I recently read The Healing Path by Dan Allender. He invites us to look at our lives through the lenses of faith, hope and love. The difficulty we all face is that humans are imperfect. Faith in people will eventually result in betrayal by someone. It may be in some small way such as gossip, or something much larger like adultery or abuse. Repeated experiences of betrayal can cause us to lose hope and to feel powerless. When the vulnerability of love brings wounds, we can become ambivalent about the desire to love again. Unfortunately, that is all part of living in a fallen world in relationship with fallen people.
Our experiences with people can color our understanding of God. He is the only perfect being, and is the perfect source of faith, hope and love. But life can lead us to doubt His goodness and power, wonder whether He truly loves us, and question whether there is any hope for the future to be any different. Hannah Whitall Smith writes in The God of All Comfort, “In this matter of comfort it is exactly as it is in every other experience in the religious life. God says, ‘Believe, and then you can feel.’ We say, ‘Feel, and then we can believe.’ …If we want to be comforted, we must make up our minds to believe every single solitary word of comfort God has ever spoken.” It may seem like a trite Sunday-school answer—just believe because the Bible tells me so. But if we have no foundation in Scripture, we have nowhere we can safely place our trust, and so faith, hope and love are foolish indeed. If God is not trustworthy, then no one is, and we dare not let anyone close enough to hurt us. Smith continues, “A trustworthy person commands trust; not in the sense of ordering people to trust him, but by irresistibly winning their trust by his trustworthiness.”
Allender puts it this way, “Life without faith becomes anemic and predictable, never sufficiently stirring to compel us to risk for the future.” If we choose to risk being wounded again, we will often be surprised by love and joy in relationship with God and others. But if we choose to live the “safe” life of self-protection, we lose out on the blessings, and we’ll still end up getting hurt anyway.
Romans 15:8-13 reminds us that God is true and trustworthy based on everything we read in Scripture. The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Noah, David, Isaiah, John, and Paul is the same God we have with us today. And in Him we can have hope—hope for salvation and sanctification, hope for authentic love, hope for fellowship and relationship with one another, and hope for His return. “Hope makes us victors who succeed because we live for nothing more or less than His coming. Hope is not in a change of circumstances, but in the confidence that our character will change as we live for His coming. Hope compels us to live for the future by pouring ourselves out as offerings to God in our relationships with other” (Allender). In Christ our faith, hope and love are secure, and in that security we can risk extending love to others even when logic tells us otherwise.
Through faith in God we can find hope, joy, peace, goodness, kindness, and all the other Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). I came to the realization (again) that if we as believers have been grafted into the Vine, then the Spirit will cause that fruit to grow without us striving and fretting over it. We can’t create the fruit on our own. It is as we depend on the Vine for nourishment that the fruit will bud and flourish. We may not even be conscious of its development as we don’t “feel” like anything is happening. But we can trust that God is at work in us, changing us to be more conformed to His image, using us for His purposes, and growing His fruit in our lives.
“And now abide faith, hope and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).