REAL HOPE

Earlier this year, my pastor friend, Ryan Whitley, posted an article about Hope. The article came on the heels of an ABC interview with Actor, Patrick Swayze. News reports that Swayze died yesterday, so I am reposting that article.

Patrick Swayze spent the last year battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The actor disclosed his personal battle during an ABC News 20/20 Barbara Walter’s Special last Wednesday.

I admired his moxie. The interview was raw, emotional and real. Swayze is a dying man, and he knows it. Yet there was one thing missing – at least in what I viewed.

I never heard any words of hope.

If Swayze ever expressed his faith in God, I never heard it. Perhaps he did earlier, when I was not watching. But in the 30 minutes I watched it I never heard a word of trust in the Lord.

Later that evening Bill O’Reilly on Fox News devoted a segment of his news broadcast to the 20/20 interview of Swayze. Ironically, he asked his guest, Dr. Anna Paulick, Medical Oncologist of the NYU Cancer Institute, how she offered hope to her terminal cancer patients. The doctor’s response was deficient.

Dr. Paulick tries to remind her patients to take hope in some quality of life and in the research that will some day find a cure. Make note: hope in quality of life and research. That is not hope. That is uncertainty.

For Barbara Walters, Patrick Swayze, Bill O’Reilly, Anna Paulick and anyone else searching, true hope lasting hope is found only in Jesus Christ.

What is hope?

Hope is an essential and fundamental element to the Christian faith.

The FOUNDATION of hope is found in the DEATH of Jesus Christ.

He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?

Romans 8:32-33

The SECURITY of hope is found in the SOVEREIGNTY of God.

35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written,

37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long;

we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

Romans 8:35-39

Hope is SECURED in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…

1 Peter 1:3

Hope is FROM God.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

Romans 15:13

Hope is a GIFT of God’s grace.

16 Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father, who loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace, 17 comfort your hearts and establish them in every good work and word.

2 Thessalonians 2:16-17

Hope is PEACE with God.

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:1

Hope is ACCESS to God.

Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand…

Romans 5:2a

Hope is the GLORY of God.

and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Romans 5:2b

Hope is the LOVE of God.

3 More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

Romans 5:3-5

Hope is found in the WORD of God

For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.

Romans 15:4

Someone once said, “You can spend a lifetime without sex and go almost 75 days without food, and ten days without water and almost six minutes without oxygen; but it is impossible to live without hope.”

Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord, we have hope.