Lent Day Seven
“Contagious Hope”
Hebrews 3:12–15 The Passion Translation
12 So search your hearts every day, my brothers and sisters, and make sure that none of you has evil or unbelief hiding within you. For it will lead you astray, and make you unresponsive to the living God.
13 This is the time to encourage each other to never be stubborn or hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.
14 For we are mingled with the Messiah, if we will continue unshaken in this confident assurance from the beginning until the end.
15 For again, the Scriptures say, “If only today you would listen to his voice. Don’t make him angry by hardening your hearts, as you did in the wilderness rebellion.”
What a hope we have! Such a peerless hope, beyond all we have yet known. Our risen Lord Jesus will return and make all things new and all things well. More than well, He will make all things beautiful in perfection. Heaven and earth will be re-made with a beauty and peace that we long for but cannot conceive. We do have a glorious hope.
Yet what we see right now, all around us each day, is so often full of despair not hope. There is more trouble in this world than we can begin to think about. Each workplace, each street, each home has more than enough troubles of its own. Sometimes I feel like what I want to do in response to all this is stay in bed and stare at some pointless TV or scroll endlessly through mindless social media.
The hardest thing about hope can be to keep living it in the face of so much opposition or, perhaps worse, indifference. Yet the Spirit of God has placed His hope in us: a hope that burns brightest when we share it with others; when our families, our church, our faithful communities live and work with our hearts fixed on that great hope of Jesus return.
Hope is in fact highly contagious. If your or I respond to the trouble around us with a compassion fuelled by the hope we have in Jesus, then, remarkably we will find that it sets alight hope in others. The small steps you take in hope will be followed in leaps and bounds by others. Hope leaves a beautiful trail that leads away from the pit of despair of this world towards the glorious new creation of everlasting hope that Jesus is preparing for us.
There are times when each of us may find our own hope fading like a candle whose wick has burnt out. In those times we need to feed on the hope of others, to let their hope rekindle ours. We may even reach a point where our own hope has died. Even then Jesus shows us on the cross that death has been consumed his limitless love and unquenchable life. In Jesus, hope has won.
Nigel Adams
Nigel founded Hope Nottingham in 2010. This grew from nothing to become a network of community hubs and foodbanks, inspiring similar projects in Derbyshire and Kenya. Many of these community hubs are brimming with life as the helped and helper become a blessed community with Jesus at the centre: Communities of Hope. This is the title of his first book which tells the inspiring story and shares many lessons.
Since April 2024 Nigel has worked in a consultancy role for Transforming Notts Together, enabling all manner of Christian compassion ministry and especially church based community hubs: Communities of Hope.