What Is Hope?
• My prayer is that as we focus our attention on
• Psalm 42:5 — Hope in God!
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God.
A Sermon to Preach to Yourself: Hope in God!
• In Psalm 42:5 that is exactly what you have, the
soul arguing with itself, preaching to itself. “Why
are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you
disquieted within me? Hope in God!”
• Hoping in God does not come naturally for
sinners like us.
• We must preach it to ourselves, and preach
diligently and forcefully, or we will give way to a
downcast and disquieted spirit. This is evidently not
well known among all the saints — this preaching
to yourself —as a way of fighting off
discouragement.
• I love the way the psalmists wrestle and fight and
struggle to maintain their hope in God.
• This is a normal Christian experience while we
are still just saved sinners. And we better own up to
it, or else we may grow sluggish and negligent in
our fight for hope. And that is very dangerous, as
our text plainly teaches.
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The Emotional Reservoir of Hope
• Hope is like a reservoir of emotional strength.
• If I am put down, I look to the emotional
reservoir of hope for the strength to return good
for evil. Without hope, I have no power to absorb
the wrong and walk in love, and I sink into self-pity
or self-justification.
• If I experience a setback in my planning — I get
sick, or things don’t go the way I’d hoped in the
board meeting, for example — I look to the
emotional reservoir of hope for the strength to
keep going and not give up.
• If I face a temptation to be dishonest, to steal, to
lie, or to lust, I look to the emotional reservoir of
hope for the strength to hold fast to the way of
righteousness, and deny myself some brief,
unsatisfying pleasure.
our Christian hope. God will fill your reservoir
to overflowing, and that deep down in the Hoover
Dam of your soul the great hydro-electric generators
of joy and love and boldness and endurance will
churn with new power for the glory of God.
• We begin today with the most basic question of
all: What is hope? Specifically, we want to know
not just Webster’s definition, but the biblical
definition. We have to know what we are talking
about before we can get very far in our grasp of the
great truths about biblical hope.
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The Distinctive Biblical Meaning of Hope
• The most important feature of biblical hope is not
present in any of these ordinary uses of the word
hope. In fact, the distinctive meaning of hope in
Scripture is almost the opposite of our ordinary
usage.
• I don’t mean that in Scripture hope is a desire for
something bad (instead of something good). And I
don’t mean that in Scripture hope is rejection of
good (instead of desire for it). It is not the opposite
in those senses. It is the opposite in this sense:
ordinarily, when we use the word hope, we
express uncertainty rather than certainty.
• “I hope daddy gets home early,” means, “I don’t
have any certainty that daddy will get home on
time, I only desire that he does.”
• “Our hope is that Jim will arrive safely,” means,
“We don’t know if he will or not, but that is our
desire.”
• “A good tailwind is our only hope of arriving on
time,” means, “A good tailwind would bring us to
our desired goal, but we can’t be sure we will get
one.”
• Ordinarily, when we express hope, we are
expressing uncertainty. But this is not the
distinctive biblical meaning of hope.
• Biblical hope is not just a desire for something
good in the future, but rather, biblical hope is a
confident expectation and desire for something
good in the future.
• Biblical hope not only desires something good
for the future — it expects it to happen. And it not
only expects it to happen — it is confident that it
will happen. There is a moral certainty that the
good we expect and desire will be done.
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Confident Expectation
• There is a kind of certainty that comes from
knowing the character of a man or of a group of
men or a wife (of God). It is not infallible, but it is
secure and confident. It lets you sleep at night. It
carries you over rough times. Eventually, it can see
you right through the grave.
• Biblical hope is not a mere desire for something
good to happen. It is a confident expectation and
desire for something good in the future. Biblical
hope has moral certainty in it. When the word says,
“Hope in God!” it does not mean, “Cross your
fingers.” It means, to use the words of William
Carey, “Expect great things from God.”
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Scriptural Evidence
• Now let us go to the Scripture to see where I get
this understanding of biblical hope. We will begin
at Hebrews 6:9-12. After warning his readers that it
is possible for people who have had remarkable
religious experiences to commit apostasy and go
beyond the point of no return, he says,
• 9 Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we
are convinced of better things in your case—the
things that have to do with salvation.10 God is not
unjust; he will not forget your work and the love
you have shown him as you have helped his people
and continue to help them.11 We want each of you to
show this same diligence to the very end, so that
what you hope for may be fully realized. 12 We do
not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those
who through faith and patience inherit what has
been promised.
The Writer’s Confidence in His Readers
• The reason the writer is so sure that his readers
will not be among the apostates is that they have
not only been loving servants for God’s sake in
the past but are still serving. You see that
emphasis on perseverance, don’t you, at the end of
verse 10?
• You showed love in serving the saints in the
past, and you still do. Their religious experience
was not a temporary decision at camp or at a Keith
Green concert or Billy Graham crusade. It was
continuing. Perseverance in godliness is the proof
of the genuineness of a person’s salvation. That’s
why the writer feels so sure of the people: they had
served the saints, and they still do.
The Writer’s Admonition to His Readers
• Now comes the admonition in verses 11 and 12 to
press on and not become sluggish. But now the
battle is described in terms of hope, not just in
terms of love and service:
• And we desire each one of you to show the same
earnestness in realizing the full assurance of hope
until the end.
• In other words, with all the zeal of the past that
enabled you to work and love in the name of Christ
— with all that zeal, keep on pursuing the full
assurance of hope to the end. There is no fight, no
quest, no challenge, no war more urgent than this.
Keep your hope alive!
“The Full Assurance of Hope”
• Now, what does “the full assurance of hope”
mean in verse 11? It means hope which is fully
assured. Hope which is confident. Hope that has
moral certainty in it. It is not finger-crossing hope.
It is not the lip-biting gaze as you watch the
placekicker go for a field goal in the last ten
seconds when you are down by two points.
• In fact, verse 12 implies that hope and faith are
almost synonymous. Notice the connection: verse
11 says, go hard after full assurance of hope; verse
12 says the result of that pursuit of hope is that you
will be like those who through faith and patience
inherit the promises. Pursue hope so that you can
be like men of faith.
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Paul Shares This View of Hope (Romans 4:18-22)
18
Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and
so became the father of many nations, just as it had
been said to him, “So shall your offspring
be.”[a] 19 Without weakening in his faith, he faced the
fact that his body was as good as dead—since he
was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s
womb was also dead. 20 Yet he did not waver
through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but • Therefore I pray that the main point of the
was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to message is plain from Hebrews and from Romans,
God, 21 being fully persuaded that God had power to namely, that the biblical concept of hope, which
do what he had promised. 22 This is why “it was we are going to be examining for the next 16 weeks,
credited to him as righteousness.” is not the ordinary concept we use in everyday
speech. It does not imply uncertainty or lack of
• Now briefly let’s notice how Paul shares this same assurance. Instead, biblical hope is a confident
view of hope in Romans 4:18. He describes expectation and desire for something good in the
Abraham as the great example of faith, and in future. There is moral certainty in it.
particular, of justification by faith. In Romans 4:22
he says, “This is why Abraham’s faith ‘reckoned I count it a great privilege and delight to spend the
to him as righteousness.” And the faith Paul is next sixteen weeks with you unfolding what it
speaking about is the faith that God would fulfill means to say that our God is a “God of hope”;
his promise by giving him a son, Isaac. (Romans 15:13) and that the central exhortation of
our church is very simply and very
• So the faith which justified Abraham was faith in profoundly, Hope in God!
the future work of God. Verse 21 makes this
crystal clear: he was “fully convinced that God was
able to do what he had promised.” In other words he
had what Hebrews 6:11 called the “full assurance
of hope.”
• “Wherever there is full assurance of hope, there
is faith. Faith is the full assurance of hope.”
• Verse 18 describes how faith and hope worked
together: “In hope he believed against hope, that he
should become the father of many nations.”
• “Against hope” means that from the ordinary
human standpoint there was no hope: Abraham
was too old to have a child, and his wife was barren.
• But biblical hope is never based on what is
possible with man. Biblical hope looks away from
man to the promise of God.
• And when it does, it becomes the “full assurance
of hope” — the expectation of great things from
God.
• But from the whole context I think it is fair to say
that Abraham’s faith was his strong confidence in
the reliability of God’s word, and Abraham’s
hope was his strong confidence in the fulfillment
of God’s promise.
• In other words, whenever faith in God looks to the
future, it can be called hope. And whenever hope
rests on the word of God, it can be called faith.

A Confident Expectation