“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”
When you spend some of your final minutes making this kind of point, it’s probably pretty important. Earlier Jesus said it’s THE MOST IMPORTANT commandment, the one upon which everything else depends.
LOVE is clearly Jesus’ most central, most essential teaching, throughout His life and on that final evening. He knew, though, that his friends faced unimaginable trials. He knew they needed something else to sustain them.
They needed hope.
Aside from love, hope is the most powerful force in the universe.
When there’s no hope, even the strongest wither and give up because, well, it’s “hopeless.” Why even try? Hope allows us to confront and overcome difficult, painful circumstances.
Hope isn’t blind optimism, a trip on The Good Ship Lollipop, and it’s not a wish (I hope I win the lottery). That sort of warm-and-fuzzy won’t sustain anyone in significant turmoil.
Authentic hope is a confident expectation about the future based on faith that God keeps His promises.
So faith looks to the past and sees that God is faithful, which provides the foundation for our ability to love in the present and confront the future with hope.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13)
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Easy on Good Friday to focus on the darkness, the horrible torture, the death. Easy to hear It is finished and give up.
But it’s not finished. Sunday’s coming, and we know the end of the story. God keeps His promises. We have hope. That changes everything.
Hope changes what’s possible.
For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through the endurance taught in the Scriptures and the encouragement they provide we might have hope. (Romans 15:4)