Love Hopes All Things

The Greek verb here is elpizei — from elpizō, the New Testament word for to hope, to expect with confidence, to wait for what God has promised. The verb has nothing to do with the wishful version of hope the surrounding culture has reduced the word to. When the world says I hope it usually means I would like, though I do not expect. When Scripture says elpizō it means something nearer to I am expecting, with confidence, what God has said is coming. Christian hope is not a feeling. It is a settled posture toward a future the believer has been promised.

In verse 7, Paul puts the verb in an unexpected setting. He does not say love hopes for its own salvation, though that is also true. He says love hopes all things — panta elpizei. Love is hopeful toward the people it loves. Love is hopeful toward the situations it walks into. Love does not give up. When the brother has, in fact, failed in a way the believing of the last chapter cannot deny — when the situation has, in fact, gone wrong in a way that looks final — love still hopes. Love refuses to write the brother off. Love refuses to call the situation hopeless. Love continues, against contrary evidence, to expect what God has been able to do in worse cases than this one.

That is the verb. It is closer to bedrock than to feeling.

What was happening in Corinth

The Corinthians had been writing each other off. The factions of the first chapters were exercises in writing off — I am of Paul was, among other things, the public announcement that I am no longer expecting anything from the followers of Apollos. The man in chapter 5 — sleeping with his father’s wife — was a man the Corinthian church had given up on in the wrong direction; they were not hoping he would be restored, they were enjoying that he was there. The believers being dragged into pagan courts in chapter 6 were brothers each side had stopped expecting anything from. The whole letter is full of writing-off — short patience, quick dismissal, the assumption that whatever was broken in the Corinthian fellowship was going to stay broken.

Paul did not give up on them. The whole letter is the long, patient, careful work of a man who still expected God to do, in the Corinthian church, what He had been doing in believers since the beginning. Paul’s expectation was not naive. He saw the failures with full clarity — chapter after chapter of correction documents how clearly he saw them. But the seeing did not produce despair. The seeing produced a letter. The letter assumed the Corinthians would, eventually, become what they were supposed to be. I have confidence in you in the Lord, he could write later (Galatians 5:10, the language is from a different letter but the disposition runs through all of Paul’s correspondence). Being confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus, he wrote to the Philippians (Philippians 1:6, NASB). The hope was not for the people. The hope was in the God who was at work in the people. That was a hope worth holding.

In the spiritual-gifts setting, the writing-off was constant. The brother whose interpretation fell flat was being written off as not really gifted. The brother whose prophecy was unclear was being written off as a fraud. The newer believer whose contribution to worship was clumsy was being written off as not yet ready, with the implication that he might never be. Love hopes all things would have turned every one of those judgments around. The brother whose interpretation fell flat was still a brother God could use. The brother whose prophecy was unclear was still on a road of growth that had a future. The newer believer was a newer believer, and newer believers grow, and the right posture was to expect the growth and to give him room to do it.

The God of hope

Hope in Scripture is grounded in the character of the God who has made the promises:

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you will abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Romans 15:13 (NASB)

The God of hope. That is a title. The God we serve is not just a God who allows hope to exist; He is the God in whom hope itself originates. He is, by His very being, the kind of God toward whom expectation makes sense. He keeps His promises. He finishes what He starts. He has been, in every generation, the God who took broken situations and made them new, broken people and remade them, broken nations and gathered out of them a remnant. The believer who has been brought to that God has been brought to the only Source of hope that does not eventually run out.

That is why Christian hope is not the world’s wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is the small ungrounded wanting of a person who has no reason to expect what he is wanting. Christian hope is the settled expectation of a person who has been given reasons — the cross, the resurrection, the indwelling Spirit, the Word in his hands, the body of believers around him, the long history of God’s faithfulness to His people from Abraham forward. The believer hopes because the God he hopes in has earned the hope, again and again, across every generation, and is at work right now in every situation the believer can see and many he cannot.

That kind of God produces a kind of hoping that the surrounding world does not understand. Paul wrote it most plainly to the Romans:

…and we exult in hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance; and perseverance, proven character; and proven character, hope; and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.

Romans 5:2–5 (NASB)

Hope does not disappoint. That sentence carries the weight of the verse Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:7. The believer is being asked to hope toward the brother, toward the situation, toward the prodigal, toward the wandering son, toward the marriage that looks broken, toward the brother in the church who has fallen and not yet been restored — and the hoping is not going to disappoint, because the God in whom the hoping is grounded is the kind of God who finishes what He starts. The believer who has been writing off the brother has been forgetting which God is at work in him.

Christ Himself modeled this kind of hoping in the most expensive way the universe has ever seen. He hoped for the restoration of Peter, who would deny Him in a few hours, and prayed for him that his faith would not fail (Luke 22:32). He hoped for the gathering of the church through the eleven men whose understanding was, at the end of His earthly ministry, still seriously incomplete. He hoped for the salvation of Saul of Tarsus, the man hunting His people from house to house, and met him on the Damascus road. The Lord whose hope toward sinners was the engine of His every move on this earth is the Lord who has put the same kind of hoping into the believer through the Spirit who has been given to him.

From the believing, the hoping

The last chapter named love’s belief — its refusal to assume the worst about the brother before evidence requires otherwise. This chapter takes up what love does when the evidence does require otherwise. The brother has failed. The believing has been tested past where it can go. What now? Does love conclude that the brother is finished? Does love conclude that the situation is hopeless? Does love walk away from the marriage, the friendship, the brother in the congregation, the prodigal child, because the latest evidence has been bad?

No. Love hopes all things. The verb takes over where the verb of the last chapter has reached its limit. Believing had been the disposition before the failure. Hoping is the disposition after it. The believer who has been forced to admit that the failure happened is still not free to write the brother off. The same God who has been at work in believers from the beginning is at work in this brother right now, and the work is not finished, and the believer’s hope is properly placed in the God who is doing it. The hoping is for the brother’s restoration. The hoping is for the marriage to be redeemed. The hoping is for the prodigal to come home. The hoping is for the believer himself, on the days when he is the one who has failed and hopes someone, somewhere, is still hoping for him.

Believing and hoping sit next to each other in Paul’s sentence for a reason. Believing covers the disposition before there is a failure to deal with. Hoping covers the disposition after. Together they spell love does not give up. Whether the evidence is currently favorable or currently dark, the believer’s posture toward the brother is the same. Not naive. Not denying. Hoping. Expecting, on grounds that have nothing to do with the brother’s track record, that God is still at work in him.

What it looks like

Hoping all things looks like a teenager who has been praying for the salvation of a parent or a sibling for as long as she can remember, and who, this morning, prays for them again. The God of hope has not yet shown her what He is going to do. She keeps praying, because the hoping is not built on the family member and it is not built on her circumstances; it is built on the God who has restored prodigals across every generation and is at work, right now, in the person she has not yet seen restored.

It looks like a high-school girl whose best friend has, this year, made a string of choices the friend used to know were wrong — and who has not written the friend off. She is still texting. She is still showing up. She is still praying. The friend has not come back yet. The hoping is not contingent on the friend coming back; the hoping is contingent on the God who has brought friends back across every generation of the church.

It looks like a teenage boy whose father has been absent or hard for years, and who refuses to give up the hope that the father can yet be brought to Christ. The father has given him no recent reason to expect it. The hoping is not built on the father’s signals. The hoping is built on the God who saved Saul of Tarsus on a road the apostle Paul was traveling for the worst possible reasons. That God can save this father too, and the son who hopes for him is not crazy. He is on solid ground.

It looks like a young person in a dating relationship that has hit a hard place, and who, instead of jumping to the conclusion that the relationship is finished, prays for the other person, prays for himself, prays for the wisdom to see what God is doing, and waits to see whether the season is one God is using to deepen the relationship rather than to end it. Sometimes the right answer will be that the relationship should end. Sometimes the right answer will be that the season is a refining. The believer is not given the answer in advance. He is given the disposition — hope — and the disposition keeps him from quitting before God has had time to show His hand.

It looks like a Christian whose brother in the congregation has fallen into a public sin and is now in church discipline. The believer is not writing the brother off. The believer is praying for the brother’s restoration, every day, in the way the brother in the congregation prayed for him on the day he was the one who had fallen. The body of Christ has historically been a place where fallen brothers can be restored, because the believers around them did not give up. That body is the body verse 7 is calling every believer to be a part of.

It looks like a Bible class teacher who has watched young believers come and go over many seasons, some of them falling away, some of them growing — and who, for the young person currently struggling, still hopes. The hope is not naive. The teacher has watched the same struggle in other young people who did not, in fact, come through. But she hopes for this one, because hoping for them is what love does, and the teacher has learned, by long walking with the Lord, that the hoping has been worth doing every time.

It looks like Christ. The One who, hanging on a cross between two criminals, did not write off either of them. He spoke with the one who turned to Him, and promised him paradise. The other did not turn. Christ was not surprised by either response. He had been hoping for both. He was hoping for both. The hoping was the love. The salvation of the one who turned was the hoping arriving at its object. The refusal of the other was the hoping not being received. The hoping was right to extend in both directions.

The world’s despair, and ours

The world has been losing its hope for a long time, and losing it faster in this generation than in any previous one. The young people growing up now have been told, in a thousand ways, that the future is bleak — that the climate is failing, that the economy is rigged, that the institutions are corrupt, that meaningful work is rare, that lasting marriages are unusual, that the friends they have will probably drift, that their own minds are anxious and depressed and likely to stay that way, that the country is breaking, that the world is ending. Some of this is overstated. Some of it has real ground to stand on. All of it has had a cumulative effect on the young heart, which has been told, in effect, do not hope. Hope will only set you up to be disappointed.

The Christian is called out of all of it. The believer is called into a hoping that does not depend on the news, on the economy, on the polling, on the trend lines, on the personal circumstances of the believer in this current month. The hoping is built on a God who has been steady across every collapse the human race has experienced for six thousand years, and who is bringing His purposes to their appointed end no matter what is happening on the surface. The young Christian who has been catechized by the surrounding despair has been catechized into a faith his Bible does not teach. The Bible teaches hope. We exult in hope of the glory of God. The believer is being invited into that exulting, and the surrounding voices that have been telling him hope is foolish are voices he can stop listening to.

The cultivation of hope is not, in the believer, a denial of reality. The believer sees the situation as clearly as anyone. The cultivation is in where the believer puts the situation once he has seen it. He puts it in the hands of the God who has been writing redemption stories since the beginning. He waits, with the kind of waiting that is not anxious because the waiting is on a God who can be trusted. He keeps doing what he has been called to do — pray, love, serve, witness — and he leaves the timing and the outcome to the Lord who has not failed yet and will not fail now.

A note for the reader who is not yet in Christ

If you have been carrying the surrounding despair and have started to notice that the despair is making your life smaller, hear one thing.

The hope you have been told to live without is a hope that does, in fact, exist. It is not the wishful thinking the world has reduced the word to. It is the hope that comes from being brought into a relationship with the living God who has been faithful to His people across every generation. The God who raised Christ from the dead is still raising things. The story is not over. Your story is not over. The hope you have been told to abandon is the very hope God has been holding out to you the whole time, waiting for you to receive it.

Hear it. Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Believe it. Repent of the long despair that has shrunk your expectations. Confess Him as Lord. Be baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4). And then live as a man or woman who has been given the only hope worth giving — the hope that is grounded in a God who keeps His promises, and who is bringing every one of His purposes to their right end.

Where this leaves us

Three of the four positive verbs are now down. Bears all things. Believes all things. Hopes all things. The brother under that kind of love is being covered for his real failures, credited where the failures were never committed, and hoped for where the failures have been undeniable. Almost the whole picture of what a Christian community ought to feel like has now been described.

The last of the four turns to the believer himself, in the long view. Love endures all things. When the bearing has stretched into years, the believing has been worn down, and the hoping has gone on so long it has begun to feel like wishful thinking — what does love do then? Paul has an answer, and the answer is not what an exhausted believer would expect. It is one verb, and it is the strongest of the four. Hypomenei. Stays under the load. The next chapter takes that up, and then we close.

That is the work this attribute is calling you into. Think of one brother, one situation, one prodigal, one friend, one marriage you have been quietly writing off. Catch the writing-off. Refuse it. Reach instead for the verb the Spirit has put in you — hope. Pray for that brother, that situation, that prodigal, that friend. And keep praying, and keep hoping, and keep showing up, because the God who has been writing restoration stories across every generation is at work in this one too, and your hoping for it is the love verse 7 is calling you into.