Take Heart! Our Unshakeable Hope Is Rooted in God

Today’s the Day!

Refresh Your Hope, 60 Devotions for Trusting God with All Your Heart releases today!

As a special treat for you, my faithful readers who have prayed this book into existence, I’ve included the very first devotion in the book below. Enjoy!

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13

The poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops—at all—.” In four simple lines she captured the essence of what lifts every human being out of bed in the morning, moves us through our days, and enables us to persevere when life gets hard.

We hope we’ll accomplish something meaningful. We hope someone will love us. We hope our lives will be free from pain. And if it’s not, we hope tomorrow will be a better day.

For many, hope is nothing more than a wish. A yearning for something our heart desires. An expectancy that we’ll gain the object of our affection. This type of wishful hope rises and falls with the winds of chance and circumstance. It has no solid basis and is usually tied to something or someone temporal.

Thousands of years before Emily Dickinson penned her famous lines, another writer described a different source of hope—a constant and sure One.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him,” the apostle Paul wrote, “so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit”

Romans 15:13

J. I. Packer, in his book, Never Beyond Hope, differentiates between worldly and biblical hope. “Optimism is a wish without warrant; Christian hope is a certainty, guaranteed by God himself. Optimism reflects ignorance as to whether good things will ever actually come. Christian hope expresses knowledge that every day of his life, and every moment beyond it, the believer can say with truth, on the basis of God’s own commitment, that the best is yet to come.”[1]

The concept of hope, then, is a biblical one. The word appears 158 times in the New International Version of the Bible. These verses describe three sources of sure and certain hope: God’s character, God’s work, and God’s Word.

“No one who hopes in you will ever be put to shame” (Psalm 25:3).

“For what you have done I will always praise you in the presence of your faithful people. And I will hope in your name, for your name is good” (Psalm 52:9).

“You are my refuge and my shield; I have put my hope in your word” (Psalm 119:114).

Every day we have a choice where to look for hope—to created things or to our Creator. The world tells us to hope in money, luck, determination, relationships, skills, and our own abilities. God tells us to look to Him.

The world disappoints us—again and again, but God will never fail us. The hope He offers doesn’t rise and fall with changing circumstances. It is solid and secure.

God’s version of hope doesn’t promise to deliver our personal definition of happiness. It assures us that He’ll order the events of our lives to refine us and make us more like His Son. Only there will we find the deep and abiding joy we crave.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon once shared that New Zealanders have a word for hope that signifies “the swimming thought.” He used the term to describe the hope God offers, “because when all other thoughts are drowned, hope still swims.”[2]

I pray that the sixty biblical reasons I share in this book, and thousands more tucked into the pages of Scripture, will “fill you with all joy and peace” and cause you to “overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).

May hope swim in your life forever.

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[1] J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom, Never Beyond Hope: How God Touches and Uses Imperfect People (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2000), 15.

[2] C.H. Spurgeon, “Unanswered Prayer (no. 3344),” Christian Classics Ethereal Library, accessed July 14, 2021, https://ccel.org/ccel/spurgeon/sermons59/sermons59.x.html.

*This excerpt is used with permission from Our Daily Bread Publishing.