In 1971, marketing executive Harvey Gabor gathered a group of teens and 20-somethings from around the world on a beautiful Italian hillside to film an advertisement for Coca-Cola.® The jingle-based song “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony)” anchored the ad. (Check out the original release on YouTube. Lots of shiny, happy faces!) Coke spent $250,000 to promote global harmony, an unheard-of amount for an advertisement in the ‘70s—a whopping $1,864,303 adjusted for inflation in 2023 (dollartimes.com).
Gabor’s answer to cultural chaos? “Coke—it’s the real thing.” That’s a lot of pressure to put on a carbonated beverage!
I was a teenager in the ‘70s. I remember seeing knockoff red T-shirts that had Jesus written in the Coca-Cola script with “The Real Thing” as the tagline. I don’t know who created that shirt, but they knew the culture was grasping at straws if a soft-drink ad made them feel more hopeful.
Yes, our culture perpetually grasps at straws to fill the emptiness in the world. We quickly memorize a catchy jingle and crave the temporary fix of the product it cleverly hawks. But superficial solutions and wishful thinking never have, nor will ever match the depth of the void. Here’s why:
The core answer to empty—yours, mine, and the world’s—is not hope as wishful thinking or an emotion, but Hope as a person.
What the world needs now—and has always needed for real peace and satisfaction—is Jesus! The Apostle Paul began his first letter to Timothy with a joyful, affirming, trust-filled greeting:
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope, to Timothy my true son in the faith: Grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord (1 Timothy 1:1-2).*
Did you catch the real thing unveiled in verse 1 and its links in verse 2? Our hope is placed on a person, and that person, Jesus, is placed in us. Hope is the person of Jesus, and we get grace, mercy, and peace with Him.
Backfilled Holes
When my mother was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer in her 50s, walking with her through those long days and nights was excruciating. Although I had a supportive church family, and an unbelievably courageous wife and compassionate daughter by my side, the situation still felt empty.
I remember calling Mom one Sunday before I left for church. She was having one of her lowest days, and it crushed me. I went to the altar that morning to beg God to heal her. Almost immediately, I heard His words in my heart, clearer than I had ever heard Him: Charlie, My grace is sufficient. I immediately perked up and exclaimed, “Mom is going to live!” God’s immediate response was, That’s not what I said, Charlie; I said, “My grace is sufficient.”
I really didn’t know what to make of God’s rebuttal, but I left the altar that morning with a truth cemented in my spirit: The situation wasn’t empty; God, my Father, my Hope, was already there. I recognized God’s words as those He spoke to the Apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9a: But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’”
What was Paul’s takeaway from God’s declaration?
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong (vv. 9b-10).
And with that reframe-life statement, Paul dismissed the perception of weakness, insults, hardships, persecutions, and difficulties as empty places. Why? Because God backfills those places with the strength and hope of Jesus.
My mom passed away a few months after my altar conversation with God, but I was a different person walking through those days. Yes, the whole situation still hurt deeply, but I was centered and more hopeful in that emptiness than at any other time in my life.
That encounter with God made me a better husband, father, pastor, and man because I knew that Jesus had not abandoned me—and never would. He walked with me through that dark place, and my future was secure because of Him.
Start at the Beginning
No matter how empty or dark circumstances in your life feel, you are not alone. Never have been. Never will be. How do I know this? The first five words of the Bible prove it. Genesis 1:1-3 dramatically tells us:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
Those first five words of the Bible are profound and full of hope because they substantiate that nothing preceded God. Nothing. And those five words also set the scene for the description of the earth as “formless and empty.” Don’t miss this revelational truth: God created the empty. Therefore, God precedes the empty.
But don’t stop there, because the next words in Genesis 1 are the ones that radiate the presence of hope: “and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
The earth was empty of earthly stuff, yet it was brimming with God’s presence. He filled it up! God’s initial creative force was activated by His hovering. He was everywhere. In every crevice and corner. God filled the empty with Himself and then continued His creative work with four spectacular, straightforward words: “Let there be light!”
God was speaking into the utter, empty darkness He had created and fully occupied. That’s power!
The Magnitude of God
From Genesis to Revelation, the entire Gospel story is about God transforming what we perceive as empty into full. In Romans 4:17, the Apostle Paul described God as the One “who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.”
Empty has always been the best frame by which to grasp the magnitude of God. Our enemy, Satan, leverages empty situations to accentuate our frailty and minuteness. God, however, frames Himself in our emptiness to allow us to see Him in His proper maximum scope. This core truth reveals the dynamic difference between minuteness-minded Satan and our glorious, ends-of-the-earth God: Satan uses emptiness to fixate on our size; God uses emptiness to frame His size.
Facing situations we would describe as empty is inevitable. There are few exceptions when empty is a good thing or doesn’t hurt. No one wants an empty package, an empty bank account, or an empty gas tank. Something is empty after it is used up. Empty is when what we face drains our available resources without changing the result. The feeling of emptiness spawns expressions like “I’ve hit rock bottom” and “There’s no way out,” which lead to other phrases like “I quit” and “I give up.”
When you feel that way, you can’t trust your eyes or even your ability to reason through situations. Instead, you have to trust the truth:
Empty is an illusion. Hope is always present with an ever-present God.
From Genesis to Revelation, the entire Gospel story is about God transforming what we perceive as empty into full.
The Power of Empty Symbols
Before the cross was a Christian symbol, it was a Roman tool. Crucifixion was the prime execution method of the Romans because it killed “two birds” with three nine-inch iron nails.
First, crucifixion killed the person. One iron nail went into the left wrist, another went into the right wrist, and another went into the person’s overlapping feet. Those three bone-splitting nails supported the entire weight of the individual. When someone could no longer endure the pain required to stand, the lungs would collapse under the pressure of the diaphragm, and the individual would suffocate. This method of execution killed individuals and their reputations, marking them as defeated criminals or frauds, thus the “second bird.”
The crucifixion of Jesus completely reversed both aspects of defeat: defamation and death. The religious rulers tolerated Jesus’ miracles but went berserk over His claims to be able to forgive someone’s sin. Jesus’ death sentence was pronounced based on His claim to be God, which was heresy by their standards. The Jewish rulers were counting on the crucifixion to put an end to Jesus and His claims.
But this defamation case would ultimately be reversed because Jesus’ blood did more than run down that cross, stain a rock, and sink into the dirt. His blood washed away the sins of the world. His blood gave the world hope. The power of the cross of Christ isn’t in the hewn wood, its craftsmanship, or even its shape.
The power of the cross is in its emptiness.
Christianity is the only faith system whose founder willingly died for His followers. Take note: Jesus isn’t a martyr who died for a cause. Jesus is our Savior who died for us. Yet He didn’t stay on the cross. And that’s why the cross is empty. Someone took down His body and placed it in a borrowed tomb. He remained in the tomb longer than on the cross, but not much longer. He hung on the cross on Friday and entered locked rooms on Sunday. Jesus stayed on the cross long enough to defeat sin, and He remained in the tomb long enough to conquer death! Once again, God flipped Satan’s intentions from vacuous and empty to full of hope. It has been that way since Genesis.
I was with my mom when she drew her last breath. I wasn’t sure I would be able to handle her final moments. Yet I wanted to be there. There were no bright lights. She didn’t stare into a corner of the room and say she saw Jesus; she even struggled to take her last breath. That was hard to watch. The easier part was when she finished breathing. I had peace then, knowing that she was with God.
I immediately felt the physical loss of my mother; it was a real emotion. But I also knew that her last exhale with me was partnered with a fresh inhale in the physical company of Jesus, her Hope! Paul explained how these emotions of grief and joy coexist for the follower of Christ:
Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
Without the emptiness of the cross and the tomb, this paradox of emotions cannot exist. An empty cross and an empty tomb are the consummation—the seal of authenticity—of all that God promised Israel in the Old Testament. And from that time forward, the emptiness of those two symbols is the reservoir of our hope.
The sooner you come to this conclusion, the sooner you will discover hope hanging out in the corner of whatever place you find yourself! In 2 Corinthians 4:6-12, Paul wrote:
For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.
We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
What looks like and feels like empty circumstances is counteracted by the power of the hope of Christ living inside of us. The hope of Christ exerts more pressure from the inside out than the circumstances from the outside in. I can best illustrate this from something my dad taught me as a 12-year-old at the gas station he owned in New Egypt, New Jersey. From time to time, I would go with Dad on road-service calls. He always carried a small toolbox, a full gas can, jumper cables, and a portable air tank.
My first physics lesson came from that air tank. Dad taught me that once the air pressure inside the portable tank equals the air pressure inside the tire, no more air can enter the tire. Why? Because the air pressure pushing out neutralizes the air pressure pushing in. This physics lesson has always been an excellent visual for me. The Hope that resides inside us has the power to push back all forms of emptiness trying to force its way in from the outside!
On the night of His arrest, Jesus told His disciples, “In this world, you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). It doesn’t take much effort to hear Jesus’ words like this: “In this world, you will face what appears empty, but I have overcome more than your empty; I have overcome the source of empty, so take hope.”
Jesus is moved with compassion when we wrestle with the emotions of emptiness, but He offers us more than a pep talk. Jesus removes the source of our emptiness.
*All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version.
Charlie Weir, D.Min., is the lead pastor of Gateway Franklin Church in Franklin, Tennessee. This article is excerpted from his book Hope in Empty Places (Pathway Press, 2023). Visit pathwaypress.org to buy a copy of the book.