Evidence of Grace: Hope

Romans 5:1-4
February 23, 2011

A few weeks ago, Irv Welling passed along what is said to be a Cherokee story he heard recently at an awards dinner. The story goes like this. One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. The grandfather said, “My son, the battle is between two ‘wolves’ inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.” The one you feed.

It occurred to me when I read that story that it could stand for our entire MidWeek series on virtues as evidences of grace and vices as obstacles to grace based on Steve Shoemaker’s book The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome. It all depends on which wolf we feed. Tonight, I’m talking about feeding hope. Not having hope; not finding hope; not needing hope; but feeding hope.

In the Bible, hope is presented as something God gives. The prophet Jeremiah wrote to the people of Jerusalem who had been exiled to Babylon, “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). God gives hope, Jeremiah says. As that verse from Jeremiah implies, hope is always about a future with God that stands somehow in contrast to or in tension with the present. Whatever the circumstances of the present may be, hope holds out an alternative future in the plan of God for welfare and not for evil, for shalom and not for ra‘, the Hebrew text says.

The apostle Paul calls God “the God of hope” who will “fill you with joy and peace in believing so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope” (Romans 15:13). Shoemaker points out that “In the New Testament, hope is always a noun [or a verb], hope, never an adjective, hopeful, or an adverb, hopefully; [because hope] is far more than some subjective feeling we conjure up. It is a power given us by God, the God of our hope” (Shoemaker, p. 174). Hope is a power given to us by God. It is like a wolf inside us—if we will feed it.

God is our hope, the source of our hope and the object of our hope. “Hope in the Lord,” says the psalmist (Psalm 130:7; 131:3). “I hope in the Lord,” says Paul (Philipians 2:19). Hope is not some vague, wishful and wishy-washy feeling that “everything will be O.K.” Hope is a persistent and tenacious conviction of the soul that God really is at work in all things for good (Romans 8:28), even when you and I cannot see the good for which God is working. After all, Paul reminds us in Romans 8:24-25, “hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”

Ah, patience. There’s the rub. In an era of fast food, fast cars, fast facts, fast internet, fast money, fast games, fast answers, fast weight loss, fast living, fast-acting, fast and furious, we do not hope for what we do not see because we wait for nothing with patience. The problem with the hope that comes to us from God is that it does not come as a gift on a silver platter to privileged and entitled people who are impatient and in a hurry. “Lord, give me patience, and give it to me right now.”

Hope comes, says Paul in Romans 5:1-4, from the long, slow work of the cultivation of our character which comes from the expansion of our endurance which comes from our experience of suffering. God sows hope like seeds in the dirt of our lives, seeds that must lie in the dark, underground, in order to germinate and sprout, to be cultivated, watered, fed, weeded, trimmed and pruned only eventually to be harvested as ripe and full-grown hope. The quote from Steve Shoemaker's book that has been at the top of our MidWeek order of worship for this series speaks of all of the virtues and of each of them. So, hope “is a gift from the Creator, an evidence of natural grace, and [hope] is also a habit, a discipline consisting of difficult choices and the day-by-day, step-by-step determination” to choose hope. In other words, to “have hope,” we must “feed hope.”

We must day-by-day and step-by-step determine to choose hope among the many options we have for relating to ourselves and to God and to others and to the world. I say to myself, “In this situation, I can choose cynicism; I can choose despair; I can choose apathy; I can choose anger; I can choose retribution. I have many choices, and I choose hope. I am going to feed hope.”

Ezekiel saw a vision of a valley of dry bones, the bones of Israel in exile, who cried out, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost!” But in that valley of dry bones, Ezekiel heard God say, “I will put my Spirit within you and you shall live!” That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether the valley is exile or illness, a broken family or a broken heart, a lost job or a failed test, God puts God’s spirit within us for life. In Egypt, Israel cried out to God under the murderous oppression of Pharaoh, and God raised up the voice of Moses, who demanded for God of Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether Pharaoh is a political tyrant or an exploitive workplace, an abusive parent or spouse, or homelesseness or hunger or poverty, God’s spirit is always on the side of liberation. In the Easter story, we, like the women who were there, are asked, from the empty tomb, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” (Luke 24:5). That’s the voice that gives us reason to choose hope. Whether the tomb is in a garden or a graveyard or a failed marriage or a faded dream or an addiction or a dead end of one sort or another, God’s spirit is always on the side of life.

That’s the voice that gave Martin Luther King, Jr., the spiritual fortitude to announce on the night before he was assassinated, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. . . .
With this faith I will go out and carve a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair.” We are all in the business of carving “a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair.” Carving a mountain of hope from a tunnel of despair takes a tenacious faith in God that God is working for good regardless of how things look at any given time or place. It takes passionate confidence that in the end, God’s kingdom will come, God’s will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And it takes faithful listening to the voice that gives us reason to choose hope.

Which wolf in you will win? The one you feed. So feed hope.


Photo by sometimesong. Used under license of Creative Commons. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sometimesong/

This material is Copyrighted © 2011 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeff.rogers@firstbaptistgreenville.com.