Hope is Confident Expectancy.

Now is the hour for Christians to know their hope is in Christ. Others are looking for answers in impossible situations. When they see us hopeful no matter what; they will want to know what makes us tick.

Hopelessness is a sad word. There are others:
Poet T. S. Eliot: “The saddest word in the English language is, of course, ‘saddest.’”
Lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II: “But.”
Writer John Dos Passos quoted John Keats: “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell.” Psychiatrist Karl Menninger: “Unloved.”
Statesman Bernard M. Baruch: “Hopeless.”
President Harry Truman quoted John Greenleaf Whittier: “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”

John MacArthur explains hope writing that...True hope can be based only on a true promise, on confidence in someone who can perform what he promises. Hope is a profound blessing that gives meaning and security to life. Living without hope of future joy and enrichment reduces man to a piece of meaningless protoplasm. Hope is the consummation of life, the confident assurance that we have a blessed future in the plan of God.

Hughes writes that...The first century was an age of suicide. There was no Messiah, no hope. That is the way it is today also, apart from Christ.. (Hughes, R. K.: Ephesians: The Mystery of the Body of Christ. Crossway Books)

Spurgeon said regarding "Ye were without Christ ... aliens ... strangers ... having no hope . . . without God. Savior, Christ Jesus."

Hope is the looking forward to something with some reason for confidence respecting fulfillment. All of these aspects of Biblical "hope" were something the pagan Gentiles sorely lack.

If there is no hope, all is lost. Without hope there is nothing. The promise of God is the only foundation of hope, and therefore those to whom there is no promise have no hope. (Hodge, C. A Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians. London : Banner of Truth Trust, 1964)

If your only identity is in your career and you're handed a pink slip; or you lose your home because of escalating mortgage interest and you can't imagine foreclosure; and if you are faced with your spouse saying they don't love you anymore you can feel hopeless. These are some of the pains in those areound us.

Those apart from Christ typically wrap their lives around things and refuse to think about ultimate reality. The escape can be very intellectual on one hand, or on the other an eternal Nintendo game. As a believer who has found hope, I cannot imagine living without God. The word which describes all of this is alienation.

How will you encourage someone based on your hope in Christ?