Progress and Hope
Hope is essential if we are to see progress in our personal lives, in our community and society. Hope can create the momentum needed to progress. On the other hand the lack of hope stripes away that potential.
Dr. Victor Frankl was in a Jewish death camp during World War 2 He survived and out of his experiences wrote “Mans search for meaning.” Frankl observed the following about hope: The prisoner who had lost faith in the future – his future – was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment – not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends.
Usually it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the parade grounds. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there, hardly moving.
If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick-bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him any more.
Frankl went on to say that when all the familiar goals in life are snatched away what alone remains is the last of Human freedoms – the ability to chose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.”
This is so true,
Hope is a choice but when you and I are feeling hopeless it is really hard to choose hope. How do we journey from hopelessness to hope?
One of the ironies of life is that Hope often grows out of the challenges of hopelessness. Christ helps us both in choosing to hope and in the growing of that hope. We have been following the exodus story of the Hebrew people found in the Old Testament. They were given the choice to place their hope in God. They chose to not place their hope in God. As a result they spent a generation in the desert learning among other things – to hope.
Finally they were at the edge of Canaan ready to enter and God gives them this reminder:
Deuteronomy 7:7 “The LORD did not set his heart on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other nations, for you were the smallest of all nations! 8 Rather, it was simply that the LORD loves you, and he was keeping the oath he had sworn to your ancestors. That is why the LORD rescued you with such a strong hand from your slavery and from the oppressive hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.
8: 2 Remember how the LORD your God led you through the wilderness for these forty years, humbling you and testing you to prove your character, and to find out whether or not you would obey his commands. 3 Yes, he humbled you by letting you go hungry and then feeding you with manna, a food previously unknown to you and your ancestors. He did it to teach you that people do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.
4 For all these forty years your clothes didn’t wear out, and your feet didn’t blister or swell. 5 Think about it: Just as a parent disciplines a child, the LORD your God disciplines you for your own good.
God chooses us and encourages us in our hope, not based on our success or our achievements. He chooses us and encourages us because he loves us. It is one of the foolish things of the gospel. We tend to believe that our success is a measure of God’s favour in our lives – may be, but not necessarily. The constant theme in Scripture is the hope that Christ offers the poor and the persecuted. If it isn’t our success and our achievements that Christ uses to build hope in us and help us progress what is it? The Children of Israel spend a generation in the desert acquiring the qualities of humility, dependence, and obedience, towards God. It may be when you are feeling most hopeless God is in fact intimately involved in your life.
God could be allowing you to wander in the desert in order to overcome your past, to mature you and to put your hope in him.
Dr. Kent Anderson a former professor of mine wrote:
Life in the Spirit is harder than we think it ought to be. The idea of a constant progress toward “the victorious Christian life” frustrates believers whose actual lives seem more checkered. The common experience of believers is that spiritual life is an ongoing struggle – three steps forward, and two steps back. This is disappointing to those who were expecting something more evidently successful.
“It is easier to be spiritual in the garden than in the desert. It is hard to maintain hope when God goes into hiding. Mature disciples will not despise the desert for it is in these arid times that faith turns into faithfulness. It is in the desert that we get to know God.
It is often in the most hopeless situations that we progress as followers of Christ.
Sometimes our hopeless situation isn’t even our doing. That doesn’t change God’s love for us nor his desire to build hope in our lives.
When we were working in Africa Cheryl had the opportunity to visit widows with women from our congregation.
Matilda, one of the widows cared for five of her own children as well as some from the neighbourhood. She was pregnant with her last when her husband was murdered while she watched. Homeless and deeply traumatized Matilda rarely slept for the next three months.
She became a Christian at that point and had slept well since. A fellow Christian gave her the house she lived in. Still, her home was only a 10×10 foot shack with a leaky roof.
With no income she lived each day not knowing how she would feed the children. Yet each day she did. What was most remarkable about Matilda is the peace with which she lived.
There was the grandmother, also a widow who suffered from aids and was recovering from malaria. Though she was weak from lack of food she grasped Cheryl, hugging her tightly, her damp face marking Cheryl’s blouse.
It is natural, perhaps instinctive to pull away and to fret about what was living in the sweaty smear. My wife did not pull away, instead she struggled to grasp how this woman could find significance and hope for the next hour let alone the next morning.
This widowed grandmother suffering from Aids and Malaria found meaning in Christ, with whom she had relationship.
Hpe matures in our choice, in our willingness to obey and trust God.
Our hope in the midst of hopelessness empowers and encourages not only us but also those around us
God makes this commitment to the Hebrew nation as they prepare to step forward in hope:
Joshua 1: 5 No one will be able to stand against you as long as you live. For I will be with you as I was with Moses. I will not fail you or abandon you. 6 “Be strong and courageous, for you are the one who will lead these people to possess all the land I swore to their ancestors I would give them. 7 Be strong and very courageous. Be careful to obey all the instructions Moses gave you. Do not deviate from them, turning either to the right or to the left. Then you will be successful in everything you do.
They are facing exactly the same obstacle as their forefathers; the difference is that they now place their hope in God.
People of hope stand out.
It is one of the defining characteristics of Christ Followers.
Since 1989, Aung San Suu Kyi of Burma and winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize has lived most of her time under house arrest. This is what she says, about hope: “I think by now I have made it clear that I am not very happy with the word hope. I don’t believe in people just hoping. We work for what we want. I always say that one has no right to hope without endeavour”
The situations we read about, hear about and talk about often seem beyond remedy. We can provide hope. We can be hope to the hopeless.
Jeremiah 29:1 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
What are the things that create a sense of hopelessness in our lives?
Are these related to a lack of humility, dependence on Christ, or obedience to Christ?