I’ve been meditating on 1 Corinthians 13 for months now. Every day, even though I’ve known this chapter for years, it seems I see something new in its words.
The statement that’s most recently intrigued me is It always hopes. For context, this chapter is describing the kind of love God has for us – agape-love – and wants us to have for each other. Agape-love is the same thing as grace, which is unmerited favor. This chapter tells us what God’s favor looks like. Remembering with each phrase we read that it’s given whether deserved or not, we see in verse seven that it always hopes. This is amazing to me. God never loses hope in us. Even with our poor track record, projected failures and many shortcomings, God sees our future as a sure thing.
Hope holds together three traits: something future, desirable and certain. So, God sees my future as something certainly desirable? “Oh God,” I begged, “help me understand this.” And He has.
While God sees and knows everything, He also has the ability to choose His focus, thereby eliminating the peripheral. He can look at a positive factor in me with such laser focus that He completely disregards the contrasting negatives. And it’s on that basis that He never loses hope in me. Of course the real positive in me is that the Spirit of Christ dwells within me.
Therefore, He continues to invest in me, pouring resources into my life that anyone else, myself included, would consider a bad investment. He relentlessly adds to me relationships, opportunities, valuable resources and all kinds of lavishings because he believes in me.
Why? Not because I merit them in any way. But it’s because His agape-love works that way. It always hopes.
God, being, as 1 John 4 says, agape-love, Himself, always hopes in us grace recipients. He never doubts we’re worth the investment; He’s always sure we’ll yield the desired results.
“Well,”you say, “God must be wrong and I must be right, because that’s never been the case and I know that it never will be. My results are often negative, undesirable.”
One of the fundamentals that we need to get, once and forever, is that God’s Word is completely true. And it says that He always hopes in us. Once we accept that truth, we can begin to understand it.
Understand this. God’s view (And His view is the correct one.) is that the results we yield are desirable to Him. Where we see failure, He may see our growth through a training exercise. Where we see sin, He may see a bad taste in our mouths for something we’ll steer clear of in the future. The point is that He sees results differently, perfectly. And that’s how He can never lose hope in us.
This explains how God could say, through Jeremiah, that He plans to prosper us, to give us hope and a future.
