Why Hope? Series

Sometimes our hope is invisible. The last words of dying people have always fascinated me. They are so revealing of a person's heart and soul. John Wilkes Booth who assassinated President Lincoln said only two words at his death: “Useless. Useless.” These are words of hopelessness.

Fox News has reported this past Wednesday (August 20, 2008) Yemeni police have detained at least nine people this year for converting from Islam to Christianity, a security official said Tuesday. The nine were arrested between May and early August and remain in police custody, said the official. Converting from Islam to any other religion is illegal in Yemen and can be punishable by death. But in previous cases, those arrested are usually released after they revoke their new faith and pledge to return to Islam.

Our focus is on only on verse today: “Therefore, preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded, set your hope fully on the grace that will be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 1:13)

For the first time in this letter Peter gives his readers a command It’s a command: “Hope fully.” Or: “Fix your hope completely.” So the first command in this letter is an action you do with your mind and your heart. It’s a command to hope.Hope is not an action of the body. It is an experience of the soul.

1. Hope Is Powerful

When tragedy comes our way, we fix our hope on something in order to get through the difficult times. On April 16, 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King writes “A Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The letter was written to clergy who had called on King to be patient and stop his nonviolent protests. Writing from a jail cell in Birmingham, King would inspire many as well as enrage others: “Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policeman curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she’s told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking, “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “Nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears an outer resentments; when you are for ever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” (M. L. King, Letter from Birmingham Jail)

King wrote with profound insight as he called on people to end the injustice of segregation. In front of the Lincoln Memorial, King spoke just four months after his writing (August 28, 1963) where he more pointedly about where his hope was placed: “And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. …I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. …I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”