May 30, 2004

"But now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love."  1 Corinthians 13:13 NAS

We hear a lot about faith and love but not too much about hope.  Of course, as it says here, love is the greatest of the three so we should spend most of our time on the subject of love, but we also need to understand the role of hope as one of these three great spiritual foundations.  Notice it says these three abide.  These three are things that will endure and remain.  Faith, hope and love are enduring spiritual forces.

When we’ve compared faith and hope, we’ve downplayed hope because we know that our hope has no substance without faith.  We read in Hebrews 11:1 that faith is the substance of things hoped for, so we have emphasized the need to add faith to our hope—and rightfully so.  But we can’t forget the role that hope plays and especially hope and love together.

Hope has to do with expectation and desire.  There has to be a desire and expectation for something before that something can occur.  Hope defines our dreams.  Look at what the Lord said in Habakkuk 2:2, "Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it."  Hope envisions the dream.

Where do we get hope from?  If we are faced with a problem we might have hope of relief.  We want to be free from the pain the problem is causing.  It might be physical pain from a sickness, it might be financial worries, it could be depression or family concerns etc.  Just like faith, we get Godly hope from hearing the Word of God.  Hope comes as we hear that relief is a possibility, and maybe not even a possibility, but a promise from a loving Father.  But this type of hope is reactive.  It’s in response to a problem.  While, in God’s design, hope was meant to be used more to take an initiative.

Hope can be more then the desire for relief.  It may be a desire for anything—a dream, a goal etc.  And if we want Godly, enduring hope, then we need to not only couple our hope with faith, we also need to couple our hope with love.  When we, out of a love for God, have a hope of pleasing Him then our hope becomes the powerful foundational stone that it was meant to be.  When our expectations and desires—or our hope—is in God and is defined by our love for God and the desire for His will to be done in our life, then that hope brings great joy to our lives.

Faith, hope and love together will endure because faith brings us victory, hope brings us joy, and love brings us peace, knowing that the victory we are experiencing is the will of God for us, and we haven’t gone against His will in our achievements.  Our goal as Christians should not be ‘success’ at all costs, but success as defined by the will of God for our lives and our desire of pleasing Him because of our love for Him.  Faith without hope, which comes from love, can be selfish in and of itself.  But when we truly love Him, our hope will be to please Him, and our faith will make it a reality.