🚪No Hope😱

  Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible. Helen Keller

Those were the words my friend James heard in a doctor's office one afternoon. The doctor asked James and his wife to come to his office. When they arrived he had them sit down. The doctor told James that he had a brain tumor that was inoperable. There were treatments available but the truth was he had a short time to live. Then the doctor said “do you or your wife have any questions?” James' wife sat there in unbelief of what she was hearing. James on the other hand unstood completely what he heard. James stood up and learned over on the doctors desk and said “yes I have one question.” What was James about to ask? James looked the doctor in his eyes and said “yes I have one question and that is do you know for sure that you are going to heaven?” “For at a time like this that is all that really matters isn’t it Doc.” A few months later James left for heaven. No Hope, are awful words to hear if all you have is here on this earth. The Bible is a book full of Hope. Somehow this word hope has become a word we use as maybe. We use it and hear others use it that way. John, are you going to………then you hear John reply by saying “I hope we get to go.” The word HOPE can have that meaning. Not long after I asked the Lord to save me, forgive me of my sin, we moved to the country. A small town outside of Atlanta. That's when I heard people using this word hope. Someone would get sick and couldn’t get the crops harvested. Then friends would say “Miss Hall we are going to hope you. At first I thought they were saying help you in a country way. No that is not what they were saying because I kept hearing it over and over again. Then I learned what they meant by using that word hope. The word hope has another meaning: “Confidence in a future event.” When these old timers said hope, what they were saying is you can have confidence that I will be there. Fields where cattle once grazed and crops once filled the fields and words of confidence filled the air are no more. Now there are houses standing and subdivisions with roads crisscrossing and people rushing back and forth. The word Hope has become maybe and not confidence. Our Bible on the other hand has not lost that meaning of confidence. For when we read that word Hope it carries the meaning to expect with confidence.  

When the Apostle Paul writes about Redemption he uses the word Hope 4 times in one verse.

Romans 8:24 (KJV) For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for?

We are saved by confidence in what the Lord Jesus has already done. We are looking ahead with confidence. Hope is a word of confidence but take that word hope and put a no in front of it and you get not any confidence.

Ephesians 2:12 (KJV) That at that time ye were without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world:

1 Thessalonians 4:13 (KJV) But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.

No confidence and without God in this world. Wow that is an awful place to be. Then we read in 

1 Thessalonians,  of having confidence that there is confidence of a better place. Don’t be sorrowful for we have confidence in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Here is a side note: the word HOPE is mentioned 130 times in our Bibles while  NO HOPE is only mentioned 5 times. In conclusion, God wants you and I to have confidence in what He has done for us. That is why James didn’t get all unset when the doctor told him there was no hope. James knew better for he knew and had confidence in his future home, heaven. The bad news is coming but if we know Jesus Christ as our Savior then it’s not bad news at all it’s our way out of here.