A Season of Hope by Kathi Macias

Today’s guest blogger is my writer-friend Kathi Macias. You can find out more about Kathi here.

A Season of Hope
Kathi Macias

Hopeless. Have you ever heard that word echoing in your mind? Sure you have—it’s the enemy’s most effective means of tempting us to walk in defeat. There is nothing he would like better than to convince us that our situation is hopeless, that there’s no sense in continuing to fight, so why bother?

Hopeless. It’s a word that has grabbed the world by the throat and is strangling the very life out of them. The suicide rate among young people has never been higher. Drug use, in spite of attempts at prevention through education, continues to escalate. AIDS has done little or nothing to curb promiscuity. Legalized abortion and euthanasia tell people that life has no intrinsic worth beyond convenience and/or personal preference.

Hopeless. The longer we listen to that word, the darker and more depressing out situation becomes—wars and rumors of wars, famines, natural disasters, violence and brutality, men fainting “from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world” (Luke 21:26). Why are they fainting? Why are they apprehensive? Because they have no hope—there seems to be no answer to the escalating evil and destruction around them. That is exactly why they will be ripe for the Antichrist when he comes on the scene and offers them what they have long since given up on ever finding and yet so desperately need—hope.

Hope. Man cannot live without it. Without hope, why get out of bed in the morning? There would be no point in taking our next breath. And so the world will turn to a false hope for the plain and simple fact that even a false hope is better than no hope at all.

Hope. True hope. We, as believers, do not need to turn to a false hope, for we have the true hope within us. While the world is sinking into a bottomless pit of hopelessness, the Church should be rejoicing that we are moving into a greater season of hope than ever before. To confess that our situation is hopeless is to deny God’s Word, which declares that our hope is “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. 1:27). Christ in us is our hope! If we place our hope in anything else—our work, our family, our bank account, our church, our leaders, our government—we will see that hope crumble around us. Our hope must be in the fact that, at the moment we received Christ as Lord and Savior, He took up residency within us (see John 3); He has promised to complete that good work in us (see Phil. 1:6); and the One who is in us is greater than the one who is in the world (see 1 John 4:4). Doesn’t that tell us that God is for us; therefore, who can be against us (see Rom. 8:31)? The answer is, no one! The enemy of our souls is a defeated enemy, and he cannot steal our hope unless we forget what that hope is—Christ in us!

Hope. As the world’s news goes from bad to worse, let’s remember that we, as communicators, are the bearers of good news, and then let’s go out and share that good news with broken, hurting people who are looking and longing for someone to offer them the hope that is in us—for it is a season of harvest, a season of hope. Christ in us—Christ, the soon returning King. Hopelessness has no place in such a season of promise.

(c) Kathi Macias, 2006