Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote, “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.” Fortunately, most of us would disagree.

If you were to ask 10 people what hope is, you would probably get 10 different answers. According to Colossians 1, hope is the wellspring of faith and love. Hope is not just a realization of something in the future, but rather, it is something that radically changes the here and the now.

In 1965, a man by the name of Richard Wurmbrand testified before the US Senate’s Internal Security Subcommittee. Wurmbrand took off his shirt at that meeting to show the scars and burn marks on his body from years of torture. He had spent 14 years in Communist prisons in Romania and had been ransomed out of the country by Christians for $10,000. In his book, Tortured for Christ, Wurmbrand tells of the torture Christians endured in prison. The torturers broke 4 vertebrae in Wurmbrand’s back, as well as many other bones. He had 18 holes burned and cut in his body. He recalls times that he was put in a freezer until he was close to death only to be “thawed out” and returned again and again.

When asked how he endured  and resisted all the torture he experienced in his lifetime, Wurmbrand said, “if the heart is cleansed by the love of Jesus Christ, one can resist all tortures.” His focus on God’s love got him through 14 years of torture. Hope is living transcendent to your current condition; it is having an eternal perspective. It was through hope that Wurmbrand loved his tormentors and was not broken. Hope doesn’t prolong suffering, it perfects our love. Only when we hope can we live transcendent of our circumstance and love. Wurmbrand said, “God will judge us not according to how much we endured, but how much we could love.”