Looking for the Blessed Hope

We are always talking about what we are hoping will happen. We say that we hope the weather will be nice. We express our hope that we will be able to have our family together for Christmas this year. We hope we can be healthy and get everything done that we need to do. All of these hopes are nice, but they are a far cry from the best thing we should be hoping to happen.

Paul wrote to Titus, one of his sons in the ministry. He told Titus what he was looking for. (Titus 2:13) "Looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus." Paul was looking for the "Blessed Hope." We all should be looking for the same thing with great anticipation every day.

The Bible explains that a hope is something for which we are waiting to happen. In fact, for us, as Christians, it is a confident expectation of what God has assured us will happen, but it just hasn't happened yet. Our blessed hope is to be with the Lord in heaven, walking the streets of gold, and being with Jesus and those who have gone before us. There is nothing that could ever happen to any of us that would be better than that. 

The blessed hope can come in one of two ways. We experience it when our life here on earth comes to an end. Then, the Bible tells us that "to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." I pray we all have that blessed hope. Also, the Second Coming of Jesus to rapture us up into the sky and take us to heaven is the other way we could experience the blessed hope of being in heaven with Him. We need to have that hope every day and be looking for Jesus to come at any moment.

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Tomorrow, I intend to read Titus 3 and Philemon.