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What we ache for is redemption; what our heart cries out for is restoration.
How you envision your future impacts your current experience more than anything else.
How we feel about our future has enormous consequences for our hearts now.
We need to know that good is coming to us. We need to feel confident that a bright future is going to be given us and never taken away—not by anyone or anything.
Human beings are by nature ravenous creatures; a famished craving haunts every one of us. We were created for utter happiness, joy, and life. But ever since we lost Eden, we have never known a day of total fullness; we are never filled in any lasting way. People are like cut flowers—we appear to be well, but we are severed from the vine. We are desperate, lustful creatures. We look to a marriage (or the hope of marriage), a child, our work, food, sex, alcohol, adventure, the next dinner out, the new car—anything to touch the ache inside us. We are ravenous beings.
By saying they last forever, God names these three as immortal powers. A life without faith has no meaning; a life without love isn’t worth living; a life without hope is a dark cavern from which you cannot escape. These things aren’t simply “virtues.” Faith, hope, and love are mighty forces meant to carry your life forward, upward; they are your wings and the strength to use them.
Hope is the sunlight of the soul; without it, our inner world walks about in shadows. But like a sunrise in the heart, hope sheds light over our view of everything else, casting all things in a new light. It wasn’t merely sunlight bathing the mountain this morning—it was hope.
Faith is something that looks backward—we remember the ways God has come through for his people, and for us, and our belief is strengthened that he will come through again. Love is exercised in the present moment; we love in the “now.” Hope is unique; hope looks forward, anticipating the good that is coming. Hope reaches into the future to take hold of something we do not yet have, may not yet even see. Strong hope seizes the future that is not yet; it is the confident expectation of goodness coming to us.
Some sort of promise seems to be woven into the tapestry of life. It comes to us through golden moments, through beauty that takes our breath away, through precious memories and the hope even a birthday or vacation can awaken. It comes especially through the earth itself.
Fetishes are illuminating; they are a sort of peephole into the wild mystery of the human heart. We can hide our weirdness under a social disguise, we can maintain a good show, but our fetishes and fantasies blow our cover. The addict’s ravenous hunger is there for all the world to see.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: your heart is made for the kingdom of God. This might be the most important thing anyone will ever tell you about yourself: your heart only thrives in one habitat, and that safe place is called the kingdom of God.
The thing you are made for is the renewal of all things. God has given you a heart for his kingdom—not the wispy vagaries of a cloudy heaven, but the sharp reality of the world made new.
If we will listen with kindness and compassion to our own souls, we will hear the echoes of a hope so precious we can barely put words to it, a wild hope we can hardly bear to embrace. God put it there. He also breathed the corresponding promise into the earth; it is the whisper that keeps coming to us in moments of golden goodness.
The secret to your unhappiness and the answer to the agony of the earth are one and the same—we are longing for the kingdom of God. We are aching for the restoration of all things.
You’ve just been told your future is “the restoration of all things,” real things, the restoration of everything you love.
Is this a theological defense for Universalism? There is also the question for, what about the things we do not love? Many people anguish over the perceived injustice of “horrible” people being raised or resurrected into the Kingdom. Will they too be “restored”?
God is trying to do two things with the promise in the earth and in our hearts: he is trying to woo us into hopeful expectation, and he is attempting to lift our gaze to the horizon so we might live for the real thing that is coming.
When God calls us to love him as our “first love,” it is not only because he deserves to hold that place in our hearts, but also because he knows what pain will come when we get that out of order. If you give the part of your soul that is meant for God to lesser things, they will break your heart because they cannot possibly come through for you in the ways God can. Only he will never leave you or forsake you.
When our hopes are in their proper places, attached to the right things, not only do we flourish better as human beings, but we are rescued from a thousand heartbreaks. For not all hopes are created equal; there are casual hopes, precious hopes, and ultimate hopes.
Maybe another barometer would look like this: When our casual hopes are suddenly in question, they elicit worry, but nothing more. Precious hopes in question can usher in fear and anxiety. Ultimate hopes that suddenly seem uncertain shake the soul to its core. And I will be forthright with you—very few things deserve the place in your heart made for ultimate hope.
Where we take our fantasies is a helpful way to know what we are doing with our kingdom heart.
Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of
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You cannot protect your hope until you face the inevitable; maturity means living without denial. But we are mainlining denial; we are shooting it straight into our veins. We are grasping at every possible means to avoid the inevitable. We give our hopes to all sorts of kingdom counterfeits and substitutes; we give our hearts over to mere morsels. We mistake the promise of the kingdom for the reality and give our being over to its shadow. But when you raise the white flag, when you finally accept the truth that you will lose everything one way or another, utterly, irrevocably—then the
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When the kingdom comes, my dear, heartbroken friend, nothing that was precious to you in this life will be lost. No memory, no event, none of your story or theirs, nothing is lost. How could it be lost? It is all held safe in the heart of the infinite God, who encompasses all things. Held safe outside of time in the treasuries of the kingdom, which transcends yet honors all time. This will all be given back to you at the Restoration, just as surely as your sons will come back to you. Nothing is lost.
One of our greatest losses is the gift of wonder, the doorway into the kingdom heart. But each of us has special places and favorite stories that are still able to reawaken it.
Youth is what enables us to enjoy life. No, that’s not quite right; youthfulness is what enables us to find the wonder in everything. Vibrancy. Lighthearted, like you feel late into a long vacation. Hopeful, like a child on Christmas morning. The absence of all cynicism and resignation—not to mention all physical suffering.
For we live in an age of staggering unbelief, a thoroughly deconstructed age where wonder has been stripped from everything. We no longer believe in the noble, the heroic, or the epic. The biggest part of our day is a latte from Starbucks or a funny YouTube video someone sends us.
God seems to be of the opinion that no one should be expected to sustain the rigors of the Christian life without very robust and concrete hopes of being brazenly rewarded for it. Now, yes, yes—there is a place for altruism, no doubt about it. But we have in our pride or in our poverty let a false humility creep in.
The vindication of our grievances, the honor given to our thousands of unseen choices, and the brazen promise of reward are intended to spur us on!
Now, that would be a reception worth living for. The reality that every story will be told rightly should affect your choices today. If there is no cost to our Christian faith, how then shall we be rewarded? And may I point out that if we, too, would love to receive a hero’s welcome, it helps to keep in mind that valiant deeds require desperate times. The desperate times are all around us, friends; now for the valiant deeds.
We are each created to accomplish a work worthy of God; it is one of our deepest yearnings. And we will, in the kingdom; not just once, but many, many times over. Are we employed in the actual restoration itself? I don’t know for certain. “They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated” certainly hints at it. And we know our God is a God of process—look at how long your sanctification is taking.
If we believed that—if we believed in the total overthrow of evil, in the complete renewal of this world, if we knew we could count on our own restoration and the exercise of our gifting in the new earth—we would be the happiest people in any world.
Yes, we need to embody God’s love in the world today. The human race is not well; things fall apart. We must care for the planet and all creation; we must fight injustice. But we speak of that work so casually; we do not understand it can be the most demanding, heartbreaking work in the world. Those who serve at the front lines of social justice ministry have a tragically high burnout rate. Without a glorious hope blazing in your heart, you will be crushed by the pain of the world. “If you read history,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world
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If you woke each morning and your heart leapt with hope, knowing that the renewal of all things was just around the corner—might even come today—you would be one happy person. If you knew in every fiber of your being that nothing is lost, that everything will be restored to you and then some, you would be armored against discouragement and despair. If your heart’s imagination were filled with rich expectations of all the goodness coming to you, your confidence would be contagious; you would be unstoppable, revolutionary.
Friends, it is as simple as this: if you do not give your heart over to the renewal of all things, you will take your kingdom heart to something in this world. You will do compulsive things, like collecting way too many shoes. You will be tempted into far darker things. It is inevitable.
As Peter Kreeft says, “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a dull lie or a dull truth. Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith.”
Stay open to surprises; keep asking for glimpses of the kingdom any way God wants to bring them. This is how we reach into the future to take hold of the hope that is our anchor. The more our imaginations seize upon the reality, the more we will have confident expectation of all the goodness coming to us.
And if you want to take a really big risk, for an even more beautiful and encouraging picture, ask Jesus to show you as he sees you, as you are in his kingdom. That one might take a little waiting for, because we are so fearful, but wait for it. It will be worth it.
