When special occasions come, people wish one another a good future in earthly and heavenly lives. Preachers give messages holding out prospects of miraculous interventions from God that will make life healthy and prosperous. 'Prophets' promise breakthroughs that will change our life around. Then there are 'positive-focused' people who filter out every hint of what they consider as negative and keep away from people who bring bad news. Everybody seems to accept these as a part of life!
But we can't forever keep ourselves within this Utopian bubble we have created with our imagination! Any moment reality will come in and burst it! It feels nice to imagine good things and hope that everything will be good because none of us likes pain or sorrow. But pain and sorrow are a real part of this world, and whatever 'faith' we try to exercise it doesn't eliminate pain. We'll have to wait for eternity, only when pain and sorrow will disappear entirely (Re.21:4).
In the meantime, those who put such false hopes in front of people are like those who dangle a carrot in front of a donkey to urge it to go forward – it always remains out of reach! For people who think better than a donkey, disappointment brings disillusionment and causes some to even turn away from God. So what have such preachers achieved? They have retained their popularity but hurt the hearers. What if they had prepared people to face hardship and to exercise faith in the right way?
Jesus was a realist. Look at some of the things He said. "Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me" (Mt.5:11). "In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world" (Jn.16:33). "But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you" (Lk.6:27,28). If we think that God is going to work in such a way that we don't face any trouble, we are going to be shocked.
Instead of giving people a false hope and trying to live in a world of fantasy isn't it good for us to be equipped spiritually and mentally so that when problems do come we can face them in a better way without collapsing? For example, to know that whatever we face, we will have our Saviour standing with us (Mt.28:20)? Can't we take comfort from knowing that even in the most difficult times there is a way God can provide for us to deal with it (1Co.10:13)? Even if we fall, God can make sure that we don't lose it totally (Ps.37:23,24). God will stand by to ensure that no problem becomes too much for us (Ps.66:12). He will cause all things to work together to bring out some more Christ-likeness in us (Ro.8:28,29).
As years pass by and we get nearer to the end of this world it is going to become worse on the earth and tougher for Christians (2Ti.3:1). Instead of trying to build a fools' paradise why don't we encourage and strengthen one another to overcome?