Well, today is the day many Arkansans have been waiting on for months – the first Razorback football game of the season! As Hog fans, our emotions over the last nine months have gone from despair to apathy to mild interest to excitement to great anticipation, all culminating in a 6:30 p.m. kickoff tonight at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock. We are currently undefeated, we have lots of optimism and hope, and while Las Vegas thinks we’re going to win between four and five games this year, I’m extremely hopeful that it will be in the six-seven range at least!

Of course, hope only goes so far. After the first loss to a team we’re supposed to beat, or after a complete thrashing by a team that we thought we could at least hang with, all hope will be lost and despair will return. A well-worn phrase of any Razorback fan is, “On to _______ (insert next sport here). It seems as though our teams always let us down at some point, making it tough to be a fan.

Hope is an interesting thing; as long as we are hoping on anything here in this world, we will at some point be disappointed by an outcome. We can hope for a cool spell or hope that a particular person wins an election or hope that a store has our size in those shoes we’ve been wanting. Hope here in this world is a “maybe it will, maybe it won’t” kind of proposition. But hope, as it’s referenced in the Bible, is a completely different matter.

The word “hope” as seen throughout our Bible is not a “fingers-crossed” uncertainty; no, this word describes an enduring, settled confidence in the promises of God even when we are still waiting on the ultimate fulfillment of those promises. It’s a confident expectation for something good in the future. Here’s just a few examples from God’s Word:

Psalm 62:1-2, 5-6: I wait quietly before God, for my victory comes from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress where I will never be shaken. Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress where I will not be shaken.

Lamentations 3:22-24: The faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning. I say to myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”

Romans 8:18-25: Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will reveal to us later. For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope, the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay…We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. We were given this hope when we were saved. (If we already have something, we don’t need to hope for it. But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently.)

Hebrews 6:18-19: So God has given both his promise and his oath. These two things are unchangeable because it is impossible for God to lie. Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.

So, as we root on the Razorbacks tonight and hope that it’s not actually a contest in the fourth quarter, let’s remember that our hope in Christ will never fail us and never let us down. As Paul writes to the Romans, “I pray that God, the source of hope, will fill you completely with joy and peace because you trust in him. Then you will overflow with confident hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.”