I wonder what is the highest mountain that you have climbed. Perhaps Everest or K2 or Ben Nevis. Perhaps it is Pen y Fan in Wales, a tor on Dartmoor or Box Hill in Dorking.

Whatever it is, I am going to suggest that climbing all these mountains or hills has something in common. On the way up, you can only see the hardship, the struggle and what is immediately in front of you. But when you get to the summit, everything changes. The pain has gone and we see something new.

For many of us, this is a metaphor for our lives. So often we only see the problems ahead, but God wants to take us up to the summit. With the Holy Spirit as our Sherpa, he wants to show us something different. He wants to show us the eternal big picture, to broaden our horizons and to show us a new world without pain. He wants to give us hope.

This was the message that the Apostle Paul wrote to the house churches in Rome in the middle of the first century. To give them hope, he posed three rhetorical questions. Firstly, ‘If God is for us, who can be against us?’ That is, if the creator of the universe, the most powerful being known to exist, is on our side, what are we afraid of?

The Apostle Paul then switches his logic to a court of law. The second rhetorical question is, ‘Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen?’ It is a compelling question. You see, if God is the judge of all and he has declared us innocent, then who can call his sentence into question? No prosecutor dares to arrive.

Although all these words would have lifted the spirits of the early Christians, it was nonetheless true that they still faced hardship. This would include persecution, famine and physical attack. To this list, we could add today: global warming, drought, floods and the cost-of-living crisis. Paul’s answer is that these trials are only temporary because ultimately nothing can sever our relationship with God. Therefore, his third rhetorical question is, ‘What can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus?’

Yet today we live in a culture that has largely abandoned the idea of eternal hope. Instead, the modern assumption is that what you see is all there is because ‘you only live once’ (YOLO). This is not the message of the Bible.

Just as Moses stood on Mount Nebo and gazed into the promised land, God invites us to gaze into a new creation that lies ahead for us.

One day our resurrected toes will stand on solid ground in a renewed cosmos. No more death, dying, mourning or pain. No more global warming, storms and rumours of war.

In the meantime, this future hope should give us resilience for what lies directly in front of us and inspire us to lead bold, brave and adventurous lives, irrespective of our mountaineering skills.