Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life. ~Proverbs 13:12 (ESV)
Hope stretches our faith beyond appearances to the possibilities. Hoping for God’s best is an attitude we should all maintain if we want to overcome our adversities and celebrate our lives. There is no doubt we are surrounded by both adversities and adversaries. That is why it is so important to pray our model... aka...the Lord’s Prayer. We are told to ask God to lead us not into temptation but to deliver us from evil. God knows and we must recognize our natural tendency to grasp the unprofitable things verses putting our hope in the promises of God. Left to ourselves we will fulfill our own desires when our hope has been deferred. We will begin to look for ways to make our world right again ourselves instead of patiently trusting God to turn our circumstances around or allowing Him to change our mind about our circumstances. Stepping out on our own causes us to put our hope and ultimately our faith in what the world can produce for us which will never fulfill our spirit man and it will only fulfil our souls for a little while. When we put our hope in the promises of God, He tells us that kind of hope is an anchor for our soul. Our soul is made up of our mind, our will, and our emotions. Those three parts of us have to get on board with our spirit to thwart the enemy from planting doubt and unbelief into our hearts. Hope in God holds us steady in the storm and keeps us in a firm position while we watch for the promises of God to be realized in our lives.
For hope to be fulfilled change must happen and the key ingredient to change is risk. We have to be willing to let go of what we have or even what we think we know today for God to bring change and increase into our lives. Simply put- to see changes we need to make changes. We all want to see change but when it comes to making change we grab on to what we know and have like a bulldog and when we look at where we are at as something we have attained, we will be more likely to try to hold onto it. But when we look at ourselves in all of our greatness as something God has brought us to, we are ascribing Him the glory and abasing, or humbling, ourselves will not be hard because we can trust God to make us all He has created us to be again and again. We must get a vision for the future and where God has promised to lead us and not let where we are today skew our perception of where we want to be tomorrow. Don’t get stuck in the wilderness just because you have fresh manna raining down and water flowing from a rock every day. There is milk and honey like you have never tasted over in the Promised Land. Nothing is impossible with God when we put our hope and faith in God alone. The Lord tells us in the book of Proverbs that hope deferred makes the heart sick. Many of us have sick hearts because we are not willing to make the changes necessary to see our hopes fulfilled. Take a risk and trust God. They say doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is insanity. What changes do you need to make to see some dreams fulfilled in your life? There is great power when we change our lives and attitude to line up with God's word and put our hope in Him!
But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you. ~Psalm 39:7 (NIV)
What changes do you want to see in 2024? What will you set your heart to change?
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