Unfettered Hope

  I've had a few books that I've been reading for months that I'm trying to finish up before I start any new books.  This was one, Christopher Wright's doorstop The Mission of God is another.  I've loved every page of Wright's tome, and it's challenged how I read the Bible, but trying to read long books while you have an infant has proved challenging.

  In Unfettered Hope: A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society, Marva Dawn means to throw a cog in the machines of our lives, stopping everything so that we might take it apart, examine it and recognize how seamlessly we are all humming along without bothering to pay attention to the faith we profess.  She humbly submits that American Christianity is so tied up in hopes that are focused on this world, hopes of riches and power and fame and renown and respect and so many other things, that we have forgotten (or perhaps never truly learned) what it means to hope in God alone. Dawn proposes that are hopes are fettered, shackled by the world, and that faithful living means letting our hopes rest in God, where they are truly free.

  How should we do this?

  Dawn proposes we should die more.  And it's hard to disagree with her.

  The way forward, she writes, is to give up on ourselves, to recognize how badly we fail, to acknowledge our guilt, and then, freed by the unfettered hope of forgiveness and the promise of God's new future (already begun), we rise from that death to ourselves into newness of life, filled with Joy and Hope and thereby equipped for devotion to loving God and the neighbor.


  Dawn is bold enough to believe that being a Christian ought to transform the way we live.  It ought to change us, to have an effect on every single part of our lives, so that we don't get so caught up in the world's struggles and turmoil, but that our eyes are set upon God and the future we have in him.

  The thing I love about this book is that Dawn follows that spiritual focus with an earthy action plan--our eyes focused on God ought then to lead us back into our community, to love those that surround us, to work for justice and peace.  Freed from the pressure to accumulate and succeed based on the world's standards, we are then free to love and serve the world with passionate abandon, loving our neighbor and trusting that we live within God's grace.  There is no need to be concerned about falling short, about running out, about being unworthy.  God has defeated every fear we could have, freeing us to live for His glory.

  We need not fear.  Only hope.