Faith – Hope is the Key that Activates Faith. (8)

God did a very clever and interesting thing when He told Abraham, “I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies”. Now, it was easy enough for Abraham to literally look up and see the stars. He lived in a tent and when he was told this, all he had to do was look up at night. However, at this time he was on Mount Moriah and couldn’t see the sea. So, when God told him his descendants would be as numerous as the sand on the seashore, he would have had to engage his imagination and lock that thought into his mind. The numerous stars and sand on the seashore became a way for his imagination to help his hope have more substance and become alive for him.

Last time I wrote I talked a lot about imagination and mentioned quite a few places in the bible where a negative use of our imaginations is really brought to our attention. But now, I want to talk about using our imagination in a more positive way and the New Testament talks about this when it mentions hope.

Romans 8:24-25 gives us a definition of hope like this:

For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

So hope is something we can’t see with our physical eyes (it hasn’t yet materialised otherwise it’s not hope) and yet we can picture it with the use of our imaginations.

An example of this would be our hope as Christians that we will one day go to a place called heaven. Now we could just quote Scriptures that state this but we can also paint a picture in our minds from what we read also from the bible and try an imagine a place where there is no more sickness, crying, pain or sin. You see we can strengthen our hope by using our imaginations and thereby it steadies us and gives us something to hold onto. Hebrews 6:19 tells us that we have a hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.

Many times we seem to lift up and talk about the virtues of faith and love and maybe forget that, yes, they are important. But, there are three virtues that are very important as 1 Corinthians 13:13 tells us: “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

Hope is, I believe, the key that unlocks and activates our faith. It says in Hebrews 11:1 that, “faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” Now, of course we need to keep a balance here because if we read the whole of chapter 11 and see this great hall of fame concerning faith, it goes on to say that most didn’t get to actually see what they were hoping for but were living in faith anyway. There were some exceptions as we see that Abraham and Sarah did get the son, Isaac, that they were hoping for. Of course they never got to see the vastness of their descendants but me and you are some of them! Rahab the prostitute she also got to see what she hoped and had faith for and that was that she wasn’t destroyed or taken into captivity by the Israelites when they invaded.

So, not everything we hope for we will actually see. But, never the less when wanting to live by faith it starts by seeing something that cannot be seen with our physical eyes, and yet we see it with our hearts and imagination; this is hope. Now, the purest and most certain hope would be based on the incorruptible Word of God. For instance, if we are sick, we can see ourselves well and base it on “By His stripes, I have been healed.” And many, many other verses that talk about healing.

What I really want to major on is the importance of having godly imaginations, whereby we actually think about something and picture it in our minds which really solidifies our hope. Obviously the danger lies where we don’t base our imagination on the right things which results in what the bible states: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” But the rest of the verse says, “but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12.

At church on Sunday, we hire a room in a building that is used by all sorts of different groups and people at various times. When I got there last Sunday, I was met by the cleaner who told me that the Beavers (part of the Scouts family) had spent the night there, and boy, I could smell it too! It was also humid and hot in the room. So, thankfully, the room has air conditioning. I went to the switch on the wall and within a matter of seconds, the room was getting filled with lovely fresh feeling and cool air. Now, the air conditioning couldn’t be activated until I pressed the right switch on the wall which then fired up that AC unit and pump and fan etc. Likewise, when we start to imagine and have hope, this is when conception takes place and it activates the faith process, or at least it should.

Let me finish by sharing this quote below from T E Lawrence: