Articles
GPS
Many of you know that I travel all over Louisville for my job. I rely on a GPS for pretty much everywhere I go. You would think that after about 20 years on the road I would know my way around town, but sometimes I even use it to find my way home! Our modern GPS systems have a lot of technology that’s helpful like traffic updates, detoured routes, and time estimates, but the main purpose is to get us to our destination. It puts our destination in front of us and gives us the direction we need to go in order to reach it.
For the Christian hope is like our GPS. Hope is keeping our destination before us. Peter describes our hope in 1st Peter 1:3-5 like this:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable and undefiled and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.”
According to Peter one of the expressions of God’s great mercy in our salvation is that we now have a living hope. He tells us that our new destination is heaven, and hope is what keeps our hearts focused on that destination. Whitney and I were just talking the other day about having a hope versus not having a hope. Without hope it’s easy for us to get discouraged or distracted because the end goal is not in sight. We know people that have denied the hope in scripture, and they are desperately searching for hope and happiness in other places, but they aren’t finding it. This world doesn’t offer us anything to motivate and sustain us in dark and difficult times. God’s word points our hearts to an amazing destination and urges us to hold onto that hope with everything we’ve got.
“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promises is faithful.” (Hebrews 10:23 NASB)
Hope is what inspires perseverance and endurance in us.
Trying to live our Christian lives without our hope at the front of our minds is like turning off our GPS while driving in the middle of the night in a place we’ve never been before. It’s no wonder that so many passages in Scripture and hymns that we sing point our minds to the blessings of our hope. We need our destination always before us. Here are a few passages and quotes from hymns to plug into the GPS of your heart today:
“But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.”
1 Corinthians 15:54-58 NASB
“His oath His covenant, His blood support me in the whelming flood. When all around my soul gives way, He then is all my hope and stay.”
The Solid Rock by Edward Mote
“In the same way God, desiring even more to show to the heirs of the promise the unchangeableness of His purpose, interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have taken refuge would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us. This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, a hope both sure and steadfast and one which enters within the veil, where Jesus has entered as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”
Hebrews 6:17-20 NASB
“Let us then be true and faithful, trusting, serving every day; just one glimpse of Him in glory will the toils of life repay.”
When We All Get to Heaven by Eliza E. Hewitt
- GPS.pdf (94.54 kB)
