I think everyone might be tempted to lose hope when we look at the world today.
There is the continuing war in the Ukraine, the cost of living crisis, and workers on strike.
The daily news reports are enough to erode any hope we might be holding on to.
We live in a time when nothing feels constant. And yet, there is something deeper, someone, eternal and never changing, that offers hope that is not temporary or fleeting.
The hope I’m referring to is present throughout Scripture without even being mentioned by name; frequently, the psalmists encourage us to hope in God.
The Psalms are not talking about a hopeful feeling but an encouragement to choose hope. A hope that we capture when we gain or regain a sense of who God is.
The Message, a retelling of the Bible for today, takes the words of Psalm 36 and gives them a hope-filled equivalence, and it describes God like this…
“He is meteoric; He is astronomic; He is titanic; He is oceanic.”
This Psalm describes God as being bigger than anything we can imagine; yet in His largeness, nothing gets lost.
I have moments when I feel so small, and what’s before me feels too big. Psalm 36 reminds me that, however small I feel, there is a great, BIG God, and He is on my side.
Jesus is that great big God who came to make His home amongst us; He is known as Immanuel, which means God with us.
The Bible proclaims a hope-filled message to this world with all its troubles, reassuring us that God is with us and He will never abandon us. Hope is found in our great BIG God.
Chris Jones, Vicar of Saint Laurence, Reading, writing on behalf of Churches Together in Reading
