the Hope for a hopeless world

Do you feel like that sunflower sometimes? The last petal holding on beyond anything to hope for. Living in this world can be extremely draining on one’s hope if it is not planted in the right place and not cultivated correctly.  Romans 5:2-5 tells us about how to grow our faith. Let’s take a close look at verses 2 and 5.

Our hope is planted in the glory of God. So what is the glory of God? In Colossians 1:27, we see what the glory of God is,

To them God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Christ Jesus, living in us is the hope of glory.  John Piper has defined this the best in his interview “What Is God’s Glory?”

Now when Isaiah 6:3 says that angels are crying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty, the next thing they say is this: The whole earth is full of his…and you might have expected him to say holiness. And he doesn’t say holiness. He says glory.

Intrinsically holy, intrinsically holy, intrinsically holy and the whole earth is full of his glory from which I stab at a definition by saying the glory of God is the manifest beauty of his holiness. It is the going public of his holiness. It is the way he puts his holiness on display for people to apprehend. So the glory of God is the holiness of God made manifest.

The perfect example of God’s holiness was Jesus. Yet all around us, we see the holiness of God. From the mountains to the oceans, from the ants to the elephant, from the mustard seed to the giant redwood all show God’s holiness. Jesus was there when everything was created. He created us to and when we come to the saving faith in His grace that is when we find hope in His glory. There is no shame in this hope because it is the love of God which fills us through the Holy Spirit.

So how does our hope grow? It comes through trials. Let’s look at the verses 3 and 4, now.

 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,

Here we see the progression of how hope grows. We rejoice in our sufferings because they create endurance, in turn, endurance creates character which creates hope. Our hope grows when we are in trials. They make us hold on tighter to our hope in Jesus that He will get us through.