Monica Kirsch (’15), is a Lancaster Bible College Worship Arts graduate and content writer and member of the worship team at Calvary Church, Lancaster, Pa.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers 
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the Gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

– Emily Dickenson

When I was in college, I wore a ring with a single feather across the band. If, according to Emily Dickenson, “hope is the thing with feathers,” that feather served as a daily reminder for me to hold on to hope. But, if I’m being honest, I’m not sure I really knew what it meant to hope.

The Mirriam-Webster dictionary gives us a pretty straightforward definition for hope:

• “desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment, also: expectation of fulfillment or success”
• “someone or something on which hopes are centered”
• “something desired or hoped for”

In the Bible, however, there are countless Hebrew and Greek words that translate to our English word for “hope,” and their meanings vary. I believe this is where my ignorance originated.

The problem with our modern understanding of hope is that it too often has no real foundation. If we’re being truthful, most of our “hopes” are no more than “wishful thinking,” or “sentimental optimism.” But before we get too discouraged, this is where understanding biblical hope can open a whole new window to assurance.

Let’s take the book of Romans for example. No other book of the New Testament mentions hope more than the seventeen times the Apostle Paul mentions it in his letter to the Roman church. In fact, in the entirety of the Bible, only the Psalms mention hope more! What’s even more interesting is that, of those seventeen occurrences, five of them accompany hope with the words “waiting,” “patience,” or “endurance” (see Romans 3:3-5, 8:24, 12:12, and 15:4). To understand the correlation between these concepts, let’s consider the message of the gospel…

Continue reading this Easter devotional on the Calvary Church website…