Episode Details

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Introduction:

Philosophy as a subject gets a pretty bad wrap in our society. We think of philosophers as those who argue about absolutely meaningless questions, or who perhaps are busy wrangling complicated explanations for how to explain things like meaning or existence without accounting for the presence and reality of God. But the term philosophy is simply a compound of the Greek words phila and sophia - love and wisdom. Philosophy, at its best, is simply the pursuit of wisdom. And thus it is absolutely something with which Christians should be concerned. The entire point of the book of Proverbs, and the whole of Scripture at some level, is to instruct us in the wisdom of God. So we can appreciate that, classically, one of the chief concerns of philosophy is this question: what is the good life? 

In answer to this question Aristotle put forward a set of virtues: wisdom; prudence; justice; fortitude; courage; liberality; magnificence; magnanimity; temperance. But, as admirable as those may be, we’re not here to talk about those virtues. The Christian tradition was happy to embrace or modify that list, but there were also additions: namely, the three so-called “theological virtues”: faith, hope, and love. You might recognize them from 1 Corinthians 13:13, where Paul writes:

“So now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

Paul says that these three virtues stand at the center and foundation of the Christian life. And while he points out that the greatest is love - echoing Jesus’ words that the greatest commandments are to love God above all and love neighbor as self - I think we can argue that true Christian love is not possible apart from both faith and hope. 

Faith is the means through which we receive God’s gracious gift of salvation. Without trusting Christ is who he says he is, and has done for us what he has said he’s done, we cannot truly love him. Likewise, if we don’t rightly hope in him, if we don’t look forward to the eternal promises he has given and eagerly anticipate receiving their fulfillment, we are not loving him the way we are meant to. 

So while we can distinguish and even rank these three virtues, we cannot separate them. Faith, hope, and love abide together. 

 Hope

So, then, why focus on hope specifically? Two reasons.

* I think of these three virtues, hope is perhaps the one we talk the least about. Faith gets a lot of play because it is, as already mentioned, the conduit through which the life-giving water of God’s grace and forgiveness flows to us. “For by grace you have been saved, through faith” writes Paul. We know that “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). And love is, again, the greatest of all. Jesus told us so, and he’s quoting the law - that wasn’t new information. God has always made it clear that love is at the core of how he wants us to relate to him and to one another. So, while we can’t overemphasize these virtues, we can sometimes focus on them without speaking of the third. Hope, like the other two, suffers in our culture from having the word watered down. We speak of hope as a wispy wish, rather than a firm conviction of the future fulfillment of God’s promises. So we need to give the word back its biblical content. We need to define the term biblically. We might call this part the mind piece. We need to get our heads straight when it comes to hope.

* This is more subjective, but we’re going to focus on hope for the reason I discussed last week: I’ve been deeply convicted over the past several months that I need to be more hopeful. More confident in God’s power and purpose not only for myself, but for our church and for the world. And since I do most of the preaching, what is on my mind is what goes into the sermon. I’m trus