The Hope QuotientSample

Hope liberates, motivates, initiates, and activates. Genuine hope will bring enormous life changes to you and to our hope-starved world. 

1. Hope liberates. Hope releases you from your past. 

For 150 years, my family had no lasting marriage. I believed I wouldn’t, either. Then I attended a church where couples stayed married for decades. No one broke up. For the first time, I thought, Wow! I might one day have a lasting marriage. 

Today, my wife and I have the longest-lasting marriage in my family’s history. Why? Because hope liberates you from past failures, bitterness, anger, insecurity, and from the low expectations that keep you chained to the past.  

2. Hope motivates. Hope helps you bounce back. 

The difference between people who thrive and people who decline is not that they don’t get knocked down. It’s that they bounce back up. Every successful person has had to bounce back from discouraging circumstances, including every Bible hero. 

What determines if a person bounces back? People bounce back when they have hope. Hope looks at what can be instead of what is.  

3. Hope initiates. Hope sets you free to dream. 

Some world-changers have great resources and others have nothing. They make a major impact because they share one thing—hope. Their hope sparks dreams that bring change.  

Corrie ten Boom hoped for freedom for Jews. Martin Luther King hoped for freedom from discrimination. Malala Yousafzai had hope for an education. Those kinds of dreams don’t happen without hope. 

4. Hope activates. Hope is the fuel that makes the world a better place. 

Hope unleashes compassion like nothing else. Consider the small band of discouraged disciples who received hope at Christ’s resurrection. They took faith to the entire world along with launching the first hospitals, forming the first public libraries, establishing universities, elevating workers, and more. They became the world’s most effective agents of hope. 

Think Up: 

Are you open to becoming an agent of hope in your life and community? 

Do you have those four things hope gives? Do you want to? (Read on).