Pastor's pen 5th July 2015

Living with hope

Wow! How much things can change in a week. As I wrote last week’s Pastor’s pen, I was anticipating spending time with visiting friends on Friday evening and spending Sunday as I regularly do, preaching God’s word. Yet on Friday evening even as our guests arrived, I was rushing to hospital in Emerald. Twenty-four hours later in Rockhampton hospital a surgeon sat down next to me with a serious look on his face to tell me he had discovered a mass that he suspected was a malignant tumour. This was confirmed in the following days.

As you can imagine the last week has been quite a ride. So as I put my fingers to the keyboard this week I do so looking at life from quite a different perspective. But while the circumstances of my life may have changed somewhat, God has not changed and that is a great source of encouragement and hope. Hope is a very powerful thing. And the hope that we have as Christians means we can face today, tomorrow and eternity with a confident assurance that God is for us and with us.

Romans 12:12 puts it plainly, “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.”  I am guessing that those words will come to be importantly instructive for me over the coming weeks and months. But they are instructive for us all. The one thing that really comes home at times like these is there are many things that we worry about which just aren’t important. Hope is something that needs to be guarded and fostered. And it is something to be enjoyed (joyful in hope). This hope can only come through faith in what God has done and what He is going to do. Furthermore the hope we have in God to deliver us and sustain us enables us to face the fiery trial with a patient endurance. That patience will be key for us to remain faithful in prayer, not giving up when we don’t see God’s salvation immediately but holding onto hope; patiently and faithfully seeking God’s face.

In the various trials each of you may be facing as well as in the trial you see that I am facing, let us together be encouraged to hold onto hope. It will enable us to truly live life as God intended—filled with joy.