When we talk about hope it usually has a future context. “I hope I get the call.” “We hope to arrive soon.” “They hope to get the support they need.” Each of these expresses a future expectation. A verse that many are fond of quoting is Jeremiah 29:11, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Hope is explicitly connected to a future expectation here. Hope, however, is not only an optimism about the future. It is also a present reality.
The verse that defines “faith” reads, “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Faith is the current assurance of our hope. It is not exclusively an assurance about something positive that will take place in the future. It is a confidence that promises that have been made are currently being kept.
This is not a mere academic distinction. It has a perspective-altering application. Recently I was planning a mountain bike ride with a friend who, when I first met him, was enduring debilitating back pain. He wore a brace and quietly grunted every time he sat down or stood up. He leaned forward a bit when he walked and, despite his attempts to conceal it, I could see the pain in his face as he tried to maintain focus during conversations.
My friend had been dealing with that discomfort for decades and in the year leading up to the corrective surgery it had increased to the point of being bedridden. I asked him how the Lord used that affliction in his life, and he said he learned to “abide in Christ.” It became clear to him that his bed was the location God had assigned to him and that he needed to honor the Lord in the confines of that particular place.
This brings clarity to the importance of having a current hope. People, even unbelievers, will glibly say, “Everything happens for a reason.” The more spiritual among us will point to the expectation that “God will bring something good out of this.” There is truth in each of these future-facing comments, but there is also a hope that’s based in the here and now. Using the tools of pain and physical limitation God developed an active, moment-by-moment, ongoing hope in my friend. Consider the “current hope” that is expressed during ongoing physical distress in the following verses.
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you. (2 Cor. 4:8–12)
The apostle Paul describes the many facets of affliction, not the least of which is physical infirmities resulting from beatings, shipwrecks and time spent in prison. He was writing about how the experience of significant discomfort displayed the life of Jesus in him. His hope was not just in a future without pain, but in the work that the pain was currently doing in him for Christ.
Whatever affliction you are going through, there is a current hope that matches your future hope. To put it bluntly, if it never gets better you still have hope! Praise God for what He is doing now in your pain, regardless of what He will do with it in the future. Paul referred to God as the One “who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:4). He comforts now, so that we may comfort others later. Do not despise the affliction. Thank Him for it, knowing it comes with a current hope.
It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes. (Psalm 119:71)