How much time do you spend imagining a better future for yourself? I suspect it’s quite a bit. You think about when you will buy a new dress, or what life will be like after you have finished studying. You dream of the children you will have, the house you will build, or just the day when you will fit into your jeans again.

It’s just very human to imagine the future, and to be optimistic about what it holds. We call it hope.

But, in reality, the future on earth for each of us is most likely worse than the present! This bleak thought can be backed up by one simple fact: we are all headed for the grave. But before then, the vast majority of us will succumb to an illness, suffer a misfortune or (if we are lucky) find ourselves in a nursing home slowly fading into the background. We might manage a few highlights, a couple of ‘mountain top experiences’, a win here or there. Perhaps we’ll get to string out our successes over a few decades. But that’s about it. As the great wave of time overwhelms us, and the dreams drown, we wonder whether we matter, why we are suffering so much, and when it will all end.

Which is why the Bible consistently teaches us that the most liberating of human experiences is to imagine not your future, but the future of God’s creation. When you start to see yourself not as the central figure of the future, but as a beloved participant in God’s future, your present troubles become less depressing.

While your own pathway may be bleak, creation’s pathway is not. Your life is brief, short and usually painful; but the Lord’s plans are being fulfilled, and cannot be thwarted. They involve the end of pain, the defeat of death, the reign of peace, the pleasure of company, the satisfaction of plenty, the wealth of nations, cities of splendour, and the presence of God (all images from Revelation 21). The theme from Old Testament prophets to the close of Revelation is that God is bringing about a “new heavens and earth”, a cosmic renewal, and the biblical imagery of it is grand, peaceful and lovely.

Even so, little-ole-me is not left out: as “new creations” in Christ, we are being custom-fitted to be part of this wonderful future which God has begun and will complete. We start to live now, as followers of Christ, in a way suited to the coming new creation. We try to live as if we are home already.

Paul makes it plain to us that if the only hope we have in Christ is for a better life here and now, we are to be pitied (1 Cor 15:19). That’s not the deal; that’s not how life in this world plays out. All this talk of victorious living, greater blessing and prosperity—friends, we have to revisit it through the lens of Scripture. All we can expect now is to walk in the Way of the promised future.

The Bible’s message is simple: to have hope in the future, it needs to be less about you and more about what God is doing and your delight to be part of it. When you lift your eyes from your own situation to see what God is doing, it is incredible just how much hope can flood into a heart.