Friends, we've come a long way together.
Ten posts ago, I started with a simple question: "Is the gospel of Jesus Christ as big as Paul seems to think it is?"
Since then we've listened to Paul's sweeping language about all things reconciled in Christ. We've walked through Old Testament fire imagery that wounds in order to heal. We've wrestled honestly with Jesus' warnings about Gehenna and with the hard word aionios. We've looked over the shoulders of Gregory of Nyssa and a company of early fathers who dared to hope further than most of us were taught to hope. We've stood at the gates of the New Jerusalem — and noticed that they never close. We've pushed on the free will question and found that the God of Scripture is not so easily boxed in as a love that finally shrugs and gives up. And we've held the second death and "all things new" side by side and refused to let one cancel the other.
Now we are here.
And the question I want to close with is not "Have we proven our case?" I'll let you be the judge of that. The question I want to close with is:
If this is true — if God really is that good, if His purposes really are that large, if His love really does pursue that relentlessly — how then shall we live?
Because I believe that the Larger Hope is not just a doctrine for theologians to debate. It is a way of inhabiting the world. It is an orientation of the heart that touches everything — how you pray, how you grieve, how you evangelize, how you forgive, how you rest.
1. We worship differently
When you believe that God's heart toward His creation is one of determined, patient, seeking love — when you believe He is making all things new and means it — worship changes.
It is no longer primarily about managing your standing before a God who might finally write you off. It becomes gratitude. It becomes wonder. It becomes the response of a person who has begun to see how vast and how deep and how high the love of God actually is.
Paul, who understood the Larger Hope as well as anyone, ends his great meditation on God's purposes in Romans 9–11 not with a doctrinal summary, but with an eruption:
"Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!… For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen." — Romans 11:33, 36
Paul didn't arrive at a smaller doxology by wrestling with the breadth of God's plan. He arrived at a bigger one. I want that for you.
2. We grieve differently
This one is personal to me.
If you have ever stood at a graveside and wondered — really wondered, in the sleepless hours — about someone who died without making a clear peace with God, then you know the particular anguish of that question. Did the church hand you a tight, sure answer about their fate? Or did it leave you with something that felt more like a door slammed in a corridor you desperately wanted to walk down?
The Larger Hope does not tell us that none of it matters or that judgment is just a word. But it does tell us that the God who meets our loved ones beyond the veil is the same God we have met in Jesus — the One who goes after the lost sheep until He finds it, who came not to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved.
We can grieve honestly, and we can grieve with a hope that does not embarrass us. We do not have to live as if the last word belongs to anything other than a Love that makes all things new.
3. We pray with more audacity
The Larger Hope gives you more to pray, not less.
If God's heart is already bent toward the restoration of all things, then when you pray for the prodigal in your family, for the friend who walked away from faith, for the enemy whose name still makes your stomach clench — you are not trying to talk God into something He is reluctant to do. You are agreeing with Him. You are joining the prayer of the Son who stood over Jerusalem and wept, who from the cross prayed for the very people who were driving the nails.
Pray for the worst people you know, and dare to mean it. Pray as though the Father is more eager to save them than you are.
Because He is.
4. We evangelize more urgently — not less
"But wait," I can hear someone saying. "If everyone is eventually saved anyway, why bother sharing the gospel?"
I want to answer this honestly, because it is a fair question.
The Larger Hope is not the announcement that nothing you do matters and all roads lead home automatically. The suffering of sin is real. The damage of a life lived in darkness is real. The difference between a life shaped by grace and a life spent running from it — that difference is real, and it is costly.
The gospel is still the most urgent message in the world. Not because God will ultimately give up on people if we don't reach them in time. But because now matters. This life matters. The healing that God wants to bring — the freedom, the dignity, the joy, the wholeness — He wants to bring it here, through us, now.
The Larger Hope does not make me a quieter witness. It makes me a more joyful one.
5. We forgive as people who actually believe God is making all things new
If God is making all things new — if His goal is the restoration of every broken thing — then when someone wrongs me, I am called to live as though that person is not their sin. They are a person for whom Christ died, a person the Father is moving toward, a person who is not yet fully who they were made to be.
Forgiveness, grounded in the Larger Hope, is not the pretense that wrong things did not happen. It is the faith that wrong things do not get the final definition. It is the refusal to let another person's worst moment be the last word I say about them.
I can leave the settling of accounts to the One who knows far more than I do, whose judgment is far more accurate than mine, and who has promised to make all things right. That frees me from the impossible burden of carrying it myself.
6. We rest — really rest
Perhaps this is the one I feel most in my bones.
For years, I lived with a low-level, low-grade anxiety about the fate of nearly everyone I loved. It was not debilitating. I didn't talk about it much. But it was there — a quiet background hum of dread that said: "The story might end with most of it lost. Most of them gone. Most of creation unredeemed."
The Larger Hope did not take away the mystery. I still don't know how all of this works, and I say that openly. But it did something to that background hum. It quieted it.
Because if God is the kind of God I have come to believe He is — if He really is making all things new, if His love really does not fail — then the story is in better hands than mine. I can put it down.
And when I do, I find that the weight of grief is real but bearable, because I am not grieving as those who have no hope. I am grieving with a hope that the God who wept at the grave of Lazarus and then called him out — that God is not finished yet.
A word of honesty before I close
Friends, I want to be straightforward with you about something. I have not resolved every question in this series. There are passages that remain genuinely hard. There are arguments on the other side that I take seriously. There are people I deeply respect who read the same Scriptures and land in different places.
I am not asking you to believe exactly what I believe. I am asking you to keep the question open. I am asking you not to let fear or tradition or habit foreclose a conversation that Scripture itself seems to want to have.
I am asking you to look at the face of God as revealed in Jesus — not the face of a cosmic judge whose love has limits and whose patience has an expiration date, but the face of the Father who runs to the prodigal, the Shepherd who goes after the one lost sheep, the Woman who turns the house upside down to find the single lost coin.
Look at that face. And then ask yourself:
Is the Larger Hope too big for this God? Or is it, perhaps, just barely big enough?