Living Hope

Excerpt from The Power of Hope by John Piper

[1 Peter]

What is "living hope"? The New Testament idea of hope is very different from our normal thinking about hope. We say to someone: Will the North Stars win the Stanley Cup? And they say: I don't know; I hope so. In other words, hope, as we typically think about it, is a desire for some future thing which we are uncertain of attaining. That is not the way Peter, or the rest of the New Testament, thinks about hope. When Peter says in 1:13, "Hope fully in the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ," he does not mean we should desire it and be uncertain of it. The coming of Christ is a matter of complete confidence for all the writers in the New Testament. So the command, "Hope fully," means be intensely desirous and fully confident that Jesus Christ is coming again with grace for his people. Another example outside 1 Peter would be Hebrews 6:11 where it says, "We desire each one of you to show the same earnestness in realizing the full assurance of hope to the end." So we can define hope, in the New Testament sense, as full assurance, or strong confidence that God is going to do good to us in the future.

But there is something even more peculiar about Christian hope: Peter calls it "living hope." What does that mean? The opposite of a "living hope" would be a "dead hope," and that calls to mind a similar phrase in James 2, namely, "dead faith." "Faith without works is dead" (2:26), James says. That is, faith is barren, fruitless, unproductive (2:20). So "living faith" and, by analogy, "living hope" would be fertile, fruitful, productive hope. Living hope is hope that has power and produces changes in life. This is what "living' means in Hebrews 4:12, where it says, "The word of God is living and effective." So Christian hope is a strong confidence in God which has power to produce changes in how we live.