Monday, December 10, 2012
317 - Shopping for Hope
Spirituality Column #317
December 11, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville
Author of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
During the thirty years of my life that I spent religiously not going to church, I don’t recall ever searching for “hope in Christ.”
December 11, 2012
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville
Shopping for Hope
By Bob WaltersAuthor of (click) Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
During the thirty years of my life that I spent religiously not going to church, I don’t recall ever searching for “hope in Christ.”
I hoped for all kinds of other stuff … hoped I’d get a
job, get married, have children, do well, stay healthy, etc. I hoped this opportunity would pan out. I hoped that problem or pain would subside. It never occurred to me to examine the
quality of hope or where it came from. I
was fortunate to ride out life’s good times and bad in the hope that things
would get better, rather than in despair that they wouldn’t.
A lot of people
have hope, especially Americans.
Optimism and freedom, the essential seeds of hope, are an American
birthright. Hope in the world, to me,
didn’t seem especially better or worse than hope in the Lord. Hope was hope. Freedom was freedom. What’s the difference?
Well … big difference, obviously, but it took faith to
make me see it.
Right now millions and millions of optimistic,
non-churched Americans are planning and hoping for a Merry Christmas or a Happy
Holiday or whatever. And they will have
one. They are shopping, they are
decorating, they are coordinating, and they are aware that the greatest joy of
this season is in the giving not the receiving.
They get the Christian meaning
of the season. They share in its joy. But they shortchange themselves by limiting
their hope to the secular holiday. They
miss the cosmic enormity of hope given to us by God in the eternal salvation
and divine New Covenant power of faith that was introduced to humanity in the
humility and fragility of the baby Jesus born in the obscurest of humble
mangers. The manger is Christmas, but
Jesus is life.
Why are people so hard to evangelize when the most basic
Christmas messages of giving, of peace, and of joy, are at once shared and
commonly desired by almost everyone? Because
putting one’s entire life, hope and eternity exclusively into the hands of
Jesus Christ through our faith requires forfeiture of our assuredness in our
own power. Even if that human assuredness
is a false truth and temporal mirage, it’s easier to understand and explain
than the divine assuredness of hope in Christ.
Christians, in love bordering on desperation, want to
give that gift of hope. And while it is
more blessed to give than receive (Acts 20:35), hope in Christ has to be
received in faith before it can be given in love.
Maybe that’s why it never occurred to me to shop for it.
Walters (commonchristinity.blogspot.com, rlwcom@aol.com)
went to church as a kid but didn’t find his faith until he was 46.
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