VICTORIA OSTEEN SERMON HOPE FUELS FAITH : Pastor victoria Osteen said, I want to encourage us all today, I want to challenge us in a way to think about this word that we hear so much of now called hope. Are you hoping for anything today? Maybe you’re hoping for a better marriage, maybe you’re hoping for a strong family unit, maybe you’re hoping to get that job promotion, maybe you’re hoping that you’ll have a child.
What are you hoping for today? is it a casual hope? Is it a vague hope? Because sometimes the word “hope” has been used so much that we forget the power of hope. People say, “well, I hope that happens,” “yeah, well, that’d be nice, hope so.” hope comes from heaven, it’s heaven-made.
In Corinthians 3:13, it says, there’s three things that are eternal, three things that will remain: faith, hope, and love. God wants us to get our hopes up, he wants us to hope on in faith because God created this hope on the inside of us, and he doesn’t want us to get vague with this hope.
if God has spoken something to you, if you’ve found a promise that you believe that God has given you, put hope in front of that promise. Hope creates vision, hope gives our faith something to attach itself to, something to go after, we need a picture of what we’re going after.
The scripture says that faith is the substance of things hoped for; do you have a picture in your mind of what you’re hoping for? Are you feeding that picture? Are you fueling it so that your faith can move towards it? God designed hope because he knows that hope fuels our faith, he knows that hope picks us up.
The scripture says hope anchors our soul, it anchors us in disappointing times, in challenging times, in times of failure, if we can only keep our hopes up, faith will pick us up and move us in the right direction. God does the work faith, hope, and love comes from him, but you know what he wants us to do? He wants us to develop it, he’s given us the potential, and the seed for it, now he’s saying, and you need to develop it.
It’s interesting because when Paul prayed in romans 18, he said, “I pray that the God of all hope.” Paul called him the God of all hope, he said, “I pray that the God of all hope would fill you with joy and peace so that your hope would overflow by the power of the holy spirit.” you see, God is saying, “stir up that hope and it will flow out of you.” it will flow out of you because hope comes from heaven. God gave it to us, and he’s going to help it flow out of us as we begin to develop it.
At all times we must keep hope alive to fuel our faith.
