Receiving the certainty of hope with a posture of thanksgiving

Life has a way of sometimes being more difficult than you can imagine, throwing a curveball when you expected the fast pitch down the center of the plate. We make plans and settle into a routine only to be violently inconvenienced when we least expect it.

 

It is from that vein that I want to share with you what I am most thankful for this Thanksgiving — the certainty of hope.

The Christian life is defined by a different ethos than what our culture offers. One of the highest ideals sold to us by the culture is that we should attain to be happy, that positivity and optimism should be our default posture, and that we should cut off anything that stands in the way of obtaining personal happiness.

But what happens when life gets messy? To what, then, should we turn?

It is often during the difficult seasons of life that we self-medicate using the great idols of our day, like rampant consumerism and addiction to hurry. That if we can simply block out difficulties or ignore them for just a little bit longer, we might perhaps be closer to the utopian idea of bliss.

However for the Christian, the Messiah person, the man and woman through whom the Kingdom of God comes on earth as it is in heaven, there is the promise and certainty of hope.

We know that this world is not as it should be. But God, the Creator God who designed the heavens and the earth and everything in the cosmos, so loved his image bearers that he, in unimaginable humility, became like us in order to reconcile us to him with the promised restoration of all things.

That hope — that one day all things will be returned to their intended order, that chaos will no longer have a say — is what I am most thankful for today.

I would like to encourage all Christians to reflect on the gift of hope while remembering that, to our very good God, we should cultivate a humble posture of thanksgiving. In doing so, we recognize that God, in his very nature being the substance of love, has gone to immeasurable lengths to manifest his very character in our lives.