Hope: the half-remembered song

Surely there is a future,

and your hope will not be cut off.

Proverbs 23:18

God wants His people to live in hope, to thrive with a vision of His glory as their future. It is a difficult world we live in. This is why we need a divinely appointed vision of the future driving us forward. Surely there is a future! Here is why we need to look to God for a living future and hope:

• Our perspective is limited. Many times I cannot lift my eyes beyond the immediate circumstance in which I find myself. Because this world is cursed by sin, and because my own heart is also so sinfully bent, it can be very difficult to see beyond all that sin warp. And there is difficulty in life (God told Adam that hard work, sweat, and pain would attend all daily labor) and there is pain even to gain something wonderful (God told Eve she would experience great pain in bringing forth children), it is easy to lose hope in all the hardship. I NEED God’s future revealed to me in order to move me from my near-sighted perspective and grasp tenaciously a powerful, wonderful hope.
• We were created for so much more! I was recently reminded of this longing within us articulated by C.S. Lewis so well in The Weight of Glory: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” Lewis went on to describe a sort of half-remembered song we were born with that pulls our souls toward a better world as we feel hints of it in inexplicable moments of transcendence: “…only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” And those existential pulses beat in our hearts! They are why we need a God-directed hope and future. We were created for so much more than our own experiences here and now. When we think about it, our souls KNOW this! That longing drives much human frustration and also much great human art. But it is only truly fulfilled in the gospel’s hope of a New Heavens and a New Earth.

O great God of mystery for Whom I long!

Be my hope! A vision of glory drives me to seek You alone, to hold out through life’s hard work, pain, griefs, sorrows, faint joys and Your provision of my daily bread to find true hope. No earthly adventure, no mountain vista, no ocean swell, no rapturous romance, no laughter with a true love will ever come close to the powerful presence You will give me in eternity in a universe that will be the home of righteousness when You remake it. I tenaciously hold on to hope as I listen attentively to the whispers of that half-remembered love song that first drew me to You. I want echoes of that love song leading me into the experience of life to transport even my daily interactions to that realm! Carry me forward with that scent, with that tune, believing that news from Your far off country. Carry me home!

Amen