Real Hope: HOPESample

Charged with Hope

As a teenager I think that I was pretty ‘hopeless’. Firstly, I wasn’t very smart, either academically or socially and, secondly, I didn’t possess many internal qualities or capacity that would lift me out of a dreary, uninspiring present existence or potential future. And yet all that changed when I met Jesus, or more accurately, when He found me.

My conversion experience changed me for the better and left me ‘charged with hope’. I became aware of my ‘soul’ and that my ‘born again’ soul was alive with hope. Truthfully, the change was both instant and gradual. The ‘gradual’ grew with my knowledge of the Bible and the ministry of Christ contained therein. I read and believed that what God said He would or could do, especially through the life of Jesus, He did do.

I experienced what some writers have said, that ‘hope’ is often defined as – ‘the confident expectation of what God has promised will come to pass’ and that this hope and its strength is attributed to God’s faithfulness. JB Phillips in his translation of Hebrews 6:19a wrote – ‘This hope we hold as the utterly reliable anchor for our souls, fixed in the very certainty of God Himself in heaven…’.

So the ‘hopeless’ teenager is now a thoroughly joyful and peaceful older man, delighting in following and serving Christ for over 50 years and enthusiastically looking forward to the future through the eyes of faith and hope. Won’t you join me on the journey, starting today if you haven’t done so yet?

Written by JOHN SCOTT

Want more? Check out the Real Hope Conversations Podcast and listen as we delve further into the topic of Hope. Available wherever you listen to podcasts.