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Hope appears to be in short supply; discouragement reigns. But God’s people are supposed to be people of hope. The church’s world mission is supposed to be energized by hope.

Various worldwide catastrophes contribute to the demise of hope and the reign of discouragement: war, famine, disease, homelessness, injustice and poverty, to name a few. To these we must add a host of personal adversities and some terminal malignancies in our churches.

Should we just look at the bright side, the proverbial silver lining, and tell ourselves to buck up? Should we look at life, and our places in God’s universal saving mission, as we would a spreadsheet and total our gains and losses?

Occasionally when I read missionaries’ reports, and the documents produced by mission agencies, I get the distinct impression that they try to tell us to walk on the sunny side of the street. Sure, things are bad in some places, but we are winning. I derive little comfort and hope from that kind of scoreboard, or spreadsheet, thinking.

For the most part, it seems that Americans need this kind of positive reinforcement for their prayers and donations more than Christians in other places do. Is our faith so deeply grounded in a surplus of good material things that we can’t stand a dose of bad news?

What about Christians in Congo or Mongolia who search for hope, not in getting better jobs, houses and cars, but in their faith commitment to the God whose promises they count on to see them through? We love to berate the “health and wealth” gospel, but when it comes right down to it, we hope for health and wealth to sustain us.

God’s promises constitute the only firm foundation for hope that transcends temporal circumstances. Why should any thinking American Christian abandon security and ride the hope of the gospel into an unknown future in a foreign, often hostile culture? Only because Jesus Christ is our hope now and forever.

Perhaps the smashing of some of our hopes in the wrong things is necessary for us to sharpen our focus on Jesus and putting God’s kingdom first. God is the God of hope; Jesus Christ is our blessed hope. Hope in anything or anyone else is idolatry. No American church or American Christian has any right to make gospel-talk to the rest of the world, unless false hopes have been confessed and dismantled.

With Jerusalem under siege in the prophet Jeremiah’s time, the Jews shouted, “The temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” but their misplaced hope in the temple led them to disaster. They refused to repent of their idolatrous worship in God’s temple.

But a handful of godly Jews continued to hope in the Lord through six centuries of darkness. Like a probing searchlight in a morass of despair, Simeon burst forth out of nowhere when the infant Jesus was brought to the temple. What was he doing? “Waiting for the consolation of Israel,” Luke wrote. Finally, Simeon’s hopes were fulfilled, so much so that he cried out that he had seen God’s promised salvation-a light to the Gentiles and glory to Israel.

How we need people like Simeon to stand up today in our churches here and abroad. This is the time for people of hope to make a difference, to dispel discouragement and darkness, so that Jews and Gentiles alike-whatever their circumstances-will see God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. If our worldwide mission means anything, it means we must be ministers of hope to despairing people.

By faith, the patriarch Abraham showed us how to be people of hope. Through his bright and cloudy days of both victories and defeats, “he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.”

That’s the only genuine hope that saves.