The Hope Of Glory Has An Address

The doors are thrown open at both ends because it is warm and because the caretaker gave up on the doors years ago, and people are arriving in twos and threes and the noise is the good kind.

Somebody is trying to put out an extra row and being told there is no need and putting it out anyway.

She is fifty-six.

Nine years. She uses the word manageable about it and she means it, and the word has done a lot of work for her because it stops conversations that she does not have the energy for.

And she has a habit, and the habit is the whole thing, and she has never described it to anybody because she is not sure it would sound like anything.

She looks ahead. Constantly. Whenever anybody speaks about glory, or heaven, or the resurrection, or what God is going to do, something in her turns and faces a horizon, and she scans it, and there is nothing on it, and there has been nothing on it for nine years, and she keeps looking anyway because that is where she has been told to look.

It is not despair. It is more like a person who has been given a direction and has faced that way for so long that the facing has become the posture.

If you have been scanning a horizon for years, you know how automatic it has become, and you know that nothing has ever appeared on it.

Read the two words before the phrase

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened.

What this costs is not the nine years, which are manageable, which is a word doing a great deal of work. It is the posture. It costs you a decade of facing away from where you are, which is a strange way to live and which nobody around you can see you doing. It costs the word manageable, which ends conversations and which is now most of what people know about your situation. It costs you the arriving, in the sense that you are in a room with the doors open at both ends and part of you is out on a horizon. And it costs you a habit you have never described, because you are not sure it would sound like anything at all.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your nine years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if the scanning has gone somewhere darker, as far as wanting the horizon to arrive sooner than it is going to, tell one living person today. Your doctor, whoever is putting out the extra row, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who put out a row nobody asked for.

Now, Colossians 1, and read the two words in front of the famous phrase.

To whom God would make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles; which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.Colossians 1:27

Which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Everybody quotes the last three words. The two before them are where the address is.

In you. Paul is answering a question about where something is, and he has just called it a mystery, which in his vocabulary means a thing that was hidden and has now been disclosed. And the disclosure, the thing that was not previously known and is being announced here, is a location.

The hope of glory is not described as a distance or a date. It is described as a person, in a place, and the place is the reader.

You are the address in that sentence. Colossians 1:27 says Christ in you, the hope of glory, and the Holy Spirit is the one Paul names elsewhere as the seal on exactly that indwelling.

Now, why the horizon habit is so hard to break, and it is worth being fair about it. Scripture does speak about a day and a revealing and things that are ahead, and it is not wrong to look. A great deal of the New Testament is written forward.

But the specific phrase you have been reaching toward, the hope of glory, is given an address in that verse, and the address is not out there. Which means the thing you have been scanning for has not been failing to appear. It has been somewhere else the whole time, and it was disclosed as a mystery precisely because nobody would have guessed the location.

You have never once been looking in the place Paul named. That is written into Colossians 1:27, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee of the indwelling that verse is about.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because nine years of good talk has already happened in that hall.

It does not tell you the nine years are changing, and it makes no promise about your body, and I will not predict it, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not make the indwelling a reward for holding out. Colossians 1:27 says nothing about endurance and names nothing you have qualified for, and the Holy Spirit was given rather than awarded. It is called a mystery made known, which is a thing announced rather than a thing earned.

And it is not compensation. It was not given in exchange for anything you lost, and it is not a substitute for the day that is genuinely coming. It is additional and both are real.

You were never being asked to earn an indwelling. Scripture calls it a mystery disclosed, and the same Spirit who seals it is the one who carries that into a hall with the doors open at both ends.