'Hope springs eternal in the human breast'. It does, and it was put there by God. Hope sustains the farmer when he ploughs and sows, the student when she studies, the athlete when he trains - and, the first person in whose body an artificial heart was placed. He was chosen, the doctors said, because of his 'attitude to life'. Give up hope, and you may die - literally! I once pastored the downtown Central Baptist church in Sydney, Australia. Around that city-area, many men (and some women) slept in parks, in drains, in railway tunnels, or in abandoned buildings. They were called 'no-hopers'...

What oxygen is for the lungs, such is hope for the meaning - and existence - of human life.

A visitor to Chartwell, Winston Churchill's old home in Kent, asked the guide (who was an old friend of the family's), 'Did Winston Churchill ever lose hope?' 'No,' she replied, 'hope was built into him. He never expected anything but victory.' Nor can the Christian!

The absence of a living hope is the essence of despair. The person who's simply 'given up' believes there's no ray of hope anywhere. All the possibilities have been exhausted. That's a false assumption for a believer in the living God. He's 'the God who is there', who will never leave us or forsake us, in whose vocabulary the word 'hopeless' cannot exist! He's the 'God whose other name is surprise', and he's the God of the Easter-event...

So hope is more than optimism. The New Testament talks about the 'patience of hope'. Christian hope is deep; mere optimism may be shallow. Optimism may be a good natural trait - and have no religious connections at all. 'Hope', says John Macquarrie in his little book The Humility of God, 'is humble, trustful, vulnerable. Optimism is arrogant, brash, complacent... Our hope is not that in spite of everything we do, all will turn out for the best. Our hope is rather that God is with us and ahead of us, opening a way in which we can responsibly follow.'

Hope is not conditional upon trouble being removed. Hope means God is with us in trouble and in triumph. Resurrection hope means God is with us in life and death. Hope means the God who was with his people in the past will be with them always.

Once when Martin Luther was feeling depressed, his wife asked if he had heard God had died. Luther replied angrily that she was blaspheming. She retorted that if God had indeed not died what right had he to be despondent and without hope?

Hope, says Martin Buber, is 'imagining the real'. It is not fantasy or wishful thinking - like Mr. Micawber's 'hoping that something will turn up'. It's not 'she'll be right mate'! Hope deals with imagining possibilities, then having the faith to work hard to see those possibilities realized.

That is why, at funeral services, you hear the biblical affirmation of 'a sure and certain hope'. Even in death our hope rests on God, not on human philosophy, or luck, or fate. It is a dynamic, transforming quality, not only 'hoping to see my Pilot face to face, when I have crossed the bar' (Tennyson), but providing deep meaning to life's struggles before that time. Christian hope says 'History is His story'. God's divine purposes for the world and its inhabitants can't be thwarted by the evils humans perpetrate. The hope for our sick, tired world is the Kingdom of God, for which we wait, but which we also experience now. Hope assures us that there is a 'joy seeking us through pain'. It's not based on a kind of utopia-idea, but rather issues in active, productive obedience.

The Power that can raise the dead can also conquer evil. This sort of hope is the mainspring of our confidence in God, especially when the traumas and troubles of life come in upon us.

Have you ever heard the little poem by Victor Hugo?

Let us learn like a bird for a moment to take Sweet rest on a branch that is ready to break; She feels the branch tremble, yet gaily she sings. What is with her? She has wings, she has wings.

Hope provides the Christian with wings.

You see, life is difficult. Morning to evening, each day is a problem-solving period. No one's life is problem-free. No, life is problem-solving, and problem-solving is life. Someone has said that 'our human choice is never between pain and no pain, but rather between the pain of loving and the pain of not loving.' To be human is to have problems. But to be Christian is to have problems - and hope.

Life, wrote Baudelaire, is a hospital in which patients believe they will recover if they are moved to another bed.

That's not the Christian life. Hope, for the Christian, is not just 'the icing on the cake'. It is the cake! It helps him or her 'face forward'. (Have you heard about the poor man in Denver who was stricken with a strange mental illness that forced him to walk backwards all the time?' Predictably, his form of hysteria ended him up in hospital). We aren't going backwards, or living life looking over our shoulders. We can face the future - and the present - with confidence, with hope.

Can human beings really live in the reality of this sort of hope when the going's really tough?

'In February 1945,' says one observer, 'I was one of hundreds of British and American POWs thrust into Stalag 3A at Luckenwalde, just outside Berlin. Unlike us, who rated some protection under the Geneva Convention, the Russians were helpless. Underfed, denied medical attention and forced to do hard labour, their death rate was staggering. Although we had no communication with their compound, each morning we watched in fascinated horror while a truck collected its daily quota of corpses.

'The days of tribulation ended on April 22, 1945, when we were all liberated by the Ukrainian army. Within hours, the Russian barracks in Stalag 3A were emptied; hundreds went off to fight again, while those too sick to volunteer remained behind. We then entered the Russian compound. It was a scene of indescribable horror. But in the heart of a barracks block they had wrought a miracle - they had built a church.

'We stood breathless. A great golden crucifix flashed from the altar, its radiance reflected in prismed chandeliers hung the length of the nave. The windows were a splendour of stained glass, and along the walls were the Stations of the Cross, fashioned in coloured mosaic. It seemed incongruous. How could starving, dying men have created so magnificent a place of worship? Then we looked closer and all was explained. The golden crucifix was two pieces of slim timber, painstakingly sheathed in gold-foil paper salvaged from the refuse dump. The chandeliers were creations of thousands of tiny slips of cardboard, each covered with silver paper and suspended by almost invisible threads. The stations of the cross were crafted not from Florentine porcelain tile but from bits of coloured paper snipped from magazines rescued from rubbish bins.

In the constant presence of death, and from scraps gleaned from the dump, they had built a church. God had illumined it with a divine authenticity.'

In Calcutta, Mother Teresa cares for the dying in a building called 'The House of the Living'. On a visit to Australia she said, 'I picked up a man dying in an open drain. He said, "I have lived like an animal all my life but now I will die like an angel".' That's hope too.


Hope is not a kind of 'everything will be all right' wishful thinking - considering something to be so because we desire it to be so. It's not a holiday-maker's 'It should be fine tomorrow' nor the politician's 'the economy should pick up by the middle of next year'! Those sorts of statements may or may not be based on demonstrable grounds for hope, but merely on the desire that things should turn out that way.

Perhaps, however, wishful thinking is better than not thinking at all. A lonely refugee child, told that his parents were dead, still believed they were alive and went on searching for them. As it happened, he eventually found them. His 'wishful thinking' wasn't based on anything concrete, but it drove him on.

Christian hope is not an 'airy fairy' thing, building castles in the air. It's not merely 'such stuff as dreams are made of'.

No, our hope is certain because 'we can trust God to keep his promise' (Hebrews 10:23). It is based on the character - the trustworthiness - of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is rooted in our understanding of who God is, and how in history he has proved himself utterly reliable. It is based on fact, not fantasy.

F.W. Boreham in one of his essays tells of his boyhood expectation of finding a pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. 'I never met another boy,' he wrote, who actually found a pot of gold, but what had that to do with it? Such an irrelevant circumstance could not keep me and my brothers from setting out in quest of that magic spot on which the many-tinted pillars rested... What castles in the air we erected as we made our way to the rainbow's foot.'

Many people have searched vainly for El Dorados, or Loch Ness monsters, or what-have-you, and their 'hope' has been baseless. Ours is grounded on the trustworthy promise of a trustworthy God.

Rowland Croucher, from an unpublished sermon on 'Hope' in 1 Peter.

This is why I say the word 'humility' is in order when it comes to our kind of creature projecting hopes onto the future. We simply do not know enough about 'the length and breadth and height and depth' of reality to be dogmatic about what must and must not be. What may seem light to me from where I sit could turn out to be darkness, and what seems dark may well turn out to be unimaginable good. Thus, not only because of what God is - mystery of mysteries - but also because of what we are - creatures who know in part and prophesy in part, who see through a glass darkly - the stance of balancing genuine confidence with radical openness and flexibility is alone the authentic stance of hope...

It is precisely in this dialectic of knowing and yet not knowing that I find the authentic image of hope, and how hard it is to maintain this delicate balance of confidence and flexibility and not tip over completely to one side or the other. Abraham was called on to believe that God would give him a larger future than either past or present while not being sure at all exactly how this would come to pass, and that remains to this day the challenge of authentic hoping: how to be confident without getting too specific in our expectation, and thus altogether miss or be dissatisfied with the gift of the future when it arrives.

John R Claypool, Learning to Hope, unpublished sermon preached at Northminster Baptist Church, July 23, 1978.

Therefore, it is time to move from Nazareth to Capernaum, from the place of despair to the place of hope. Stop setting limits on what can and cannot be. Behold our God! He can make the things that are out of the things that are not. He can make dead things come to life again. Neither empty wombs nor empty tombs are too much for him; which means neither are your problems, whatever they may be. Therefore, lift up your hearts. Be not afraid. He goes before us into Galilee and the future. What are we waiting for? Let us go out in hope.

John R Claypool, Easter and Despair, unpublished sermon, Broadway Baptist Church, Fort Worth, Texas, March 30, 1975.

Our hope lies not in the man we put on the moon, but in the Man we put on the Cross.

Don Basham, ACTS International Encounter, April, 1989, Vol 20, No 4, p.4.

God has not placed despair in our hearts - he has placed hope in us. Even though we see everything around us falling apart, our hope is not built upon what we see, but rather upon what God has hidden deep in our hearts - and that is hope. It is that hope that causes us to be excited and enthusiastic in a very despairing age. We are not linked to despair. We are linked to what the Scriptures call 'the God of all hope' (Romans 15:13)...

The Bible is a book of hope. Jesus Christ came to earth to be King. He went to the cross, not in defeat, but in victory. He will not go out of history defeated, nor will his people. He arose from the grave in triumph, and the hope of the Church must be more than that of being rescued to Heaven. God's people are called to victory...

God wants a people who will overflow in expectancy of what God is going to do, but that will only happen through the power of 'the Holy Spirit who was given to us' (Romans 5:5). We may have thought the power of the Holy Spirit was only for miracles and supernatural signs and wonders. But I believe that one of the greatest signs of the Holy Spirit in this despairing generation is the man or woman overflowing in hope.

We must not stop where we are and go no farther. We must not be contained. We must move from this place on into his declaration of who we are and what he wants us to be. My prayer for all of us is this: May the God of all hope grant us joy and peace as we fully trust in him, and may we overflow in hope through the power of the Holy Spirit until we see him - the hope of glory.

Bruce Longstreth, A hope that won't give up

There have been great and glorious days of the gospel in this land; but they have been small in comparison of what shall be.

James Renwick, martyred Feb 17, 1688. A Choice collection of Prefaces, Lectures and Sermons 1777, p. 279.

Without the event of the third day, hope would have no grounds for understanding Good Friday as `good' or Holy Saturday as `holy'. Jesus would have been one more good man, swallowed up in defeat and death. But because of what we have come to call `the resurrection', Christian hope understands the death of Jesus as the manifestation of God's transforming love touching our existence at its most hopeless point. Such hope understands his being dead as the power of that compassionate love to penetrate the depths of human defeat and isolation in order to engender a new creation.

Tony Kelly, Touching the Infinite, Blackburn: Collins Dove, 1991, p.105.

If we take at all seriously the vision of life given to us in the Bible, we have to look to the future not only in openness but in hopefulness as well. Why do I say this? Because the God disclosed in the Bible is both the Source and the Fulfiller of all creation. He did not begin this world carelessly or irresponsibly. He is not the kind of God to start something and then lose interest in it or to find he is incapable of completing it. NO, he is the one who is both willing and able to finish the good project he began back at the beginning. This is what the flow of history is all about - a movement from incompleteness toward fulfilment.

John Claypool, The Light Within You, Texas: Word, 1983, p.89.

I don't know Who - or what - put the question. I don't know when it was put. I don't remember answering. But, at some moment, I did say Yes to Someone - or Something - and from that hour I was certain that existence and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, Tr. W H Auden and Leif Sjoberg, London: Faber and Faber, 1964, p.169.


Help me in my unbelief, O God, and give me gifts of patience and hope. Make me more constant in my love for you and my trust in you. In loving let me believe and in believing let me love; and in loving and in believing let me hope for a more perfect love and a more unwavering faith, through Jesus Christ my Lord...

O God, I hope, each day, for the lessening of sin's hold upon my will; for my growth in grace and in true holiness; for a more perfect holiness, and when this earthly life is through, for an experience of knowing even as also I am known.

And until I experience a triumphant welcome on the other side, thank you for your comfort and protection in all the days of my life so far. Your blessings outnumber the leaves of autumn or the stars in the sky. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whose loving kindness we have been born anew; born to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead; born to an inheritance which will never perish or fade away, kept for us in heaven. Amen.

.....

A Benediction. May the eternal God, who has been the hope and joy of many generations, and who in all ages has invited men and women to seek him and in seeking to find him, grant you a clearer vision of his truth, a greater faith in his power, and a more confident assurance of his love.

May he who out of defeat brings new hope and new alternatives, continually bring you new life. For his greater glory. Amen.



Bible Study: Using 1 Peter 1:1-9 as your text, develop a sermon/study on the subject of hope. Here are some suggested headings: biblical hope is certain, living, a resurrection hope, and it's practical. Study the background of this epistle: to whom was the author writing about hope? What might have been their circumstances? How can we be encouraged to 'live in hope'?

Rowland Croucher