The Most Powerful Word

What is the most powerful word in our language?

A quick Google (that's got to be one pretty powerful word, right?) comes up with a whole host of suggestions: Yes.  Conversely, No.  Stop.  Love.  Sex.  Money.  I.  You.  Safety.  Why?  (The power of which can be easily understood after a tiring and tedious conversation with a young child).  These are just a few, along with a range of expletives it would be inappropriate to reproduce here.

All of these are powerful words and often elicit powerful responses.  However, I think there is one word which trumps them all.

Hope.

Hope has got a pretty bad press in recent years.  Especially where British weather is concerned: we are planning a picnic/barbeque/trip to the beach and we "hope" it won't rain.  Wimbledon/The Jubilee/The Olympics is on and, as a nation, we "hope" it will stay dry.

We don't even have high aspirations for our hope anymore.  We don't dare to hope for a hot, sunny scorcher of a day.  Oh no.  We "hope" instead that it might just be dry (at least for most of the day/week), and that it's not too cold.  We add in restrictions and clauses and sub-clauses, so that it's (quite literally), not too much to hope for.

It is used as a pathetic, powerless reflection of itself: we cross our fingers and "hope for the best."  We have watered down Hope and have stripped it of its power.  

But Hope used to be Hopeful. 

It used to mean expectation and desire for good things in the future.  It used to mean trust and security and faith in a person or outcome. 

It used to be powerful.

Abraham embodied Hope in the Old Testament.  He and his wife Sarai were "well advanced in years", but they still trusted God's promise and dared to hope that He would fulfil it.

"When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do."

[Romans 4:18, MSG]

Hope is risky.  It is scary.  It is bold.  It refuses to be defined or confined by the immediate circumstances, but dares to imagine something better.  In the middle of probably the most depressing, hopeless book of the Bible, we find this ode to Hope.  This commitment to trust, to dare, to have faith, even when faced with the impossible:

"I will never forget this awful time, as I grieve over my loss.  Yet I still dare to hope when I remember this: The faithful love of the Lord never ends!"

[Lamentations 3:2021, NIV, emphasis mine]

There is always Hope.  Powerful, death-defying, life-changing Hope.  Because of Him.