- Matt Friedeman says God wants it known – I am the hope of the world! No circumstance, no election, no disappointment thwarts that.
After a presidential election a few cycles ago, a friend and I stood chatting and, because of the outcome offered by the voting public a day before, she was distraught enough to be driven to tears. Her hope for her country had been crushed.
Not long after that, I found myself during my devotions in the Psalter:
By awesome deeds you answer us with righteousness,
O God of our salvation,
the hope of all the ends of the earth
and of the farthest seas
(Psalm 65:5/ESV)
This line from the 65th Psalm – a Psalm of David – boasts of a God who answers our prayers with just, wondrous deeds and, in doing so, broadens our possibilities. He is…“the hope of all the ends of the earth,” not just the hope of those in our Tabernacle, or by extension today…our movement, our theological tradition, our local church.
God wants it known – I am the hope of the world! No circumstance, no election, no disappointment thwarts that.
In my office, there is a painting by George Frederic Watts. In it, a woman is hunched forlornly and blindfolded on a globe. One senses the pitifulness of the painting as she sits there amidst shadowy, darker hues, seeming to listen ever so carefully to the one string on the lyre she grasps, all other strings broken. Watts had two versions of the painting; in the first, there was one star in the sky…but just one. In the second version, he removes even the sole star after his daughter dies.
In other words, there is hope if you still have at least a string left on your instrument. Yes, even if there is only one string, there is a possible future in God. Indeed, that is the name of the painting – Hope. G.K. Chesterton in his book on The Art of G.F. Watts said,
“In the centre of the curved back of Watts’ Hope we might almost think of ourselves as a bowed figure in the twilight, holding to her breast something damaged, but undestroyed… Though Watts calls this tremendous reality Hope, we may call it other things. Call it faith, call it vitality, call it a will to live, call it the immortality of man.”
A lost and largely deaf world still listens for that last string. Sometimes, even the stars above have seemingly gone blank, but still, hope, faith, vitality, a will to live, or the eternality of heaven. Even the God-deniers sense there has to be something beyond our increasingly stringless lyre.
I used to serve with a senior pastor who would say this line from 1 Corinthians 13 multiple times a year, with a slight addendum:
Faith, hope, and love…the greatest of these is love (but then he would add), but the hardest is hope.
With many recovering addicts in his church, he had found hope a hard thing to grasp when struggling against an inordinate desire for drugs, alcohol, food, and sex. But, if he could ever persuade them that there is hope, redemption in the person of Jesus Christ had a shot.
Yesterday, my associate pastor called and asked me to pray with him for John. John had received the hope of Christ through our prison ministry, had gotten out, found himself in a store where he ran into a guy who used to deal him drugs, and soon found himself high through the addiction that had ushered him into incarceration eight years ago. He was desperate, discouraged, disappointed in himself, and…he had enough hope to call my associate and confess to the entire episode.
It is far too early, of course, to know how it will all turn out. But at least he knew what to do when his post-incarceration life was slipping away – call a hope-dispenser from a hope-exporting church.
Human beings, says Andy Crouch, “can live for forty days without food, four days without water, and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.”
Hope-dispensers, that’s what local churches are…who still have at least one string on our instrument. I suspect we receive more for ourselves as we play it away for others. Especially for desperate others.
As it should be.
