This week’s character trait to make a part of your Christian DNA is HOPE. Advent, which moves us toward Christmas, is a message of hope. It begins in the temple with a priest named Zechariah.
John’s father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesied: "Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David (as he said through his holy prophets of long ago), salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us—to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham: to rescue us from the hand of our enemies, and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High; f or you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him, to give his people the knowledge of salvation through the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven to shine on those living in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the path of peace." Luke 1:67-79
Once Zechariah’s wife Elizabeth gave birth to John the Baptist, Zechariah prophesies with great hope who this child will be and what it means in light of eternity as he will be the forerunner of the messiah, proclaiming his advent.
Answer the following three questions:
What is hope?
What do you hope for?
Is hope a uniquely Christian character trait? Why or why not?
(See also 1 Timothy 1:1 and Romans 5:1-5)
Since I'm not good at putting into words what I think "hope" is, I turn to dictionary.com, which says: "to look forward to with desire and reasonable confidence. to believe, desire, or trust."
ReplyDeleteHope is a powerful thing, because without it, we really have nothing to live for. Especially around the holidays we hear more and more stories of people taking their own lives. More often than not, people do this because they feel they have no hope for the future, nothing to live for. I think that the worst feeling in the world is the feeling of hopelessness. I remember once when I was very young getting lost in the woods. Though it wasn't more than an hour before I was found, I never was able to shake the feeling of being in a situation where I was completely lost with no way to help myself. Sounds a lot like my spiritual journey too, though I didn't always know it. We all are/were searching for a Savior. Someone to give us a hope for tomorrow.
In response to the 3rd part of that question, I don't think that it is uniquely christian. Hope is a word much like love, that gets used in all sorts of ways. We say we love our spouse and then in the next sentence say how much we love tacos. Hope is often used in the same way. We can talk about how we hope for(desire, trust, long for) Christ's return, yet we also, in my case, hope for the Chargers to win the Super Bowl. So, can everyone hope for something? Sure. But as Christians our greatest hope is not of this world or in this world, it is the hope of what is to come.