Hope is one of our greatest allies. Hope empowers you to live a motived life with purpose and reward. Possessing hope in your heart helps you deal with the world, and in many ways, it forms the mindset in which you live in the world. With that said, I think hope is a word that has been completely misunderstood. Hope is often described as “a feeling of expectation and a desire for a certain thing to happen.” Another description says it is “to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or be true, as in having hopes for a promotion or hoping for the best to happen.” While these definitions sound good, they can also be very seductive. This is the hope that most people live in every day.
The problem is that this kind of hope is flimsy. It’s created by desires of the heart that are determined by situational circumstances. These situational circumstances are fueled mostly by the needs of the flesh. A deficiency usually causes you to create a certain hope that favors your desired outcome. “I hope I get that job, or I hope my tests come back negative.” Then, of course, we also have hopes for excessive things like, “I hope I win the lottery and never have to work again.” Desires of the flesh fuel this hope. But in all instances of this hope, sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.
What’s so interesting to me is that hope is very important to your life, whether true or false. If you want to keep moving forward, you need to hope in something; even false hope will accomplish this. The problem with false hope is that it is a false expectation. As I said before, you generally create things to hope in so that you can have something to desire even if you know it is out of reach. It’s what makes a person keep getting up in the morning. Even though it’s built on sand, it seems to keep you going forward, even if you’re circling. The unconscious mind doesn’t even really process that we hope for many things in our lives, and most of them don’t ever happen. We move on when things don’t work out and hope for something else.
Subconsciously we know most of our hope is flimsy, but we still use it for motivation, which means that we ignore the constant failure that false hope produces. But having this kind of hope is an important part of people’s lives. No matter how often your hope fails, you keep hoping for something better. It seems crazy to say that, but we are human and have desires and needs that arise in the flesh.
The problem begins when you bring your false hope ideas into your experience with God. When you have false hope toward God, you will start expecting Him to do things for you that He never said He would do. You make God accountable for your selfish desires. Most of these false ideas come from either scripture that you apply to yourself without the Lord’s guidance or religious traditions that have been passed down to you through generations. Either way, we must find a better hope that is true and will not fail us.
A better hope.
What if you could be enlightened to the fact that false hope is not something that the child of God lives by? The honest heart loves the truth; therefore, it only wants to hope for something genuine and not false. God’s hope is not like the hope that most people live in today. His hope is a guarantee that what you desire will come to pass. That’s because your desire was created by what He said to you. When God gives you hope, you can expect it to be true. God does not lie! He doesn’t make up things to create a false sense of happiness for you. God doesn’t guess at your future; He guarantees it because He sees it according to how He speaks it.
Hope is created when God speaks to you. Like faith, hope is a word from God. Hope puts expectation in your heart with a guarantee that what God said will happen. It is sometimes used as waiting, but it’s a waiting filled with joyful anticipation, which is another way to say desire fills your heart. When you know God does not lie, you will believe everything He says and expect everything He says to happen. That’s a hope given by a new covenant through Jesus Christ.
Hebrews 6:17–20 So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, 18 so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. 19 We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, 20 where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.
God’s word is His oath, and it’s guaranteed. A better hope that the world can’t teach you. Knowing that your hope comes from God keeps you believing in true things. God’s word will establish a hope in you that never fails; confidence that when God promises something to you, it will come to pass no matter what happens in your situation. This hope is not just wishful thinking. Lustful fantasies of the heart do not create them. Having it means that you can have the right expectations for the promises of God, and they will all come true.
When you trace through the characters of the Bible, it’s clear that they lived by hoping in what God said. They believed it to be true and staked their lives on it. It was more than a subconscious desire - to them, it was a reality that hadn’t manifested. The apostle Paul taught that hope was invisible and that it was hope because you couldn’t see it yet and if you could see it, then it wasn’t hope. That’s what makes having hope so great. You don’t have what you desire yet, so you have to trust in God and be willing to risk everything, hoping that what He said will happen. Our entire salvation is built on trust that what God said is true and that He doesn’t lie. We hope that what we believe will happen for us.
Psalm 39:7 And now, O Lord, for what do I wait? My hope is in you.
Hope is not lost.
It’s true that in the beginning, Adam sinned and lost his way. He was removed from the paradise of God and put in a world cursed with sin and death. Today we have felt the lasting effects of Adam’s fall from grace. That’s why we like to cling to things that give us hope for better days. The thing is that God didn’t abandon Adam when He removed him from the heavenly place. Quite the opposite; God loved him and put Adam in a hope to return home after the curse of sin and death was broken. Even though we might have to live in a place full of death and sorrow, we truly expect to return home because God said we would.
With this kind of hope, you can expect to make it through any situation the world throws at you. You already live in a world where sin and death have great power over people. The difference between true hope and false hope is that the believers of true hope will make it to the end. False hope eventually fails you, but your hope in God can’t fail when God Himself can’t fail. Like Adam, there is hope for resurrection and a new body free from sin and death. All of Adam dies, but all of Jesus Christ lives. That’s a hope that will not fail us.
This hope is not created by the desire of your heart to want something you see in the flesh. It’s way greater than that. This hope is created by God and then spoken to you so that you can join yourself in it. Being a Christian in a world that despises God can be challenging, but if you have hope, you will walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil because eternal life is your new home. You may not see it yet, but you trust that God will keep His word, which is your hope.
However, hope may work in you; there is a better hope that is more realistic than any hope you may create or that others may give you. There is hope from God that is 100% reliable and will never fail. I say we live by that.
Hope puts a desire in your heart that motivates you to move forward to the future, but its strength is that it expects God’s word to come true.