THE CALLING OF HOPE

We have a God who is familiar with darkness. Imagine, before the divine fiat, “Let there be light,” God was in the darkness of what was formless and empty. Perhaps the Bible starts off this way because God wants His people to know that He is no stranger to the darkness found in this world. He wants us to know that He speaks into that darkness to create light and life. What a profound hope Genesis 1 would have been for God’s people in exile–to consider that their God is no stranger to darkness and is able to create beauty and wonder out of it.

The journey of hope begins with the experience of darkness that we all face living in a broken world and the recognition that things are not the way they are supposed to be. What we do next is critical because it reflects whose voice we believe.

Hope is a calling as much as our work is a calling. But for many of us, this active sense of hope is a foreign concept. In fact, at best, hope operates more like wishful thinking than an act of trust and obedience. From a biblical perspective, hope arises from hearing the substance and tone of God's voice exhorting us to listen to Him more than we listen to others.

Hear how Paul describes the gospel, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God's glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6). Jesus is our hope because once again we encounter a God who enters into darkness–the inimitable darkness of drinking the cup of the Father’s wrath and the seeming finality of a sealed tomb. God not only understands our darkness but definitively speaks light into it (cf John 1:4). We need to hear this calling of hope especially in this time when our world so desperately longs for it. With all this in mind, we have developed this two-week journey with three goals in view: 

1. to create intentional intrusions in our day that open up space for us to listen to the most important voice in our lives,

2. to consider how the Bible reveals the nature of our hope and

3. to actively engage this hope in our day-to-day lives.

A key framework for this journey is Hearing-Believing-Responding. Simply put, what we hear shapes what we believe which in turn affects our responses to life situations. The most important voice in our lives is God’s and each week is about learning to discern His voice above all the others that are constantly filling our ears.