Hope

"… that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you …" (Ephesians 1:18).

Hope: the unsung sister of the triumvirate in 1 Corinthians 13:13; the one not much talked about. Today as I read Ephesians, I paused over 1:18 and asked the Lord what exactly He meant by "hope." How should it feel and be manifested in my life?

I know that at least part of "the hope to which he has called [us]" is that mother of all hopes, of being with Him in the new heavens and new earth someday. This is the hope Paul tells us to encourage one another with when our days are hard. So lovely is the vision that he lingers on it a while:

"For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord" (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17).

But I wondered if this notion of the future glory exhausts Paul's meaning in Ephesians 1, or if there are other dimensions, in this present lifetime, that "the hope" applies to.

I didn't have to read much further before I got my answer. In chapter 4, God says:

"… walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love" (Ephesians 4:1-2).

It was then that I realized that there are two ways to read this verse of commands, one with hope and one without. I took a look at the rest of Ephesians 1:18, our "inheritance in the saints," and realized that this inheritance is not only a future heaven but all the power we have on earth to become what God commands us to become.

There is a huge difference between reading "be humble and gentle" with the idea that you can do that, and reading it with the idea that these are beautiful and lofty goals that God lays before us but that we cannot achieve to a large degree in this lifetime. Here is the hope of His calling-that because of "the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe" (1:19), we can read the commandments of God with the vital and realistic hope that they are doable. We can hope to be noticeably different people today than we were last year.