It is rightly said that the gathered community that comes together in corporate worship prophetically points toward a hope and future glorious kingdom in Christ. This is gathered worship as an act of hope, perhaps even defiant hope in the face of a world marred by sin. The body of believers gathered for corporate worship is united by the Spirit, and points toward the hope with have in Christ to be with God.
But what about looking at things from the other direction: hope as an act of worship? In this brief reflection I want to explore this way of coming at the issue, which recognizes that hope is not always a natural outpouring of the Christian life. In fact, at times the Christian life requires a willful decision to hope.
This life has a way of bringing us down to deeper depths than we can imagine.
Many years ago, I learned just how willful hope can be. It was three days after our wedding, and my wife and I were making a cross-country move. Standing in line to board our plane she received a phone call. Her father had cancer. It was stage four, and things were serious. As we stood there with tickets in hand, we realized we may have seen him for the last time without knowing it. We had no money, no jobs, and no job prospects. There seemed to be no reason to expect a visit home anytime soon.
Fast forward many years and we had two sons, and four miscarriages. With each pregnancy that was cut short, the scars got deeper and deeper within us. In September 2020 we went to the doctor to learn if we were having twins. No. The single child was not growing in her womb. Five days later I was to preach on Matthew 8:1–4.
“Lord,” the man said, “if you are willing you can make me clean.”
“I am willing,” Jesus replied. “Be clean.”
But sometimes He is unwilling. That week, I didn’t have the strength to bear that thought. My strength was drained from me. On Sunday I worshiped from the depths, knowing I was allowed to be there, and telling the church that we are all allowed to be there sometimes. I worshipped knowing that I could dare to hope that one day things would be different.
From the depths of despair, hope is an exercise in worship. With much agony, hope may rise from the ashes of a life in ruins.
At times, like Hezekiah fearing the onslaught of the Assyrians, we need to be told “put your hope in God”. At times we need to be reminded and challenged to make the decision to put our hope in the source of all hope. At such times we acknowledge our total dependence on God. In these moments, the willful decision to turn our eyes upward – or in the language of revelation, to see the world in a downward direction from the perspective of heaven – is to join with the saints in an act of worship that submits oneself into the hands of God.
At other times we find ourselves crying out to God that things would be different. Like the Psalmist of Psalm 88 we cry out into the darkness that hope is lost, our friends have abandoned us, and all of this because God has made Himself our enemy. Even in this depth of darkness – and it must be recognized that the Bible allows such journeys into darkness – we cry out in hope that things will not always remain as they are, that God will hear our plea for mercy, and will act.
Like Hagar in the desert, we may find our world falling apart. Hope seems impossible, but we are
met by a God who sees, a God who cares, a God who comes to us enfleshed.
Stephen D. Campbell (PhD, Durham University) is Academic Director at Aquila Initiative, a non-profit organization that partners with local churches to train marketplace missionaries and church planters through contextualized apprenticeships. He lives in Bonn, Germany where he also serves as lead pastor at the International Baptist Church. He is the author of Remembering the Unexperienced (Bonn UP / V&R Unipress) and is currently working on a commentary on the book of Deuteronomy for Sheffield Phoenix Press. He is a member of the sixth fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
