A Different Take on Easter // Merchants of Hope, Part 3

<p>As we start to think about Easter this week on the program, we’re going to take a bit of a different tack. It’s a time when we don’t just look back on what Jesus did, but when we also look forward to what Jesus purchased for us in this amazing transaction of grace, that we call … Easter.</p> <h4 class="p1"><span style="color: #ff9900;"><strong>Reunited with Jesus</strong></span></h4> <p class="p1">Hope is one of the most important things to our wellbeing that there is. It’s a feeling or an expectation or a desire for good things to happen in our futures. You know when you sit there, and you daydream about this or that, it’s always about good things, isn’t it? It’s as though you’re creating a photo-album in your mind of the good things that you want to happen to you in the future. Worry and fear is pretty much the same, but that photo-album is full of dark and negative images. When we lose hope in the future, we often lose the will to go on. That’s why hope for tomorrow is such an important part of who we are.</p> <p class="p1">It’s really interesting. The word hope appears around 133 times throughout the Bible, but it’s meaning is a little different to what we’re used to today. See, when we talk about hope, when we hope for something, it has that sense of uncertainty about it generally. ‘I hope I’ll get a promotion at work. I hope the scans didn’t detect cancer. I hope that my kids will grow up to lead healthy, productive, successful lives.’</p> <p class="p1">When something is certain, like you know that you’re going on a 2-week holiday starting next Thursday, we look forward to that with anticipation, but when something is uncertain, then we hope that it’ll happen, but the Biblical word for hope doesn’t make any room for uncertainty. The moment you read hope in the Bible, it’s an indication of absolute certainty. As the article on Bible.org says, ‘The word hope in Scripture means a strong, confident expectation’. So you see, there’s a profound difference between the way that we use that word hope today, and t