By Janie Baer
With all we face and see and hear that is going on in this world, such as destructive weather, bad economy, stock market fluctuations, wars and rumors of wars, job losses, more people in poverty and living on the streets, divorce after divorce, family problems, parents abandoning children and on and on; some how with all the bad news, I believe we have forgotten the power of God’s hope we can experience and live in every day in spite of what is going on around us.
I believe most people don’t and won’t get their hopes up for fear of another failure.
You might even ask me, “Well why should I get my hopes up?”
And I am going to tell you that you can get your hopes up and have all the hope you need in your every day life.
You are mistaken if you think I am talking about a hope that speaks like, “I hope things will change.” I am not talking about a hope that is flimsy, a natural kind of hope based on the world’s economy, a job, stocks and bonds or anything you could come up with naturally speaking. I am talking about hope that is supernatural. When I say that, I am not meaning we stick our heads in the sand and not pay attention to what is going on. No, I mean, we can see all of the bad reports about the economy and the results of it; but we get our hopes up in a higher hope than anything this world has to offer us and it is called God’s hope or Bible hope. It’s real hope and it’s the only true hope that you can have in this world. It is a supernatural hope that will change all the hopeless situations in your life. You don’t hear a lot about it but it is real and there are people living in this hope today and are living good lives. It’s the kind of hope I hold dear and won’t let go of in my own life.
So what about this “God’s hope” or “Bible hope” I am talking about? Well to begin with, let me tell you what God’s hope or Bible hope really means.
God’s hope or Bible hope is the kind of hope in which you can be intensely expectant and confidently looking for something you fully expect to happen. I could describe it as a burning-up-with-expectancy hope. It’s a hope where there is no doubt at all.
Does that sound interesting to you? Would you like to have that kind of hope daily? Then let me show you some more about this supernatural God hope.
This hope I am talking about, coupled together with God’s love and God’s faith are three of the most powerful elements in the universe and are three eternal and living substances that run the entire kingdom of God.
1 Corinthians13:13 And so faith, hope, love abide [faith — conviction and belief respecting man's relation to God and divine things; hope — joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation; love — true affection for God and man, growing out of God's love for and in us], these three; but the greatest of these is love. AMP
That scripture is powerful! Did you get what it said? This hope I am telling you about is a hope filled with joy and produces confident expectation. Wouldn’t you like to have that today? You can. It is possible.
This hope has to be coupled with faith in God and His supernatural abilities working for you and God’s love.
The word “abide” in that scripture means to make a home somewhere. So this scripture is telling us that faith, hope and love make a home together.
A husband and wife abide together, they live together, they make a home together because they need each other and they assist each other in every day life.
That is true with faith, hope and love. They must abide together so they can function properly in the Kingdom of God in this earth.
The moment any person receives Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord, their spirit takes on His hope, His faith and His love and many other spiritual forces that are characteristic of Christ. The moment a person receives Christ or is born again, the Spirit of the living God comes to live inside of that person. Their inner man or spirit is reborn into God’s image. God at that moment literally became the Father of their spirit. Just as each person who is born into this world takes on the same genes and traits of their natural mother and father; a person’s spirit takes on the “spiritual genes”, so to speak, of their heavenly Father when they are reborn. Their spirit takes on His hope, His faith, His love, and all of the other spiritual forces that are characteristic of Him. All of these spiritual forces together are called eternal life. The Greek word for it is zoe. Zoe is the part of God that makes Him God. God invests zoe into the spirit of every person who makes Jesus the Savior and the Lord of their lives.
If you have never received Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, just pray this simple prayer and mean it: “Heavenly Father, I acknowledge that I am a sinner needing a Savior from my sins. I believe that Jesus came and died on the cross for me and rose again from the dead so that I would be justified before You. Come into my heart, Lord Jesus Christ. I receive you as both the Savior and the Lord of my life.”
Welcome to the family of God! Let me know that you have prayed that prayer and I will send you some things to get you started in your walk with the Lord.
Maybe you feel today that you are in the most hopeless time in your life but the Word of God will tell you as a born again Christian that you have all kind of hope because you have God’s hope.
So the first thing you can do to receive this hope today and remain hopeful every day is to acknowledge you have God’s hope and then say, “Thank God, I have hope because I have God and His hope in me!”
The next thing you need to do is plant this God hope you have in your hopeless situations so it can grow and change all of your hopeless situations.
Jesus told us the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed and even though it is the smallest seed it grows up and becomes greater.
Hope is of the Kingdom of God and so it works the same as a mustard seed. So if you plant your seed of hope, if you focus with this God hope on a particular problem in your life, then it will grow up and become greater, greater inside of you than any problem you face today. Your hope will actually become greater on the inside of you than any problem you face on the outside of you and then you can expect with excitement that it will no longer be there staring you in the face.
Once you have planted this God hope in a situation, then you feed and water that hope in you with the Word of God, the promises of the Bible to you. The Word of God is what energizes your hope and makes it strong. The Word of God planted in your heart has the supernatural ability to stir up inside of you a sense of expectancy about what God has promised you. Feeding on God’s promises to you will make hope to grow in you.
When you start earnestly expecting those promises to show up in your life, you’ll start talking about them just like Jesus told us.
Matthew 12:34 For out of the fullness (the overflow, the superabundance) of the heart the mouth speaks. AMP
And even though you don’t see any change yet, you’ll start talking about what you had hoped for like it has already happened. The Bible refers to this as calling things that are not as though they already were. That is real Bible faith and hope.
Do you know what will happen then? Those things that you hoped for will actually come to pass. That’s how powerful this God hope is. That’s how your hope, “earnest expecter mechanism” works. It is a powerful, flawless system that never breaks down. That’s good news to us since so many things in this life break down. God’s hope mechanism never breaks down and stops functioning.
With this hope and expectancy energy building up on the inside you by the Word of God, you just know that you know this thing you had hoped for is now yours. This hope and expectancy you have inside of you will build up in you so big that you will want to tell others about it. And you will speak like it has already arrived, already happened. When you do that, you are doing what the Bible refers to as calling things that are not in the natural as though they were. They do exist in the spirit realm and with faith we are calling for them to manifest into our lives and faith will give substance in this earth of what we expected. Isn’t that the best good news you have heard in a long time?
I am now going to give you some examples of this very thing happening.
Both God and Abraham spoke of things that were not yet manifested as though they were already existing in the earth. God did this when He created the earth. He used His hope blueprint coupled with His faith to give substance to His hope blueprint of all He wanted to create.
Then later on He taught Abraham how to do the same thing.
You can do this too. It is really your faith speaking or calling for those things you hope for and earnestly expect to manifest in your life in the earth.
Romans 4:16-21 Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all,17(As it is written, I have made thee a father of many nations,) before him whom he believed, even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were.18 Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations; according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be.19 And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sara's womb:20 He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God;21 And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform KJV
Meditating this scripture where God and Abraham called for things that did not already exist in the natural will help you to do the same.
Remember there was no light and God called “light be”. The light came when God called for it with His faith. God operates just like He expects us to do in hope and faith.
God called Abraham a father of nations before he even had a child. Abraham agreed with God and started calling for things like God; changing his name to the name God had given Him, Abraham, Father of nations. No child existed when he first spoke that name but as he continued to declare, “I am Abraham, Father of nations,” then his faith and hope, his expectancy, worked together and produced a child.
Your expectant hope coupled with your faith will cause you to start talking about what you hoped for; declaring it as though it already exists in your life. This is not lying, this is faith. Faith is calling for something that does exist in the spirit realm.
When people do not understand what you are doing and think you are lying, just tell them about God calling for things that did not exist in creation and also how He and Abraham called Abraham, “father of nations” long before he was, so God could give him the family he desired.
God will work with you too if you will get some God hope and couple it with your faith.
The Bible tells us, in Hebrews 6:18 to, “lay hold upon hope” and we are told in Hebrews 6:11 to diligent stay in hope until the end.
When you lay hold of hope that means that you sink your spiritual teeth into that hope and refuse to let go or give up on that hope. You know that hope and faith are working for you regardless of how you feel, regardless of what your circumstances look like and regardless of what the devil or anybody else has to say about the situation. You have to be diligent to lay hold of hope and stay in hope until the end in order for hope and faith to continue to work out the situation the way you believed and hoped for. Don’t stop them from working for you by using this God hope and faith in spurts.
In order for this God hope and faith to work you can’t wait until things are falling apart and then suddenly get full of hope in about two hours. It will never work. This is something you build on and do every day, all day long. Your hope is built on continually as you use it.
You must refuse all bad feelings, the pressure that comes from circumstances and the devil trying to tear down your hope with words of despair. Refuse to allow your feelings to dictate your conversation and make no exceptions at any time! That is being diligent to stay in hope until the end of the situation. You have to understand that you are in a battle to keep your hope and faith.
Did you know that we are not civilians in the Kingdom of God but warriors? 2 Corinthians 10:3-4 tells us that we are to cast down every imagination. As a warrior fighting to keep this God hope and faith we have to take every thought captive. And you must speak out loud to those negative thoughts, “No! Absolutely not! I refuse to allow these negative thoughts remain in my mind! I cast down these negative imaginations that come against my hope and faith in the name of Jesus!”
If there are times when circumstances are really bad, go off by yourself and get your Bible, listen to some teaching CDs or some thing that has inspired you in your hope and faith in the past and listen to them until the negative thoughts quit bombarding your mind.
Then when you guard your mind like this, there will come a time when hope suddenly rises up in you, filled with faith and the love of God and completes the transaction in the realm of the spirit. When that happens, you will suddenly and strongly know inside of you that what you’ve hoped for is yours. You know that it is yours and no demon or anyone or anything else can keep it from happening.
That’s when you will find yourself saying, “It’s done! It’s mine! Hallelujah!”
Then all that is left is the manifestation of it in your life and that won’t be far off.
This is the way all of your needs in your life should be met and will be met if you use these forces of faith, hope and love that God has placed on the inside of you to change things.
Get you some power pictures from the Word of God to keep this process of hope going in your life. The Bible is full of power packed pictures of hope. You must stay full of these power packed pictures from the Bible relentlessly. Be determined, make up your mind, be relentless to hold on to these pictures of hope the Bible has placed on the inside of you. Don’t ever let them go! Then faith will make those pictures as real on the outside as they were on the inside of you.
The Bible tells us,
Proverbs 13:12 When hope is crushed, the heart is crushed, but a wish come true fills you with joy. TEV
So stay in hope and you will be the most joyful person around telling others of this God hope you have and use in your life.
Here is a word I have placed on my computer screen that inspires me to stay in hope: “I hope to the end for the divine favor that is coming to me now.”
Always remember to continually allow the Holy Spirit and the Word of God to paint you some pictures on the inside of you that will give you all the hope you need in order to see the things you pray for, dream and desire come to pass.
Remember this:
IT’S THE PICTURES
INSIDE OF YOU
THAT DETERMINES
YOUR OUTCOME, YOUR DESTINY.