Hope, the Forgotten Virtue

                It is easy to engage sincere Christians in conversations about either love or faith, two of the three primary virtues of the saints.  But when the conversation turns to hope, suddenly, there isn’t that much to say.  Christians know about their eternal estate, at least to some degree, though many do not know much more than that they are going to heaven when they die.  The real hopes of most Christians, and all unbelievers, are wrapped up in the things of this world, the things of the flesh.  We do not like to admit that it is so, but it is so nevertheless.  The more one is excited and hopeful about earthly things, the more often he is called an “eternal optimist.”  He is not an eternal optimist, however; he is a temporal optimist.  A person whose hope is not earthly, but heavenly; now this man’s hope is eternal, and he is not optimistic, but certain.  We have no certainty of tomorrow, but we have certainty concerning eternity.

                Faith is the substance of things hoped for.  Unless our hope is in God, we have no hope in temporal things.  Paul said, “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Cor 15:19).  And if our hope truly is in God, then temporal things bear small weight against that which is our real and only eternal hope.  For we know that all things work together for our good; so that, no matter our temporal circumstance, God is directing our paths, and by faith we take a longer view of things, not caring whether God answers our prayers now or later, or at all, as long as He is glorified and we are blessed.  We might have preferences, and might desire to see those preferences coordinated with the will of God so that we are blessed in them, but in our prayers we recognize that our blessing might be greater without those preferences, and we are satisfied to be patient.  Without an eternal hope, all our hopes must be temporal, ending at a hole in the ground, which is no hope at all.  But as we begin to meditate on our heavenly hope, to explore what God has revealed of it, and come to understand the reality of it, we see how futile everything temporal really is, and how great our eternal hope becomes.  Eternal hope leads to patience, whereas temporal hopes lead to impatience and frustration.  We do not like to wait for the material things that we want, but most are more than content to wait for their eternal hope, seeking to prolong this temporal life as long as possible.  A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, or so they presume.

                Most of us will say that we want God’s will to be done in this situation or that.  Mostly, we do not want God’s will at all; we want our will to be God’s will so that we can have what we want.  When we really seek God’s will for our lives, the prize we seek is not temporal.  It is not earthly.  It is not material.  When we seek God’s will for our lives, we must turn to spiritual matters, things of ministry and service to both man and God.  There is no greater gift that you can give to a man than an understanding of sin and salvation.  And there is no greater glory that you can give to God than to tell a lost soul about His mercy and His grace.  Neither is there any greater service that saved man can offer to God than the ministry of the word of reconciliation, seeing that is our reason for being here (2 Cor 5:18-21).  That is the bottom line of our faith, and if our real aim is fruitfulness, then we can ask with confidence and certainty that God will make us fruitful.  For that is clearly His will for us.  If our minds are on things above, and not on things on the earth, we will seek what is God’s and not that which will make us more comfortable or give us greater standing among our peers; or bring any sort of glory to us, but to God.

                Many Christians want to have that strength of faith that allows them to serve God in fruitful profusion, but do not have it.  We want it because we know that we’re supposed to want it, but most Christians do not know how to have that kind of strength of faith.  It is because their hope is wrongly placed.  It is easy to be a full time minister of the Gospel, but it is far more difficult to be a working man, doing the nine-to-five.  This, because you work to earn money.  The more money we make, the more we find that we need to make.  No matter how high our standard of living becomes, there is always a level above.  No matter our intellectual achievements, there is always someone more honored.  No matter how great our skill, there is always another temporal goal to shoot for.  Even ministers, for the most part, want that next larger church, that next income level, a growing congregation; the last, because it signifies what a grand job they are doing.  And wasn’t Lucifer’s aim to place his own throne above God’s? (see Isa 12:12-15).

                We talk about the things that we hope for, because what is hoped for is what is in our hearts.  We all hope for the same things—advancement in whatever our pursuit may be.  One may be a plumber, seeking the largest business in the state.  Another may be a poet, with vague dreams of major prizes and notice.  We all have a temporal image that we try to uphold, and we either kid ourselves and others into buying that image as the real us, or we spend our entire lives in an increasingly desperate search for a way to hide the fact that we do not live up to our own images of ourselves.  Nobody wants to look back over his temporal life and realize that he served himself all his life, and served neither man nor God.  The understanding at last that all his labors will go to another because his hopes were temporal is thunderous.  If we would serve ourselves, truly, we must serve God.  We do not work for retirement.  We have no retirement but death.  And then, shortly, shall our real work begin.  If we seek earthly retirement as our goal, we seek only the grave.  If we make heavenly treasure our prize, laying up today so that we shall have our eternal inheritance, then do we with hope and certainty serve God.  This is how He made us when we were born again, and this is the system of service that He has ordained, and our eternal reward is to be our greatest motivation, not because we understand its value in any real terms, but because the great Apostle Paul declared that it was his goal, and ought to be our own (Phil 3:7-8, 13-19; 2 Cor 5:18-21)

                No virtue is easy.  Is faith easy?  When your house is burning to the ground, or your first-born lies dying in your arms, is there faith?  There can be, but only if there is also hope.  There is no faith without hope, for faith is the substance of things hoped for.  If hope has no substance, then faith has no value.  But hope that is placed in temporal things is not hope at all, but fear that death must come.  It is a mere avoidance of the inescapable fact of death; an erecting in the mind of a barrier of “things” so that we are too busy to contemplate death, or our own eternal estate.  Thus, there is no faith in any hope for temporal things, and no eternal hope without faith.  The two must go hand in hand.

                Love is not easy.  When someone cheats you out of your life’s savings, or takes your most precious possession, or spreads lies that hurt you terribly, or injures you physically beyond full recovery, it is not easy to love, is it?  But it is.  Again, it is tied to hope.  If our hopes are temporal, we begrudge him who cheats us of our fortune, or who steals that which we value highly, or who slanders us, for we are damaged in some way, and we find our estate less by that much.  We resent it.  Unless, of course, our hope is not temporal, but eternal.  If we understand that we do not deserve any treasure at all, but condemnation, and yet we have received mercy, we find that we can be merciful. 

                Now, mercy itself is not love.  We can agree to cancel any punishment without loving the person to whom we are merciful.  Love is not something that happens to a person, but it is a decision that a person makes:  “I am going to love this individual, doing everything for him that love demands, beginning with prayer for his well-being and spiritual growth, just as I pray for myself.”  When we make this a practice, then we begin to love that individual.  But it does not happen without the hope of eternal glory.  If we can love our enemies, as we are instructed to do, then it must be on account of the hope that is in us.  Temporally, we have no reason at all to love someone who harms us intentionally, and every reason to resent him and seek ill for him.  If we hope to best him in some temporal endeavor, it is still temporal, and offers no hope.  And if we do then best him in some business venture or otherwise, the joy does not kill the resentment, but turns it into contempt.  But if our hope is in God, and if we serve Him in order to lay up treasure in heaven, then we have hope indeed, and we can see clearly that it is easier and more blessed to love and minister to, or, for that person, trusting God to make us stand as He glorifies Himself and not us, and for our good.

                Every Christian hope concerns things eternal.  We have said and shown it in many ways.  Is it wrong to seek a raise in pay?  No.  As ambassadors from heaven to earth, our task is to incorporate ourselves into this society, in whatever nation we dwell, no matter our physical or social or economic circumstances, to participate in their customs, but we are to represent our homeland’s interests faithfully.  We are to minister the word of reconciliation.  For there is no greater hope that you can give a man than to introduce him to the Giver of eternal life.  What hope there is in the breast of the sinner who has seen God’s grace for the first time!  All his life, laboring under a weight of sin, hopeless in his own heart concerning heaven; then, to see God’s grace shine through the darkness and pierce even to the division of bone and marrow.  What joy, that hope!  He may have spent his entire life hoping for earthly things, not knowing the joy there is in Christ, but from then on he has an eternal hope that can lift him above the mire of earthly desires and make him fruitful.  Oh, how that one appreciates the wisdom and the great glory of God.  If we are going to hope for anything at all, saints of God, let us hope that God will make us fruitful, that the harvest will be bountiful; we shall all rejoice at the judgment seat of Christ. 

                “Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself as He is pure” (1 Jn 3:3).  It is easy enough to read, but what does he mean by “purifies himself”?    We are stained by sin.  All that is in the world is either the lust of the flesh or the lust of the eyes or the pride of life.  Everything (1 Jn 2:15-17).  We become so diverted by the acquisition of temporal things and by our standing in our communities and among our circles of friends, that we run completely out of time to serve God.  “I mean, we gotta rest sometime, don’t we?” 

                The point is, when John was writing about purifying ourselves, he was not talking about our becoming any more morally superior.  We can’t do that.  We are sinners.  No, what John was talking about was purifying ourselves from the world.  We are in the world, be we do not need to get any of it on us.  We are to be holy; not good, but separated from the world by both the Word of God and by our faith.  Our citizenship is in heaven, and we have a street address in heaven already.  We are to conduct ourselves as ambassadors.  We are to live exemplary lives, but we do not, no matter how hard we try.  But it matters to us that we try, our many failures notwithstanding.  But that is not purification.  That is the obligation that accords with love.  An exemplary life is not a perfect life, but a life of faith that is an example to others.  If our hope really is eternal, and if we are concerned about our estates in heaven, then such matters as thievery and general knavery will not be of much concern to us, for we will be seeking the good of those to whom we minister, not their harm.  But it does not and cannot happen apart from hope.  Everything in the Christian experience revolves around hope, and yet we are barely conscious of it. 

                The drunk sitting in the darkest corner of the bar has no hope, else he would not be attempting to escape an uncomfortable reality.  If his image of himself was that of a superstar in some sports or entertainment arena, he would be plying his skills with confidence.  Suave.  Sophisticated.  Debonair.  He would not be hiding from the world in a dark corner.  He may say that he hopes this or hopes that, but he has in himself the knowledge that his hopes are empty.  Everyone says that they have hope. Yet, every suicide is the fruit of an overwhelming depth of hopelessness.  No one ever really has any hope at all, except Christians.  And our hope is so far above any earthly hope as to be incomparable.  Still we pay it no mind.  You may certainly believe that those who are watching the curtains of their lives slowly close are thinking about it, among both the saved and the unsaved.  What service shall they offer now that their lives are at an end?  But the Christian who is aware of his hope will spend his days in service of some sort to God.  He will build upon that estate, knowing that that which is temporary cannot take precedence over that which is eternal.  As that one’s death nears, he will embrace it as the entrance at last into his Father’s house.  The lost die afraid; the saved die with hope.  What a vast gulf lies between.  The issue is not how good we have been, but how useful, how profitable to God.  The commodity in which we deal is souls, and the currency is grace.  Those who lead many to righteousness will shine like the stars forever (Dan 12:3b).

  To be fair, most Christians do not speak much of any eternal hope because they are uneducated concerning it.  Preachers do not expound much on heaven or on our eternal estate, because many of them do not know much about it either.  But much can be deduced from what we are told.  Just as Jesus was able to appear and disappear, to lift Himself from the ground, to make Himself either recognizable or unrecognizable to mortal men; just as He was able to pass through walls and closed doors, so shall we be able to do those things in our translated bodies.  John said, “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (1 Jn 3:2-3).

        Right now, in our mortal bodies, we cannot see Jesus as He is.  His glory would vaporize us immediately and completely.  Today, this is what Jesus looks like:  “...in the middle of the lampstands I saw one like the Son of Man, clothed in a robe reaching to his feet, and girded across His chest with a golden sash.  His head and His hair were white like white wool, like snow; and His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze, when it has been made to glow in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound of many waters.  In His right hand He held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and His face was like the sun shining in its strength” (Rev 1:12-16).  John saw him with his own eyes, and wrote down the description for our edification.  Meditate for a moment on what it means when John says that Jesus’ face is like the sun shining in its strength.  How exceedingly hot must the temperature of His glory be.  Not only can He stand in the presence of His own fiery glory, but it comes from within Him.  His feet, not like polished bronze, but like bronze that has been placed in a furnace, and is glowing brightly.  We do not await the arrival of the Lamb of God, but our hope is the arrival of the roaring Lion of the tribe of Judah.

         When we see “pictures” of Jesus, He always looks like an ordinary man.  He did look like that, and we shall also.  But He does not look like that today.  In that day, when we shall be participants in our own blessed hope, we shall be like He was when He came from the grave.  In our eternal bodies we will be able to withstand the great glory of His presence.  We shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is, not as He was.  Our eternal bodies will be made of eternal flesh, unaffected by the brightness of His glory.  We will appear as He did when He emerged from the tomb, and we will be like He was.  Otherwise, we could not see Him as He is.

            Our Lord entered the tomb in mortal flesh, being completely dead.  He emerged in eternal flesh, able to do those things spoken of above.  When our flesh has been redeemed, we shall be able to do them ourselves, for we shall be like Him.  He lifted Himself up from the earth, He flew.  Quite literally, and without wings.  What kind of things can possibly give us greater hope than to be able to withstand the brilliant glory of our God, as we stand, rich in heavenly treasures, whatever form they may take, and to hear Him say in a loving voice, “Well done, faithful servant!”?  What more can we hope than to be able to feel the touch of His hand and to rejoice to see Him ascend the steps to the throne; or to take our place in His household, serving Him as kings and princes and governors and mayors and other governmental officials as we reign over the earth with Him?  If these are real, what value is there in temporal trash?  Why does our physical or social or economic status matter even a little?  We are to set our minds on things above, not on things on the earth (Col 3:2).  It is entirely impossible to do that to even the tiniest degree without hope.  Conversely, the greater our eternal hope, the greater will be our faith and our love, and the more fruit we shall bear.

           This article is entitled, “Hope, the Forgotten Virtue.”   But hope is not so much forgotten as it is unknown.  One of the greatest accomplishments of Satan during this Church Age has been to suppress knowledge of the virtue that alone gives us the motivation to serve.  Faith is the stuff of which our hope is constructed  But it is the thing hoped for that is the object; not the faith or the hope, but the thing itself.  Without hope, there is no need for faith, for,  “What does it matter if there is no eternal estate”?  There is only the yawning grave, and there is no hope in it.  Satan does not seek so much to harm the saints physically, but if he can diminish our hope by focusing our attention on spiritually meaningless temporal issues, ignoring our eternal estate, then he has already successfully diverted us from our single earthly mission, the harvest of those souls who are wandering about in darkness, hopelessly plodding toward the ends of their lives, in need of just a little light.  Love might motivate us to present the Gospel to them, but hope that is real will allow us to present that same Gospel with an enthusiasm and certainty and a vivid reality that will bring hope to those who listen to our message.  “Now faith, hope, love, abide these three…” (1 Cor 13:13).  Love is the greatest of the three, but let us not forget that lone middle virtue, hope!