Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. – Hebrews 10:23

Where we place our hope often determines our reaction toward the unexpected circumstances of life. I know that sounds like common sense, and it is, but what we often forget is how a misplacing of our hopes can produce disastrous and very negative effects in our lives. It’s not that we don’t know that our reaction and direction to life is located where our hope lies. Rather, what we can’t seem to figure out is where we need to put our hope in so that we never lose hope and have a direction in our lives that will never cease, that will constantly reframe the lens through which we see our experiences.

For example, if our hope is placed on our kids, as most helicopter parents will do, what happens when your kids are one day gone? Doesn’t this lead to a hopelessness? When we place our hope in our children, we tend to overreact when things outside of our control debunk our kids, then we coddle them and wrap them in suffocating bubbles so that every part of their lives are controlled and within our grasp. People whose hope is in their kids live for their kids. But to us single people, that is a ridiculous placement of hope.

Instead place our hope into our careers, our friends, our money, our cars, our prospective love interest, our physical appearance. When that thing we place our hope in falls off the map, we lose hope and become lost and cant figure out what to do with our lives.

If our hope was in our jobs and we lose it? Forget about it. If our hope was in a love interest and they happen to be at dinner with somebody other than you, you’re crushed and react like an insanely jealous moron.

Some of us religious people even place hope with our own righteousness. When we fail, because we will, we find ourselves hopeless again, like we were before we leveraged religion to soothe our iniquities.

The author of the Hebrews makes it really clear, we, as Christians, need to “hold fast,”– that is to cling tight to the faith we profess as our identity in Christ. Simply put, we need to constantly be holding all possible hope in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, nothing more and nothing less.

The writer says this knowing that a lot of us became Christian because when our hope was in something other than the promise signified by the resurrection, we were found wanting and decimated by a hopelessness. Life has a tendency to break people subtly through time and traumatically most other times. One thing is certain, without the hope of eternity offered by God through Jesus Christ, hope gets dimmer and dimmer as we get older and older.

A hope rightly placed in Jesus, as our Savior, helps us endure life. The sufferings, the trials, the pain, the hardship of life becomes bearable, if not entirely laughable because these things do not break us and our vision and sights are set higher, beyond what is happening.

Additionally, having anchored our hope in the eternal Son gives us an ability to comfort and level with people who have no hope because life decimated whatever they were clinging to. A rightly placed hope in God, who loves you through good times and bad times, can become the source of your confidence through life which will never run dry or expire. God gives us this privilege of place our hope in Him freely through mere faith and simple belief.

We don’t need to build up a hope with a deck of cards under a glass house, we just need to receive God’s promises and hope in it with gladness and joy because His are steady, unchanging and unmovable.

Are you ready to give up hope on things that will fail you and instead place your hope in God who fulfills all His promises?