Last Sunday, July 1, I preached on the Christian meaning of “hope” as used in the New Testament. It’s not wishful thinking but rather a joyful and confident expectation believers have in their final, eternal salvation.
My wife Ruthie came across an excellent illustration of this in Mary Somerville’s book, One with a Shepherd: The Tears and Triumphs of a Ministry Marriage. Mrs. Somerville writes, “We can get up in the morning with hope and we don’t need to fear what may happen next in our congregation, family, or world. What is the worst that can happen to us as believers? Our last and worst enemy is death. We will have power over the worst enemies we have to face.”
Somerville goes on to share that her own mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when she was in her fifties. Yet her faith and hope in the Lord remained strong. She was confident that she would dwell in His house forever. So great was her faith in the face of death, that her own husband wrote the following letter to his home church three months after she went to heaven:
Dear Pastor Dick and Family and Beloved Friends,
Enclosed is a little Thanksgiving gift to the church in appreciation for the blessing that you and your people have been to my family and me through the years — through times of joy and through times of bereavement.
I thank God at this Thanksgiving season for sins forgiven, for a great Priest touched with a feeling for my infirmities, for the privilege of being a small tool in His mighty hand, for His guidance, for His ear that hears my prayers, for His arm on which to lean, for His precious Word in which He speaks to us explicitly and for the blessed, blessed hope of His soon coming!
I thank Him, more than all else, for utter safety. In the past I have known what it was to be afraid, but now I know that I am entirely and perfectly secure. I feel that I have come into a safe place, a safe harbor. Nothing, absolutely nothing, not my own deeds nor those of others, not the works of devils, or circumstances, or so-called fate, nothing can separate me from the love of Christ. Sorrow and bereavement can come, death can even put my body and that of my beloved in the grave, but whatever comes, it passes first through His tender hands, and so I can love it because it comes from Him!
Nothing can keep me out of heaven. I am safe now as though I were already there. Just a few years to live, a few tasks to be done and then to be forever with Him and our beloved gone on before, our daily portion glory beyond infinite glory! Thankful? My cheeks are often wet with happy tears. Why He gives all this to a poor creature like me I don not know, but I know that I shall need all eternity in which to thank Him for it!
As you fellowship in Him … may your expectation and ever desire be found in Him and the Blessed Hope.
Affectionately yours till he comes,
– Robert L. Gates.
What a great legacy of faith! Somerville goes on to say that her dad finished his “few years to live” at the ripe age of 90, then he, too, went home to be with the Lord. That’s where we will ALL be some day, those of of who have trusted in Jesus Christ as our precious Savior and Lord.
This is the kind of hope Christ gives us and heaven holds for us! Remember, Christian: When there is no hope on the horizontal level, there is always hope on the vertical level!