Well, I got through half the year without missing a post each day, but coming off of vacation, I got two days behind! So I’m going to catch up by giving you three different quotes about hope today:
There are two ways to look at human history, I have concluded. One way is to focus on the wars and violence, the squalor, the pain and tragedy and death. From such a point of view, Easter seems a fairy-tale exception, a stunning contradiction in the name of God. That gives some solace, although I confess that when several of my friends died, grief was so overpowering that any hope in an afterlife seemed somehow thin and insubstantial.
But There is another way to look at the world. If I take Easter as the starting point, the one incontrovertible fact about how God treats those whom he loves, then human history becomes the contradiction and Easter a preview of ultimate reality.
Hope then flows like lava beneath the crust of daily life.
–Philip Yancey
I take hope in Jesus’ scars. From the perspective of heaven, they represent the most horrible event that has ever happened in the history of the universe. Even that event, though —the crucifixion— Easter turned into a memory. Because of Easter, I can hope that the tears we shed, the blows we receive, the emotional pain, the heartache over lost friends and loved ones, all these will become memories, like Jesus’ scars.
Scars never completely go away, but neither do they hurt any longer. We will have re-created bodies, a re-created heaven and earth. We will have a new start, an Easter start.
–Philip Yancey
Christians can hope because faith always reaches beyond earthly circumstances. Its confidence is in a person. And no other person in recorded history has influenced more people in as many conditions over so long a time as Jesus Christ. The shades and tones of his image seem to shift with the needs of men:
Truly, he is a man for all time. In a day when many regard him as irrelevant, a relic of a quickly discarded past, church history provides a quiet testimony that Jesus Christ will not disappear from the scene. His title may change but his truth endures for all generations.
–Bruce Shelley
I hope that you have hope because of who Jesus is and because of:
– what He has done in your life in the past;
– what He is doing in your life in the present; and
– what He will do in your life in the future stretching into all eternity!