Source of Hope: The Word of God

What separates hopelessness from hope? For me it is what I look to for my hope. If I’m focusing on the people around me, I can easily lapse into despair and discouragement caused by unmet expectations. The reality is that there are no perfect people who will live up to my expectations. That doesn’t make them bad people. It makes them human and flawed – just as I am human and flawed.

So where can I find the hope that I need to traverse through my days? Where can I find something or someone who will meet my expectations? In the Word of God, the Bible. Sometimes there are passages of Scripture that come to mind that encourage me and I remember those off the top of my head. More often I need to sit down and read a passage asking God to show me what I need to see for a specific situation or to deal with a specific emotion. Often what I get is a new perspective, God’s perspective, on the situation that allows me to persevere in situations that would otherwise baffle me. I can gain a sense of a bigger picture that allows me to overcome whatever adversity in which I find myself.

The Word of God actually tells me to look for hope in the Word of God. Psalm 130:5 says, “I wait for the Lord, my soul does wait and in His Word do I hope.” And, from the New Testament book of Romans it says, “For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.” (Romans 15:4) True lasting hope comes from seeing things from God’s perspective. The place I get that perspective is in the Bible. Therefore, one major source for any hope I have comes from reading the Scriptures on a daily basis.