Love Always Hopes

Alba 1-18-2026

LOVE ALWAYS HOPES

I Corinthians 13:7

In a Peanuts comic strip, it shows Snoopy thinking to himself: “Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll probably still be a dog. Ohh...there’s so little hope for advancement.” He sounds a little hopeless. You don’t have to be a very clever observer to notice that we live in a world that struggles against hopelessness. If you talk to people at all, you are going to get in a conversation with someone who is going to tell you that they are discouraged. Listen to any of the radio talk shows or watch the news and you are going to hear people who are cynical about life. They think the world is going down the tubes. On a world scale, it seems that we go from crisis to crisis.

Disappointment is known to all humans; we all experience it. But we have a choice in the way we respond to it. A friend of Thomas Edison once tried to console the inventor after a series of experiments had failed to achieve the results for which Edison was looking. “It’s too bad”, said the friend, “to do all of that work without results.” To which Edison replied, “Oh, we have lots of results. We know 700 things that won’t work!” He would continue his experiments because he had hope that eventually he could find what would work. Hope makes the difference. In the same way that hope is so important in various areas of life, I Corinthians 13:7 tells us that it is very important in love.

That verse says that love “hopes all things” or love “always hopes”. Hope is just one the of the things listed in this chapter about love. But as important as patience and kindness and humility and unselfishness are to a proper expression of love, hope is also needed.

1. The Necessity for Hope

Some time ago, a hydroelectric dam was slated to be built across a valley in New England. The people in a small town in the valley were to be relocated because the resulting reservoir would flood the town. During the time between the decision to build the dam and its eventual completion, the town became run down. What had once been a beautiful little town ended its days as an eyesore. Explaining this, one town resident said, “Where there is no faith in the future, there is no work in the present.”

Hope is what gives one the stamina to keep going even when it is unclear what the future holds. Hope is what keeps us going when things get tough. Hope is what inspires us to grow and change for the better. Hope is what makes us look forward to the future with joy and anticipation. “Where there’s life, there’s hope” is the old saying, usually applied to people suffering physically. It is true spiritually as well. I think we can turn that phrase around the opposite direction and get meaning as well: “Where there’s hope, there’s life!” In Christ there are no hopeless causes. There are no lost causes.

Romans 15:13 says, “Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” This verse is part of Paul’s prayer for the Roman Christians who were facing persecution and division. Paul prayed that they would experience God’s hope, joy and peace as they trusted in Him. God, because of His love for us, has given us precious promises. Biblical hope is the confident expectation that God will fulfill His promises and plans for us and our families.

In a marriage, if both partners put their hope in the promises of God and have faith that He will be with them in the daily issues of life, the couple can survive and thrive through the ups and downs that come to every person.

Where there is hope, it is like lighting a candle in the darkness. Emil Brunner said, “What oxygen is to the lungs, such is hope for the meaning of life.” Someone else rightly said, “Other men see only a hopeless end, but the Christian…[sees] an endless hope.”

The British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, was an outspoken atheist. He even wrote a book called “Why I Am Not A Christian”. When Russell was 81 years old, he was interviewed on a British Broadcasting Corporation radio talk show. The interviewer asked him what he had to hang onto when death was obviously so close. Russell responded, “I have nothing to hang onto but grim, unyielding despair.” What an honest yet hopeless response. You see, when you live only for this life, when you invest your life in the flesh, when you think that this is all there is, you can’t help but live in despair. But for those of us who are in Christ Jesus there is hope, because we anticipate a time when death and decay will no longer exist. That leads us to discover...