Are you going to Heaven?
I hope so!

Aren’t you saved?
I hope so!

Well are you living the life God expects of you?
I hope so!

youkeepusingthatword

Maybe you’re not familiar with the reference. And if not (shame on you) that’s okay (no really, shame on you). Maybe you’ve been in a conversation with someone and they keep using a word over and over incorrectly. And if you’re like me, this becomes the entire focus of the conversation for you, as you can’t get out of your head how this person keeps using this word so incorrectly. Finally you snap and you say “that word doesn’t mean that…” Or, if you are the gentleman in the picture, you say “I do not think [that word] means what you think it means.”

A lot of people use the word “hope” incorrectly. And it’s time to stop.

The word does not mean “I don’t know, but I’d sure like to think so!” but that’s the way it has been used for so long. It is a shame that we have taken the word and given it a definition that is the exact opposite of its ended meaning. There is a quote I am fond of, by a marvelous Christian author and educator:

It is a matter of fact that hope in this sense does not hold its ancient place in the hearts of many professed Christians of today. So, far from being a power of God in the soul, a victorious grace, it is [instead] a sure token that God is absent. Instead of inspiring, it discourages; it leads to numberless self-deceptions; men hope their lives are right with God when they ought to search them and see. This, when our relations with God are concerned, is a degradation of the very word. The Christian hope is laid up in Heaven. The object is the Lord Jesus (1 Timothy 1:1). It is not precarious, but certain; it is not ineffective, but a great and energetic power. Anything else is not hope at all.

-David Lipscomb

If you’re idea of “hoping for Heaven” is “it’s a shot in the dark and I’ll get there if I’m lucky” you need to reassess your spiritual life.

If you’re idea of “the hope of salvation” is “it’s impossible to tell, but I’ll just cross my fingers that I’m right” you need to reevaluate your relationship with God.

As Lipscomb said, hope in that sense is nothing of the sort. It’s a mockery of the very word. True Hope is rooted in knowledge. It is because we know we are saved and going to Heaven that we hope in it.

“But how can that be?” you ask. “I’ve never seen Heaven; how can I know I’m going there?”

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1

You don’t have to see it to know it. Faith is the “substance” of that in which you hope.

“But how can I know I’m saved? It’s a spiritual thing not a physical!”

Quite right, but you can still know:

And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments

1 John 2:3

We know that we know that we know that we know Him…because we keep His commandments. You can have hope in your salvation if you have kept (and are keeping) Jesus’ commandments.

You’re right that your salvation is not a physical thing. There is nothing physically about you that is any different 5 minutes before your salvation or 5 minutes after. Yet you can know you are saved. You can have that true Biblical “hope” that keeps you going. How?

Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.

Colossians 2:12

You have faith (which is the substance of your hope) that God operated on your soul and cut the cancerous sin away.

So the next time someone asks if you are saved, you don’t hem and haw. You tell them with certainty that you are.

If you are, that is.

Are you?