Quotes about Hope

In a letter, Martin Luther, one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation, wrote to Hans von Rechenberg in 1522 about the possibility that people could turn to God after death, asking: Who would doubt God's ability to do that?

God wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. 2). So does God get what God wants?

Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn't deny these moments but embraces them.

Catherine of Aragon said,"None get to God but through trouble.

A Christian is not someone who expects to spend forever in heaven there. A Christian is someone who anticipates spending forever here, in a new heaven that comes to earth.

The great Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "I did not ask for success, I asked for wonder."17

When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.

It is as if the smallest amount of light is infinitely more powerful than massive amounts of dark.

And so, beginning with the early church, there is a long tradition of Christians who believe that God will ultimately restore everything and everybody, because Jesus says in Matthew 19 that there will be a "renewal of all things," Peter says in Acts 3 that Jesus will "restore everything," and Paul says in Colossians 1 that through Christ "God was pleased to . . . reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

We're here on earth, in these bodies, feeling the pull of gravity, knowing that we're only here for a while. But then there are these moments— like brushes or glimpses— of love and connection and hope, and suddenly we're here, and we're everywhere. Our feet are on the ground, but we're flying. Our hearts are still beating, but our souls are soaring.

Our eschatology shapes our ethics. Eschatology is about last things. Ethics are about how you live. What you believe about the future shapes, informs, and determines how you live now.

If you believe that you're going to leave and evacuate to somewhere else, then why do anything about this world? A proper view of heaven leads not to escape from the world, but to full engagement with it, all with the anticipation of a coming day when things are on earth as they currently are in heaven.