hopes all things.

I am struggling with this word “hopes”.

 Google says that secular society/the worldly realm commonly uses this word to mean a “wish”.  It’s strength is the strength of the person’s desire who is doing the wishing.   To me that means nothing we wish for ever comes true except by chance because we can never have enough desire to make it happen.

 However, Google also says that in the Bible “hope” is the confident expectation of what God has promised and its strength is in His (God’s) faithfulness.  I’m not a big Google fan but I am reminded here of Heb 11:1, “Faith is the assurance of thing hoped for, the conviction  of things not seen.”  Now, we are in the spiritual realm.  And of course that’s where the Christian life is spent and lived.

The J.B. Phillips translation of Heb 11: 1-3 says “Now faith means putting our full confidence in the things we hope for, it means being certain of things we cannot see. It was this kind of faith that won their reputation for the saints of old. And it is after all only by faith that our minds accept as fact that the whole scheme of time and space was created by God’s command—that the world which we can see has come into being through principles which are invisible.”

Since the Bible is our operator’s manual for the Christian life, I am thinking that hope in the context of love means I am confident in the truth of what the Bible has to say about how I should live my life.

What do you think?  Take a little time and meditate on this.