Today we look at a third fruit of hope, namely, boldness. The fourth and final fruit of hope next week will be endurance. You can see immediately why I think that boldness is a fruit of hope. Paul says that because of his hope, he is very bold.
Christian hope is the cause of boldness in the Christian life.
If you are not bold in your witness, if you are not courageous and risk-taking in your ventures of righteousness, if you are not open and straightforward in your speech, it may be that your hope is defective. Perhaps you are hoping in the wrong things to make your future happy. Perhaps you have never really thought seriously about the relationship between the strength of your hope and the boldness of your service to Christ. And to answer these two questions we need to get through at least some of the fog of confusion that surrounds this chapter. So what I propose to do is, first, to glance at the OT background.