DO YOU CONSIDER yourself to be a “hopeful” person? What does that word mean to you? Many of us would equate being hopeful with being optimistic. Pessimists expect the worst, but optimists trust that good things generally happen. Pessimists see every dark cloud; optimists see the silver linings. Pessimists see the glass as half empty; optimists see the same glass as half full. And when someone is optimistic by nature, they come across as having a cheerier disposition overall.

But optimism is not the same thing as hope — at least not the biblical sense of hope. Christians are not called to be generally optimistic but specifically hopeful. Christian hope has a specific content and object: the future God has promised to his people. We are to live with the confident expectation that the story will turn out the way God has declared through Scripture, and that expectation changes what we strive for and how we live.

Paul was just such a hopeful person, despite everything he suffered for the gospel, and he taught a hope-filled perspective throughout his letters. To the Corinthians, for example, he insisted on the importance of continuing to believe in a future resurrection, saying, “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor 15:19, NIV). It’s as if to say, “Why am I and my colleagues doing all this, if we have no hope of resurrection?”

To the church in Rome, Paul wrote:

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. (Rom 8:22-25)

It’s a vivid metaphor. Just as a pregnant woman must bear the excruciating pain of childbirth in anticipation of the joy that is to come, so too must God’s people and all of creation groan as they await the promised future. That future is one in which our adoption by the Father will be full and complete, and our mortal bodies will be redeemed in resurrection. It is in such an invisible hope, Paul wrote, that believers are saved. In this life, we will suffer, but we can constantly, doggedly look to the future and bear that suffering in hope.

And near the end of the first chapter of his letter to the Colossians, Paul spoke of the “glorious riches” of the “mystery” of the gospel, the unsearchable purposes of God now revealed. He summarized that revelation in one pithy phrase: “Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col 1:27).

As believers, we are in Christ, and Christ is in us. We are joined with him in his death and resurrection. And as Paul wraps up the theological section of his letter, he counsels the Colossians to ignore the outside-in of earthly religion and cultivate the inside-out of true Christian hope instead:

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Col 3:1-4)

True, Paul doesn’t use the word “hope” here. But what he says is of a piece with Colossians 1:27. Again, as believers, we are those who are in Christ, and those in whom Christ dwells. We have died and been raised with Christ; he is now our very life. That’s our present spiritual reality.

But in the present, we cultivate a hopeful mindset that thinks about heavenly and eternal things, that looks eagerly toward the promised future. This is not, as the snarky saying goes, a matter of being so “heavenly-minded” that we become “no earthly good.” Quite the contrary: Paul will spend the bulk of chapter 3 describing exactly how being heavenly-minded should result in transformed relationships. That’s because to seek the things above, and thus to live in hopeful expectation, puts everything in eternal perspective, even our troubles.

We are living, if you will, in a story that ends in glory. Indeed, the biblical narrative is suffused with glory from end to end. In the Old Testament, the glory of God is such a persistent theme that God is known as “the God of glory” (e.g., Acts 7:2). John tells us that the eternal Word then took on human flesh and came to live among us in glory (John 1:14). Anticipating his death, Jesus prayed that the Father’s name would be glorified through it; in response, God thundered, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again” (John 12:28). As he told his disciples of the coming destruction of the Jerusalem temple and all the troubles that would come, Jesus also promised that the Son of Man would come “in a cloud with power and great glory” (Luke 21:27).

But even now, as we anticipate that day ourselves, we are being made by the Holy Spirit into the glorious image of Christ himself. Paul teaches the Corinthians that the old covenant under Moses came in glory, but the new covenant in Jesus is even more glorious. Moses had to wear a veil after speaking with God, because being in the presence of God’s glory made his face shine, and the ancient Israelites were afraid. But under the new covenant and the ministry of the Spirit, everything has changed. As translated in the Common English Bible, Paul tells the Corinthians:

All of us are looking with unveiled faces at the glory of the Lord as if we were looking in a mirror. We are being transformed into that same image from one degree of glory to the next degree of glory. This comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Cor 3:18)

Thus, we look forward in hope to the day in which Christ will return. In the meantime, we set our hearts and minds on heavenly and eternal things, and in the process, we are transformed by the Spirit bit by bit to look more like Jesus. We are being made more and more glorious, more and more like the one who himself will return in glory.

And as we’ll see, Paul seems to think that once we understand all that, our lives will be transformed in practical ways from the inside out.