This morning my Bible reading calendar led me to the first chapter of Colossians and Paul’s words in Colossians 1:5, jumped out at me,

“. . . the faith and love that spring from the hope . . .”

Wow, faith and love spring from hope?! That is a big deal.

Faith is the way that we engage with the grace of God in our lives (Eph. 2:8). Faith is what the ancients were commended for (Heb. 11:2). Faith is what we live by as God followers. 

And love . . . well, love is the apex of it all.  “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love is the thing that endures beyond all else, “the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13). 

But where do faith and love come from?  They spring from hope!

This thought reminded me of the first sentence in John Eldredge’s new book,   All Things New: Heaven, Earth, and the Restoration of Everything You Love , where he says,

“We could sure use some hope right now.” 

Yes, we sure could. The fake news pales in comparison to the pain and dismay of the real news that surrounds us and encroaches upon our real lives.

The enemy’s strategy to defeat us is to leave us bereft of faith and unaware of love. The way this is done is by occluding and stealing our hope—imprisoning us in hopelessness.

Where is the hope?

Hope resides in nothing other than the Lord Jesus Christ and in his promises. The pain, sadness, and death all around us are not the end of the story, for we are in the midst of God’s larger story of redemption. As we move through the pages of our lives we might come to the end of a chapter, a difficult chapter, and feel hopeless, but we must remember that it is not the end of the book.

God entered the story of our lives and responded to our cries for hope with the cross of Christ and the empty tomb. God’s story includes the restoration of all things—where the things that are worn and tattered, and seemingly destroyed, are made new.

God has the final word and that word is, “Behold, I am making all things new.” (Rev. 21:5) 

I have this quote written in my Bible next to Col. 1:5,

Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future;

faith is the courage to dance to it today. –Peter Kuzmic

I love the idea of dancing, with courage, even in the minefields of today.

May we be captives of hope.