A far country called HOPE

The Holy Spirit gives us unbelievable hope.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. – Romans 15 v 13

Hope can often be a stranger to us or a country we have heard about and longed to visit but always somehow tantilisingly out of our reach. We have brief flashes of what it would be to live there only for it so often to be taken away.

C S Lewis describes it like this:

The Christian says, 'Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.' A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

"If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only... to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, echo, or mirage.

"I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to the other country and to help others do the same."

The Apostle Paul found that "other country". It is being filled with HOPE, not by imagining, not by positive thinking, but by placing his trust in Jesus and being FILLED with HOPE by the POWER of the Holy Spirit.

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