DAY 319 - The Helmet of Hope

I Thessalonians 5:8-11 (NIV) ⁸ But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, putting on faith and love as a breastplate, and the hope of salvation as a helmet. ⁹ For God did not appoint us to suffer wrath but to receive salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ. ¹⁰ He died for us so that, whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him. ¹¹ Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing.

This passage speaks of wearing our hope of salvation as a helmet. Helmets are worn to keep us from getting our heads crushed or injured, and so this is a perfect metaphor of what hope is for – to keep us from being crushed by the blows that life will deal us. When problems come back again and again, when we experience failure and defeat again and again, that is when a sense of hopelessness begins to swell up within us. For instance, in our marriage we can deal fairly well with the day to day normal difficulties and tensions that may arise. But when some problem crops up again and again, almost on a regular basis, year after year after year, a deadening sense of hopelessness begins to creep into our marriage.

Our sense of hopelessness may come from financial indebtedness, or from grief … or the sense of hopelessness may flood us from every direction. It could be our temper, a rut we are in, smoking, eating, tardiness … anything we’ve tried to improve in our lives without success until we finally say “I guess I am hopeless. Why try? I’m caught. There is no way out, no possibility for any answer or solution.” Don’t believe it. Don’t settle for that kind of life. Put on the hope of salvation as a helmet. We don’t have to be crushed by the blows life deals us. God isn’t through with our problems, our failure, our defeats. God isn’t through with us yet. The hope of salvation gives us an expectant stance toward life. We do not know what is going to happen, but defeat is not certain. Failure is not certain. The only certainty we have in life is God, and God isn’t through with us yet.

The life of hope is a risky life, and in some ways an anxious life because we never know what tomorrow holds, except that God will be there, continuing to complete the work begun in Jesus. That may be why many of us settle for a life of hopelessness, for hopelessness offers us a great deal of security. Life is very predictable for the hopeless person, the misery of the future is certain. “I know that my happiness cannot last. I know death is the end of life. I know my life can never get any better. The blow will fall, it is only a matter of time.” Can you sense the morbid kind of security that goes with a hopeless life? But for that security we pay a high, high price .. the price of life itself.

Can we put on the hope of salvation as a helmet, know that God isn’t through yet, that God has much, much more life, joy, freedom in store for us in the future than we are now experiencing? Armed with our hope can we square up, face up to repeated failure, disappointment, pain, and know that the blows will fall but that they cannot crush us? We must wear the hope of salvation as a helmet. Can we leave the security of our hopelessness and step out into the risky life of hope?

From a sermon preached by Henry Dobbs Pope December 9, 1973

© Rhonda Hinkle Mitchell (Broyles)