A well-grounded Christian hope perseveres through all the confusion going on in our culture. Live each day to the glory of God by displaying this hope to those around you. Love God, enjoy him each day, care for your family, care for your neighbor, and rest in Christ. It’s possible to be so caught up in changing the world that you don’t even influence those in your circle. Serve faithfully where God has you and never lose hope. 

It was the strangest of times, it was the most frustrating of times. How else could one revise Dickens’ famous opening line to describe our current cultural era?

Foundational ideas and understandings are changing at lightening pace. The majority opinion from twenty years ago regarding marriage is now viewed as oppressive and unwelcome in public discourse. Definitions established for much of human history that differentiates a man and a woman are now viewed as abhorrent. Basic biology and common sense are thrown out the window to create a new normal. Like a square cat or smelling seven, much of the language of today is illogical and unscientific, yet the culture demands full acceptance without discussion or debate.

Watching the culture go down such a dark path brings about a great deal of discouragement for believers. Some Christians have given over to despair, while others have embraced a blind optimism that doesn’t take seriously what’s at stake with the current issues.

Christian Hope

In his book Strange New World, Carl Trueman warns believers against both despair and blind optimism: “To fall into the former would be to fail to take seriously the promise that the church will win in the end because the gates of hell shall not prevail against her. To engage in the latter is simply to prepare the stage for deeper despair later. And both will feed inaction, one out of a sense of impotence, the other out of naïveté.”

Instead, as believers traverse these dark roads, we do so with hope. Not a false hope that pretends problems don’t exist, but a hope that sees the issues and yet perseveres; a hope rooted in the ultimate reality of who God is, the good news of the death and resurrection of Christ, and the imminent return of Christ. As Trueman explains, “Christian Hope is realistic. It understands that this world is a vale of tears, that things here are not as they should be, and that…all life death does end. This world is not the Christian’s home, and so we should not expect it to provide us with home comforts.”

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