Empowered by Hope: Embracing God's Love Through Suffering

Dallas Willard says hope is the anticipation of the good. It is to look forward to the future. It is to have a spirit of eager expectancy, and because we require a projected future, we were made for hope. Rich Snider, one of the big researchers in hope, says that hope is actually the default mode of children unless some problem gets in the way. [00:50:48]

Martin Seligman, kind of the father of positive psychology, first became well known for an experiment around what we would think of as hope. They were studying dogs. They had dogs on a surface where they would get electric shocks, not enough to hurt them but unpleasant. One group, called the escape group, could with their nose punch a little button, and that would stop the shocks. [00:117:56]

The other group of dogs in the non-escape group, if they punched the button, the shocks didn't stop. Then all the dogs were put in a second condition. This time there was a little barrier like a little fence the dog could easily hop over when the shocks came. If they hopped over the fence, they would be free from the shocks. [00:145:23]

What happened though was the dogs who had been in the "you can't escape" group first didn't just fail to learn how to push the button. They actually learned, quote unquote, that nothing they did would make a difference, and so they just laid there even though they now were in a position where they could have hopped over that barrier. [00:165:87]

Seligman came to understand there's actually a kind of an explanatory style, how do you explain things that lead you to be in learned helplessness. So if you want an exercise in hope today, look at one area where you got a problem. You have failed at school or with finances or at work. [00:204:12]

People who develop learned helplessness, who become pessimistic, who fail in hope, when they have a problem, they view it as something that's totally internal, it's all my fault. Secondly, they view it as something that is permanent, never going to change. Thirdly, they view it as something that is pervasive, it will affect every area of my life. [00:222:23]

Paul in Romans 5 is going to write words about a hardship list that would be very familiar to the Stoics. He says that we boast in, we glory in our sufferings because sufferings produce endurance, and the Stoics would say yep, it definitely does. It helps us to become more tenacious and perseverant. Perseverance produces character. [00:540:16]

Paul here actually uses for the first time this particular word for character in all of ancient Greek literature, and the Stoics would say yep, that's definitely true. But then Paul says character produces hope. Now the Stoics often believed that hope was a moral weakness because if you hope, you are putting your happiness in the hands of an external person or power or force. [00:564:04]

Paul says we boast in suffering, it produces endurance, yep, and endurance produces character, yep, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint, doesn't put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. [00:605:80]

Paul goes on, Romans chapter 8, maybe the greatest words about hope ever written by a human being. I consider our present sufferings not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed. Creation, he says, was subject to frustration. There is suffering in hope, he writes. We know that the whole creation has been groaning. [00:646:76]

In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We don't know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes through groanings too deep for words. God himself, the Spirit of God, is groaning. And then Paul goes on, now what should we say in response to all of this? Who shall separate us from the love of God? [00:706:68]

For I'm convinced neither death nor life nor angels nor demons nor the present nor the future nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our friend and our Lord. That's hope. So today, groan and hope, change is coming. [00:802:72]