“There is one body and one Spirit; just as also you were called in one hope of your calling.” (Eph. 4:4)

What is your hope? Not hopes in this case but hope. What is your one real earnest hope? For many through the ages, it was for life eternal, for a real happy ending to the whole experience of life.

Many offers of help have been made over the centuries to mankind but only has a genuine outcome. When mankind fell in the garden, God immediately offered hope. Through the ages of prophets, priests, and kings God held out hope for humanity. He promised that help would come and when it did it would provide the reuniting of man and God that was so needed.

This hope included the Gentiles as well as the Jews which was a mystery to the Jews but was revealed at the right time to the world. Paul writes of this great mystery to the Galatians and says, …”to whom God willed to make known what is the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. Col 1:27-28 NASU

What is your hope? Our hope is one and the same. It is Christ in us. Not just Christ mind you but Christ inside us. Christ dwelling in us as his body.  Christ as the grace of God, the hope of the world appears to all men, but he only brings the hope of glory to those who he dwells within.

This is the point Paul has been making to the Ephesians. There is one body, and it is

Christ’s body and one Spirit and it is Christ’s Spirit, and there is one hope, and it is Christ in us. We were called by the gospel to be in Christ. To have Christ in us. It is the hope of our calling, and when we answer that calling and decide to follow Jesus and make him our savior, he will come into us and make us a part of his body, the church and will in that relationship provide us the hope of an eternal glory.

Look at this passage in Col 2:8-13 “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form,  and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority;  and in Him you were also circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, in the removal of the body of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ;  having been buried with Him in baptism, in which you were also raised up with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.” NASU

The body, the Spirit, the Hope, the Baptism are all in Christ in bodily form, and when we are in him, having been baptized into his death and resurrection, we are complete. Total unity exists in the oneness that is in Christ.

There is only one hope for us and for the world, and that one is Jesus the Messiah of God.