Hebrews #56 - 6:9-20
Speaker Notes Hope
Collect
O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Hebrews 6:9-20
9 Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are convinced of better things in your case—the things that have to do with salvation. 10 God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. 11 We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, so that what you hope for may be fully realized. 12 We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.
13 When God made his promise to Abraham, since there was no one greater for him to swear by, he swore by himself, 14 saying, “I will surely bless you and give you many descendants.”[d] 15 And so after waiting patiently, Abraham received what was promised.
16 People swear by someone greater than themselves, and the oath confirms what is said and puts an end to all argument. 17 Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. 18 God did this so that, by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to take hold of the hope set before us may be greatly encouraged. 19 We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain, 20 where our forerunner, Jesus, has entered on our behalf. He has become a high priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.
Quotes about HOPE:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that hope is the “virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength but on the help of the Holy Spirit” (CCC 1817).
Hope is not mere optimism, but a confident expectation of divine blessing and the beatific vision of God.
The Christian hope is the hope which has seen everything and endured everything, and still has not despaired, because it believes in God. The Christian hope is not hope in the human spirit, in human goodness, in human endurance, in human achievement; the Christian hope is hope in the power of God.... William Barclay (1907-1978), Letter to the Romans, Westminster Press, 1957, p. 215
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from The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness by Dr. Jerome Groopman (2005)
Hope, I have come to believe, is as vital to our lives as the very oxygen that we breathe. (page 208)
I see Hope at the very heart of healing. (page 212)
To hope under the most extreme circumstances is an act of defiance that permits a person to live his life on his own terms. It is part of the human spirit to endure and give a miracle a chance to happen. (page 81)
Without hope, nothing could begin … Hope helps us overcome hurdles that we otherwise could not scale, and it moves us forward to a place where healing can occur. (page 177)
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from Tony Campolo’s article “What’s Wrong With Psychotherapy?” (PRISM, May/June 1995, page 24) Victor Frankl, the famous Viennese psychologist, called this kind of counseling that focuses on the future the Logo Therapy. While a prisoner in concentration camp at Auschwitz, he used his time to explore the differences between those who survived the Nazis' inhumanity toward the Jews and those who gave up and died. Frankl found that the difference was in the ability of people to imagine a future that was good. Those who by faith were able to envision a life of freedom, friends and dignity, became the people of strong character and endured the horrors of prison life. Those who could not shriveled up and died. Faith in the future rather than the conditioning of the past proved to be the decisive factor.
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“That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.” ― Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic including A Free Man's Worship.
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If there are elements of reality beyond the flux of time, then there might also be a destiny beyond the temporal ending of this world.
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The only ground for this hope — and the sufficient ground for this hope, as we have already emphasised — lies in the faithfulness of the Creator, in the unrelenting divine love for all creatures. - The Faith of a Physicist (Princeton Legacy Library) Hardcover – April 4, 1994 by John C. Polkinghorne.