Hope and Faith Work Side By Side

by Rex Rouis

Faith is an essential aspect of the Christian walk, but so is hope. Hope supports the obtaining of faith, but it also operates on its own merit. Hope and faith working together are indispensable to receiving the will and goodness of God.

We are to walk in faith for the things for which we have faith, and we are to maintain an attitude of hope for those things for which we do not yet have faith. In life, most things fall into the latter category.

Hope is believing in God’s general will and goodness. Faith is the ability to know and believe God’s specific will and goodness. The Bible encourages us to walk in hope and to hope for our desires. With this, God is able, one by one, and at the proper time, to elevate each hope with faith, so that it can be received. You have to first know what you can have (hope) before you are able to know what you do have (faith).

A hope is a desire whose fulfillment is promised in scripture.

A desire becomes a hope once a plausible reason for its fulfillment is found. For a Christian, this means that a promise for the desire must be found in the Bible. Simply stated, a hope is a desire whose fulfillment is promised in scripture. We may desire healing, but it takes the reading of a scripture such as, ‘by His stripes we are healed’, before we can have true Bible hope for healing. This hope sustains us and motivates us to seek God till we receive the full reality of the desire, what the Bible refers to as the ‘full assurance of hope’. Without the knowledge of His will and promise there can be no hope.

Therefore remember that formerly you…were…strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. Ephesians 2:11, 12

For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction, so that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Romans 15:4

Once the full assurance of His will comes alive in our heart, hope receives the necessary foundation of what is called faith. This is the sovereign witness of God’s will upon our hope, and it is evidence of His approval. Hebrews 11:1 says that. ‘Now faith is the (foundational) reality of things hoped for, the evidence of things not (yet) seen’. If we then act on this faith, through continued belief and patience, we will receive our original desire. In the process, we grow in God and He receives the glory. This is the ongoing process of hope and faith. This is also God’s work of salvation in the heart of man.

Now faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen. Hebrews 11:1 Holman Christian Standard Bible

Walk in Hope – Walk in Faith

Also read: What Is Bible Hope?

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