SO MUCH ABOUT our future is uncertain, unpredictable. We may have goals and plans, hopes and dreams. We may envision, if sometimes only vaguely, where we want our lives to go — our families, our relationships, our careers. But for many of us, on any given day or even for a season, planning for the future may seem like a luxury, an extravagance. We feel we have so little control over today that just making it in one piece to tomorrow is challenging enough.

But what if we could predict the future?

What if today was uncertain, but tomorrow was not? Would it change anything about how we interpret our present circumstances? Would it change what was important to us, help us make different choices, prompt us to live differently?

This is the nature of what the Bible means by hope. We typically use the word to describe things that are little more than a wish. When I’m confident about the future, I say, “I know things will work out.” But to say “I hope things will work out” instead expresses uncertainty; I know the outcome I want, but doubt whether it will actually happen.

Biblically, however, faithful hope means having confidence in whatever future God has promised, a confidence that often makes a difference in the decisions we make now. Think back, for example, to the disturbing story in Genesis 22 of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham did not understand why God would ask him to do such a thing, but obeyed anyway — and thankfully, God stayed his hand at the last moment. Listen to how the author of the book of Hebrews commends Abraham’s faith:

By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death. (Heb 11:17-19, NIV)

Abraham’s faith in that incredibly trying situation was inextricably tied to his hope, his trust in the promise of God for the future. For as the writer of Hebrews says, “faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” (Heb 11:1). Abraham believed what God said about things that hadn’t happened yet, and acted accordingly in the present. That’s faith. That’s hope.

I REALIZE THAT these are dangerous words. We are too easily tempted to rip Bible verses out of context, treat them as personal “promises,” then act as if the outcomes we want are guaranteed, ignoring the wise counsel of others. That is not what I mean by hope. Nor is it what the apostle John means when he writes the following:

All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. (1 John 3:3)

To what hope is he referring? We saw it in the previous verse: Jesus is coming back, we will see him as he is, and somehow, we will be like him, perhaps in our own resurrection bodies. Again, note how this promise of the future is different from what we sometimes take as biblical promises. It’s one thing to say that we’re confident in God’s promise of eternal life, or resurrection, or Jesus’ return. It’s another to read the Scripture as promising that God will give us whatever we’ve been praying for: the job we need, the relationship we want, the healing for which we long. That’s not to say that these things won’t happen, nor that we should stop praying for them. But it’s not the same thing as biblical hope.

Moreover, there are consequences to having the hope of being like Jesus. We don’t sit around passively waiting for an extreme spiritual makeover. Rather, when we see the righteousness and purity of Jesus for what it is, we should want to emulate that in our own lives.

For John’s readers, the word “purity” would have brought back mental associations of Old Testament purity laws. In the New Testament, however, maintaining purity is not about external religious ritual: it’s about internal moral transformation, which then results in outward behavior. Some people in John’s community apparently had odd ideas about sin; they may have claimed their own kind of spirituality, one that allowed them to do what they pleased. No, John says; if you have the hope of being pure like Jesus, there’s no time like the present. The future starts now.

Again, this language of “purity” can be dangerous too. It’s been more than 20 years, for example, since the publication of Joshua Harris’ I Kissed Dating Goodbye — but people are still experiencing the lingering and damaging aftershocks of the so-called “purity culture” the book embodied.

Whole books have been written on the subject, so I won’t dwell on it here. Suffice it to say that purity culture has nothing to do with what John says here, and indeed, often promotes its own misdirected hope: the false and unbiblical promise that your one perfect God-ordained soulmate is waiting out there somewhere. But that’s not Christian hope: that’s dressing up worldly romantic dreams in religious garb and treating them as divine promises.

WE NEED HOPE, real hope, biblical hope. It comes from knowing that even when everything seems to being going wrong, the day will come when Jesus will return as promised to make everything right. It comes from believing that we will share in his resurrection and become all that we were meant to be.

So by all means, keep praying for the things you need and want God to do in your life now. But in the meantime, live toward the day that has actually been promised. Live now in a way that will invite Jesus to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” on the day that he returns.