Hope – Bill's Bible Blog

New Year’s Resolutions:
4. 2 Chronicles 15:7 – Be hopeful !

Recently Pastor Curtis, one of our teaching pastors at The Summit, used an illustration in his sermon from the Apollo moonshot days. Seems that when they launched the Apollo spacecraft, if they were even two percent off course at the beginning, when they arrived at the moon about 240,000 miles later, they would miss their orbit and sail right on past the moon.

Pastor Curtis used this principle to point out that even little changes now, applied over a long time, can result in significant changes in our lives. His point was to encourage us to start making changes in our lives toward godliness. Even if we can only make a small change here and there, we could expect to reap big results later of growth in godliness if we continued.

We should trust God that doing the things He has commanded us to do will eventually bring benefits. In other words, we should never lose hope in God’s promises.

Biblical hope is a little different from worldly hope. When in the world we say we ‘hope’ for something, that means we want it to happen, we wish it would happen, but we have no idea whether it will or not, nor do we have the ability to make it happen.

At it’s best, hopeful people are optimistic, and that’s a good thing. Optimistic people are a lot more fun to be around than pessimistic people like me.

But more often worldly hope is just good wishes–it feels good when someone wishes you well, it can be encouraging, but there’s no power to make it happen beyond your own efforts and determination.

In the Bible, hope is essentially trust in God focused on the future. God has made a lot of promises about salvation and heaven that we don’t see realized yet. Therefore, if we have chosen to place our faith in God, then we sincerely believe, we have hope, that those promises will be fulfilled…in God’s timing.

The message of 2 Chronicles 15:7 seems to fall into four categories. Let’s look at some other verses about these four points.

1. STAY STRONG !