I’ve talked to so many people in recent months who are near despair. Especially leaders. Especially young adults. The world seems hopelessly broken. The church seems hopelessly broken. Institutions seem hopelessly stuck, resistant to sacrifice and change. Communities seem hopelessly divided and immature. Several young leaders in different settings have recently confided that everyone they know who has tried to “be the change” has ended up spiritually or emotionally damaged.
These conversations have been breaking my heart and weighing heavily on my mind. For those of us who carry vision for any kind of leadership in 2025, I think this very important to understand: the most fundamental crisis of our time is a crisis of hope. All the practical problems we face are secondary to this. Without hope, all possibilities are forfeit. Without hope, new generations of leaders do not rise. I am beginning to suspect that hope—building it, feeding it, strengthening it—may be the single most important leadership responsibility at this moment in time (and perhaps at any time).
But what do you do if your own hope is perilously low? Where does hope even come from?
The verse that first got me interested in serious Bible study as an angsty thirteen-year-old was Romans 5:3: “We even take pride in our problems, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” I remember reading these words and thinking, “What a strange statement. How could trouble possibly lead to be more hope? Doesn’t trouble usually take hope away?” Only now, after decades of experience with “trouble and endurance,” am I starting to grasp what Paul meant.
I went into ministry young, hot with passion and full of faith. I was ready to die for Jesus. I was full of ‘holy ambition’ for change. Truth be told, fruit has been thinner on the ground than I once expected. There have been a lot of nights of fishing that ended up with empty nets. The biggest surprise was not how resistant others were to change but my own resistance, how easy it has been to calcify myself. Taking up your cross daily is less glamorous—and far more tiring—than dying in a blaze of flames. I have never been a natural optimist, and I can’t say much has happened in the world or church over the past twenty years that has pleasantly surprised me.
But strange as it feels to say, I have never had more hope than I feel here in 2025. How can that be? I have been asking myself this question. Here’s what I know—it is not because anything within the circumstances themselves have given more cause for optimism. Rather, I suspect that as Paul suggested, trouble and endurance have been doing their God-appointed refining work.
Nothing I’m going to do will save the world, or the church. I’m clear on that now. Nothing you’re going to do will either. Hopes based in our own strength or insight or hard work or competence were never anything more than denial or delusion. But when, by the Spirit, false hope dies, real hope can finally begin.
God is going to save the world, and the church, in Jesus Christ. Christ is the one who began this good work. Christ is the one who will finish what he started. All true hope rests in him who is actually worthy of it and who will not disappoint it.
The sight-horizon of any human being who lives for a few decades is so very short, so very limited, as to give us little information about where we labor within the arc of the whole story. We have not been given any access to the grand timeline. What we have been given, by grace, is knowledge of the ending. This ending gives our hopes concrete shape. It fans our anticipation. It tells us what is worth investing in, laboring for, enduring for, dying for, no matter what chapter of the story we turn out to have been part of.
Giving up the delusions of false hope has ironically freed my life, my leadership, even my soul in a way I didn’t expect. I worry less, far less, about short-term outcomes that lack the context to be appropriately measured. It is enough to be faithful, and even playful, in the space between one resurrection and the restoration of all things.
All of my living, all of my dying, are seeds pressed into the ground of the kingdom that will be. The timing of spring’s coming, the turning of the seasons, is God’s alone to decide. But I believe Jesus when he says that nothing sown in him will be wasted. That is enough to tell me where my seeds are worth casting. The long winter nights between now and then can only make the hope glow brighter.
May God deliver you this year from illusion and false hope. And may true hope be reborn all the brighter for the darkness, as fierce and as resilient as the cross itself.
