Everyone needs hope. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said that, ‘To live without hope is to cease to live.” And psychologists will tell you that a lack of hope is where depression comes from. Yet, what is hope? Hope is the combination of two things: desires and expectations. Hope is not just wishing for something to happen; it’s living with the expectation that it will happen. Unfortunately, the English word hope has come to mean just wishful thinking. So, you’ll hear people say, “Expect the worst, but hope for the best.” But the biblical concept of hope is a confident […]

In the movie the “Princess Bride,” Vezzini, one of the main villains, kept saying, “Inconceivable!” One of his partners, Inigo Montoya, finally had enough and said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” And the same thing could perhaps be said about the word repentance. People keep using that word, but it doesn’t mean what many think it means. Many people think of repentance as simply a change of behavior, and so whenever they hear the word repentance they conjure up in their mind a picture of some cranky street preacher […]