Lessons

The Hope of the Church of the One Body – Part 1. The lesson on July 29, 2007 begins a new series that studies our hope in the church today. This series ask the question what is your hope based on? Everyone has hope but what do you place your hope in? We studied several weeks ago the three spheres of blessings and iIn that study we learned that hope is the confident expectation of a promise that is to be enjoyed or fulfilled. Worldly hope compared to a spiritual hope has no confidence that a future expectation will happen. For instance, you may ask somebody that has had a calamity if they will be okay… and the answer may be “I hope so”. This shows the difference between spiritual hope where you have confidence in what has been promised to you because God has said so. Every endeavor that God starts, He will complete it. As Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:9-10 “Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself: That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him:” In the book of Job, which is probably the oldest book in the Bible, we see Job has hope being redeemed which includes a resurrection (Job 14:13-14 “O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me secret, until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man die, shall he live again? all the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.” and in Job 19:25-26 “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:”) The hardest question we have is when will God fulfill the hope that we have?