Today is Hope’s birthday . . . not the virtue, which has been with us since God had a thought about us, but the woman: Hope Elizabeth Lancy Reynolds. 
She does not like it when I make private praise public, so let me stop the sappiness and merely wish her a wonderful day, turning instead to praise of the virtue for which her mother and father named her fifty-one years ago.
Hope is what I need today and every day.
1Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. 2Through him we have also obtained access by faithb into this grace in which we stand, and wec rejoiced in hope of the glory of God. 3Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
The best news of the verse is that we are made right before God by God in Jesus. I do not have to do anything and given my inability to do much good consistently this is joyous! This is why I can have peace. My relationship with God isn’t based on me or my good works. Nothing can separate me from the love God because nothing but God puts me in His arms.
I stand by grace. Grace is not only amazing and comforting, but powerful. Grace is the favor of the King of the Cosmos that I did not merit but which is powerful to save. He is for me, but more importantly, He is for the community of faith. I do not stand alone before God stripped of nation, family, and home, but made part of a nation, family, and home. We are saved by grace through faith into rollicking glory.
Glory is sublime. Glory is awe filled. Glory is jolly, but glory is sometimes invisible to me.
We, the living church, remain in the hard school of souls and so we hope for the glory of God. We suffer. Why must we suffer? Sometimes we suffer for our sins, sometimes for the sins of others. Sometimes we suffer simply because the world is broken and though healing is coming, that healing is not yet fully worked out. God is healing slowly, deeply, surely working with the crooked, the rough to make it straight and plain.
Suffering produces endurance. We learn the grownup freedom to endure even when the treats are on the other side. Children and slaves work for candy, gum, and money. Men and women endure for the glory of God. We see better things coming and so we love our enemies, pray for our friends (often harder than loving our enemies) and endure. We stay the good course because we are grownups and we can.
God has given us the grace to reject the slavery of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Endurance produces character. If we refuse the demands of our flesh, we learn we will not die. If we refuse the demands of the devils, we discover they have no power over us. If we refuse the allurements of the world, then we learn that one cannot monetize love and community.
We find ourselves decent, plain men and women whose scars are actually birthmarks for a community. People come before programs. God, the Great Person, before any person. As a result, we are bursting with hope.
Character produces hope. If God can make a church out of us, then what can’t God do? When I see my community growing and my own growth within that community toward Christ, I am hope filled. The hardest deed is being done, the greatest miracle is visible to my eyes: the Kingdom of God is growing up in Houston.
Nothing can stop that Kingdom. Nothing. If Christ can save me by grace, then nothing can separate me from the love of God.
Now excuse me as I go to party with Hope.
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