The Apostle Peter's Experience With Biblical Hope

This is an excerpt from my paper on Biblical Hope, for Methods of Biblical Change.

My definition of Biblical hope is: a confident anticipation that God will keep his promises, thus providing the way to joyfully and confidently continue forward in any circumstance.

I hope this is a profitable read. God bless!

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...Because of human weakness, every believer will falter in his faith and struggle with maintaining biblical hope from time to time. If hope were merely an understood, never-lacking property of the Christian walk, then the Bible would not speak so frequently about the issue. The human soul is helpless, and desperately longs for hope. As has been said before, Christ offers this hope. To encourage the believer in his quest for hope, in the gospel of Matthew there is an example of hope acquired, lost, and restored – the plight of Peter walking on the water. This story, recorded in Matthew 14:22-33, is extremely relevant as an example of how focus on Christ and His promises relates to biblical hope.
When Peter realized that it was Jesus that the disciples saw walking on the water, he called out and said “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water (v. 28).” After receiving the Lord’s command to come, Peter left the boat and walked on the water to meet Jesus. This was accomplished by a radically focused faith on Jesus! It is evident that focus was essential in this endeavor, because when Peter began to focus on the wind he faltered and began to sink, crying out to Jesus (v.30). In this moment, Peter was faced with a choice of focus – of hope. Would he focus on his inability, or on Christ’s sufficiency? Would he sink to his death, or cry out to the Lord? The next verse says that Jesus immediately reached out and lifted Peter up, saying to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” In this brief story, we see an example of how vitally important focus on the Savior is to maintaining biblical hope. The progression of Peter’s acquiring, loss, and restoration of hope is as follows: 1) Peter saw the Lord and had faith, 2) This faith carried Peter through an impossible situation, 3) Peter lost his focus on Christ and instead focused on his surroundings and personal inability (placing him in great danger), 4) Peter looked again to Jesus for hope, and 5) Hope was immediately restored.

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