“Hope” looks to the future, however, it is also a present experience. It has real benefits for life now. Viktor Frankl was psychotherapist who survived the horrors of Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. From his observations of fellow prisoners, he concluded that when facing extreme circumstances, people are forced to choose between despair and hope and that this is literally a life-or-death decision…

The bible says of God, “In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). The analogy of birth is significant. When a person is born, they move out of one world and into another. They move out of the confined space and darkness of the womb and into the vastness of the world that we see around us, at which point all sorts of possibilities open up. Our Christian hope is similar…

I read an article in Forbes magazine with the title, “Dress for the job you want, not for the job you have.” The article went on, “if you dress more like the peer group you aspire to, and less like the one you are in, you are sending a powerful signal that you belong in that group.” To bring that back to our reflections on the nature of hope, what we aspire to be or do in the future, our hope, expresses itself in the way we conduct ourselves in the present. We live now in the light of our future.

I recently wrote about living in the hope of gaining the “one thing” (Psalm 27:4) that matters. I suggested that the hope of living in the presence of Jesus for eternity stands above everything else. Alongside that, everything else pales into insignificance. Today I’d like to suggest that the best kind of hope is a hope that also empowers us to achieve it.

There was man in the bible named David. He faced many of the same challenges as national leaders today. His country was facing an external military threat. Closer to home, his political opponents were “spouting malicious accusations” (Psalm 27:12) and finding “false witnesses” to tell outright lies. These were spreading, even without the help of social media. Some things never change.