Biblical hope is very different from natural hope. Natural hope is the optimistic wish for a particular event within the realm of possibility. Biblical hope is the joyful, confident anticipation of something certain. Biblical hope works because God’s promises are designed for the painful nitty-gritty of real life.But for many Christians, we are hesitant to go ‘all in’ on God’s promises; instead of...

When we lived in Ukraine, part of the difficulty was the lack of predictability, especially around shopping. We simply did not know when what might be available. And so something like a grocery list became an exercise in guess work, a wish list that had little bearing on what we actually came home with. We discovered that it was futile to get our hopes up that our plans had much influence on resul...

In I Corinthians 13.13, the apostle Paul writes that ‘So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love’.We know that we are saved by God’s grace, through faith, and so faith holds a perpetually prominent place in the Christian life. And we know that faith works through love – that love is the fruit of genuine faith and reflects God’s gracious character. And so lov...