[This reflection by Dazz Jones was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 01/Nov/2026]
You might have missed it, but last week a guy called Rob stood up on stage at HBC and preached a really simple, but utterly profound, idea:
He said that those of us who follow Jesus, we have hope.
He said we have it.
Which is simple enough to hear but incredibly powerful to understand.
I often use hope as a verb: “I’m hoping this rainy weather won’t last” or “I hope my wife is up for pizza this evening” (she probably isn’t). But as a noun … ? A quick check of the dictionary tells me that hope as a noun is defined as: “a confident feeling about what will happen in the future”. I mean, in all honesty this feels like something that in today’s world is quite hard to come across, let alone have. Having something sounds more lasting than merely hoping for it.
So if hope is something we have, perhaps the question is not whether we can lose it, but whether we can lose sight of it. I once met a magician who placed a deck of cards in my hands and covered them with his own. As he talked me through a trick, I stopped paying attention to what was happening. When he asked me to check for a particular card, the deck seemed to have vanished – replaced by a clear plastic rectangle. I hadn’t seen it happen. The cards had been taken while my attention was elsewhere.
Of course, hope isn’t taken from us in the same way – the trick is only an image of how distraction can make what we have feel as though it has disappeared. We can become distracted by others, by awful circumstances or, dare I say it, by our enemy the devil. Somehow whilst we aren’t paying attention to what is true, our hope can feel like it has … disappeared.
Yet, just like Paul who wrote a lot of our New Testament, we must remain convinced:
“that neither death nor life, neither angels, nor demons, neither the present, nor the future, nor any powers, neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 8 v38-39 [NIVUK]
Right there is our hope. It is ours to have. And if we have it, then it can fill us up and pour out onto the people around us.
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Romans 15 v13 [NIVUK]
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Last Sunday’s reflection: There’s No Doubt About It by Michael Goble
Contributed by Dazz Jones; © Dazz Jones