It Starts Small

Yesterday we looked at love believes all things. This is having an eye on the present for others. Today we look at Paul’s next criteria and he says, love hopes all things. This is having an eye for the future in others.

The Greek word for hope here is elpizō and means hopefully to trust in. It is the idea that of having an expectation of good things. This means that rather than assuming failure or a bad result in someone’s life, love always expects the best in someone else. It not only expects it, but it is filled with an anticipation to see the manifestation of the thing hoped for.

For this reason we labor and strive, because we have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.

1 Timothy 4:10

Paul says we put our hope in a living God because He is the Savior of all people. Paul says to “hope all things,” means that we never consider another person or situation a lost cause. We do not give up on each other, even when we see another fall and fall hard. As a Christian, we must believe that that every one who God calls will see maturity and eventually glorification. Hoping all things yields a willingness to encourage fellow runners in the same race.

We MUST be DETERMINED that no one gets left behind!

This sort of love understands that we are all works of progress and have confidence that we are all becoming more like Christ, even if the season is a tough and challenging season. When” we fail to “hope all things,” we consider failures of sin to be the final judgement.

It is the quickness to write others off. We can build these critical notions of others and when they meet our expectations of weakness, we cross them off the list and push them out of our lives.

Do you make your mind up about some people?
Do you get tired of others doing the “same old things” and just “move on”?
Are your negative opinions of others hardened and resistant to change?
Do you see everything some people do through the same critical filter?

When we fail to “hope all things” we separate ourselves because we feel we have to move on, as if the offender has fallen out of our boat and won’t recover. What is most awful about losing hope is that is can be so silent. We usually will not even bother to confront them in hopes of producing repentance, simply receding from them, quietly, withdrawing from their orbit.  We even convince ourselves that we are actually “covering their sin in love” by staying quiet.

Like failing to “believe all things”, failure to “hope all things” is unbelief. It is unbelief in the nature of God’s work. It is unbelief that God finishes what He starts, as though He forgets or walks away.

Walking away is what WE do, not God.

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