Hope

[This is my Faith Post for June 2025.] 
[Edited from my Ascension Day Sermon, May 29, 2025]

Past, present, and future, together all play a role in defining our lives and who we are and what we will be. God’s Word speaks clearly to all three and what God is doing for us in our lives.  When it comes to our past, we might look at this with guilt and shame.  We have memories of poor choices and sins of our own making.  We might also bear sorrow and loss when we think of our past. Hopefully we also have a few joyful memories to treasure in our past as well.  But when God looks at our past, He does so with forgiveness and mercy.  This is the benefit of Baptism and being an adopted child of God.  Our past sins are forgiven and we enter each new day of the present with a clean slate, washed by the blood of the Lamb.

Our present, as we see it with God’s providence and the good news of God’s Word, is all about God’s ongoing gifts and work in our lives. We can see this best in the Lord’s Supper and Jesus’ promise to be with us always.  Our present is our all-knowing and all-loving God bringing about His desire to be with us, to love us, and for us to be with Him.  He is always at work and we are never alone.

Which means there is a spectacular word we can use every time we look to and contemplate our future.  That word is hope.  Our Christian hope is one that is built and founded upon Christ’s work in both the past and the present so that we know with clarity and certainty His work in the future.  Hope comes from seeing that in the past Jesus has died and also risen from the dead and has ascended into heaven completing His victorious earthly ministry.  Hope comes in the present from the promises of Jesus who comes to us in Word & Sacrament.  Altogether, this means our future hope is in our Savior Jesus Christ who will continue to keep His promises and return to bring us to be with Him.  That where He is, we might be also.

With our hope grounded in Jesus we can begin to see what hope looks like in our daily lives.  For instance, you’ve probably had a friend come up to you in tough times and tries to encourage you by saying “You just gotta have hope.”   And you think, “ok…”   But what does that really mean?  In a worldly sense, we often use hope in the sense of optimism, positive thinking, its an attitude.  But that’s not what a true Biblical hope is all about.  When we have a hope that is Christ-filled, this is an active type of hope.  It was once said “optimism is having a gym membership. Hope is going out for a run every morning.”  Hope in Christ is not just an attitude or a feeling, it is living out the life Christ has given to us and died to save.  Hope in Christ is going out each day and living in the good works prepared for us in Jesus.  Hope in Christ is understanding the glorious inheritance we have received because of what Jesus has already done.  This is a sure, certain and active hope that we live in because of Jesus.

And we have such a hope in Jesus.  The Ascended Savior now promises to be present in all the places He has said He would be: in the Word, in the waters of Baptism, in His body and blood on the altar.  We have a tangible hope in these gifts and more.  Jesus continues to flood us with hope, strengthening us for all that lies ahead as He gives us a promise of a better future.

As it always goes, Jesus is the firstfruits.  We follow His lead, we go in His footsteps.  As He loved his neighbor and loved His enemies so we follow in His love.  As He went to the cross showing the greatest love, and died for our sins, so we take up our crosses, we die to sin in our baptism, and we follow Him.  As He was raised from the dead on Easter morning, so too our resurrection is promised because of Jesus victory.  And perhaps last, but not least, as Jesus ascended from this vale of tears, from this valley of the shadow of death, so too shall we be lifted up, caught up into the clouds to be with Him, forevermore.

All glory be to Christ our Savior, who makes all things new. Amen.

Mark Witte is the pastor at Grace Lutheran Church.

You can contact him at pastorwitte@gmail.com