Hope Does Not Belie

UV 1237/10,000 Hope does not Belie
And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.
Romans 5 v 5

The love of God that is a deposit in our hearts by the Holy Spirit gives rise to hope. The Lord will not let us down but He will fulfill our hope and thereby strengthen our faith. We will have no reason to be ashamed on account of the hope we have of the glory and grace of God being revealed in different trying situations in our lives. We will not be deceived. We will not be disappointed by the hope we have placed in the promises He has spoken into our lives. The Holy Spirit will remind us of the promise when our faith begins to flag or our hope begins to weaken. If we remove the letter ‘f’ from belief, it will become “belie”. Our faith should be strong and unshakeable if our hope is not to be belied. Our faith should be true, specific and accurate if our hope is to be fulfilled. It should be rooted in the love of God and not in personal whim or a hope that is nursed with wrong motives.
Scripture is a record of how in seemingly hopeless situations in the lives of many faithful people, God turned it round and fulfilled their hope. Salvation is not an end result we experience after our lives on earth but it is a continuous experience right from here and now of the working of God’s power in our lives. Grace is a supernatural power to act in the natural beyond the limits imposed by one’s resources, strengths and weaknesses.
Those who wait on the Lord will not be ashamed but instead they who trust in Him will be blessed. Abraham and Sarah were given the promise of a son when they were well past the age of child-bearing. When they did not see it happening even ten years after they received the promise, they decided to take their hope into their own hands and tried to fulfill it through a surrogate in Hagar the maid. But God was testing their faith and their patience. In God’s time, the promised son Isaac was born to them. Learning a lesson from their example, we should not be in a hurry to overtake God’s will but wait with patience, hope and thanksgiving for the hoped for answer to prayer, the promised blessing. Instead of expecting God to synchronise His calendar and time table with ours, we ought to synchronise our calendar and time table with His.

Prateep V Philip