From Hope to Faith

Good morning.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1).”

What do you hope for? Hope in this context hasn’t got the ‘hopeless’ meaning we often assign to it – ‘I hope it will happen’, but in my heart I actually don’t have much expectation. The Greek word for hope means having a glad expectation - a confidence.

If we therefore look at what faith is, we see that we can’t have faith without having hope. Faith is linked to an objective. Faith can’t exist without something to believe in. We need to have an expectation of something to happen in order to have faith, since this hope determines what our faith will be based on. As long as we don’t see physically that which we hope for, we see faith. Faith is like a voucher to purchase something. We haven’t got the object yet, but every time we look at the voucher, we picture the object and know it would be a matter of time before we have it. This is how real faith must be to us.

But the expectation must come from the Lord and cannot be our own idea. “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ (Romans 10:17).” We need to hear from Jesus what we need to believe for. Once again we live in obedience to the Lord’s direction for our lives. Through seeking the Lord’s will for today or for our life by reading His Word, we receive a message from what we read. The Lord just highlights something and makes it personal to us – a message to us - or He gives us a vision and confirms it to us through people and circumstances and through giving us a passage from scripture.

Once we received this, we have hope. We have something which we received from God and which we trust Him for. “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful (Hebrew 10:23).” The devil is going to try and steal this dream from us and make our hope waver. We’ll have to keep this hope alive by professing it. Confessing it and seeing it as real, even though it’s not reality yet, is looking at this voucher we have – faith.

I’d like to give you a simple example. I’m committed to writing a teaching every morning. This started when I received a lot of ideas beforehand and made notes of it until the Lord told me to start these blog postings. So I had an initial resource to tap from, which is now exhausted. But I still have to write a teaching every morning, even though I do not always know what I’m going to write about until minutes before the time. Some mornings I have to exercise faith to accomplish my objective. I have this confident expectation that in an hour and a half’s time an article will be posted on the blog, but still don’t know what’s going to be in it. So by faith I sit down at the computer and pray to the Lord that I’d like to receive what He had promised. Lord, you have told me to write a message every day, as a prophet I can’t do it out of my own strength, so here I am Lord, having the confident expectation, the faith that the message will come... and it does without fail!

We’ll continue tomorrow with more examples.

Lord, teach me the reality of receiving hope from you.

If you benefited from this, why don’t you link it to your Facebook or Twitter to make it available to your friends? You can also use the e-mail link to pass it on. Please feel free to ask questions or discuss thoughts.