The Hope of the World

From the classic bestseller devotional God's Best for My Life, by Lloyd John Ogilvie:

'Christmas is a festival of hope. And there is nothing our world needs more desperately than authentic hope. We have placed our hope in all the wrong things. The false gods of human progress, inventive genius, the future, armed power, financial security, governmental effectiveness, movements, great leaders, political parties, negotiation - all have fallen from their thrones. They have been exposed as unreliable sources of hope. We have discovered that to hope in any of them is to know eventual disappointment and to ultimately experience despair.

But hopelessness is also profoundly personal. People disappoint us when we place our hope in them. It's heartbreaking when they fail us or are unable to be our source of happiness. We place hope in our careers, our financial planning, and our abilities. Life's reversals shock us with the realization that our hope has been misplaced. Our plans for the future may pull us on to tomorrow with the longing that things will happen as we've dreamed. But things seldom work out as we've planned. Circumstances, people, ourselves, and our talents are not reliable sources of hope.

What we need is a hope that's more than wishful thinking or blind expectation that everything will work out smoothly.

We need a hope that is vibrant in pain, consistent in grief, indefatigable when people break our hearts, unassailable in disappointment, and unflagging in life's pressure. Do you have a hope like that? Is your hope ultimately reliable?

True hope is inadvertant. It does not come from searching for hope. It grows out of two basic convictions: that God is in charge and that He intervenes. This is why a true experience of Christmas gives us lasting hope.'

"The ground of our hope is Christ in the world, but the evidence of our hope is Christ in the heart."   -  Matthew Henry