Fellowship begins with hope in other people. We can’t have a relationship with someone who we have no hope in. The relationship difficulties I've had with members of my family sprouted when hope grew small. As hope diminished, the relationship diminished. Despair is Satin's tool to keep us out of fellowship.
We can never have fellowship with other Christians until we learn how to have hope in them. As long as we don’t have hope in the Christians in our community, we can never have fellowship with them. If we moved to some other state and tried to have fellowship with Christians there, we would soon discover that we couldn’t have fellowship because we didn't see hope for God’s work in their lives.
We’ve used “doctrinal differences” as a way of covering up the deeper issue of hope. If we had true hope in other people, we would have faith that God would remove the doctrinal differences. We would focus our attention on loving them and helping them to grow in doctrine. But instead, because we have no hope that God is working in their lives, we keep our distance and protect ourselves from becoming vulnerable. Hope transforms us into spiritual change-agents instead of a doctrinal brick wall.
The very reason we are able to relate to each other here at home is because we see glimmers of hope in each other.
I don't want to build a house called Hope and not live in it myself. There is more to this than just understanding what hope is, we need to experience hope in an intensely personal way.
Hope is a state of mind, a habit of thinking, a search. Critical pessimistic people who have quit searching for hope will never find a place where God is working. Hope is a search – we need to search for things that are improving life, search for the places where Christ is.
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