Called to hope
By Marcel Rebiai
“. . . I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead . . .” Ephesians 1:18-20a
Do we really have hope? Are we truly a hope for others? Do we believe that God keeps His promises and achieves His goals in all of our lives? Even when we reach our limits it’s important that we recognise there are no hopeless cases for God, because hope is His very being. He is hope. Our lives were intended to grow ever deeper into God’s love, to increasingly come to know God’s salvation and who He is. Thus we will have hope for eternity.
Our hope lies in the fact that we are being transformed into Jesus’ image and this process will never be complete. If the transformation of our hearts ended with our death, it wouldn’t be enough. God is eternal and so we too will grow eternally into the image of His Son – this is my personal hope.
I would like to emphasize again that the anchor for our soul is the hope we have in God’s promises for ourselves, our friends, our congregations and families. People with hope have broad hearts and broad horizons. People with hope expect a lot from God. We can’t have hope while at the same time being narrow-minded and shut off, or being joyless and without peace. Therefore, we should adhere to our confession of hope and abandon ourselves to its reality.
This devotional is taken from the book To See God by Marcel Rebiai. If you would like to order your own copy, please email us here, [email protected].
Marcel Rebiai is a board member of Revive Israel, and is inspiration for our community. Marcel was born in Algiers in 1953. He came to Switzerland as a war orphan and received faith in Jesus in his youth, which changed his life and made him a messenger of God’s love in Jesus. Since then, he has been faithfully working for the building of the community of Messiah. Marcel is the founder of the “Community of Reconciliation”, an organization that works for reconciliation between Jews and Arabs based on God’s forgiveness and love in Christ. Marcel teaches in various settings around the world about the love that God revealed to us in Jesus, a love that enables reconciliation. Marcel has been living in Jerusalem for the last 30 years, is married to Regula, and has four children and eleven grandchildren.
