Faith, Hope, and Love

I had another dream. In this dream a great storm was approaching. It was all over the news and was being broadcast via all sorts of available media be it TV or Radio. Everyone was aware of its fast approach. Many were trying to dig in quickly but there was a sense that it was to late for many. Everyone was in a panic state.

I found myself in my families’ home. I don’t know whether this was symbolic or not. There was a feeling of impending dread. There was the tendency to look out the window and watch with utter horror and fascination as the storm rolled in. I could see the greatest, darkest, most awesome black cloud rolling and moving over the land. At one point when it was over what looked like some sort of manmade structure like a large-scale factory or small town or something, it suddenly was hit by a violent wind from the cloud that literally flattened everything to the ground with such force that I knew no one could survive that.

I could hear, even though they were miles away, human beings screaming and wailing in fear of the approaching storm but it was too late for many of them. As I was watching in horror with living fear welling up in my stomach, I heard a voice speak plainly and with authority not once but twice until I obeyed to sit quietly on the floor. In other words, to be quite and be in humble fear of what was approaching. There was the feeling that my family was all there and we all got very low to the ground in a humble fear of the wrath that was now upon us. I was looking at my brother and he at me when just as suddenly, when you thought the black cloud was going to hit, it dissipated and broke up to let the sun start shinning again. The great terrible wrath ended and we were spared.

I looked at my brother and asked him if he had heard that voice telling us to sit down on the floor and be quite? He white faced with the whole experience, looked back at me and nodded his head with the shock of it all still on his face. I was then very vexed in my spirit with many questions toward God. Questions like: Why were we spared? Why were we set apart? I asked these questions because I knew it wasn’t because there was anything good about me. I had been sinning against God just like anyone else.

These words came back to me as I was waking from this dream, “If there is but ONE righteous person left in a family, I will spare the entire family!” I was of course deeply humbled and grieved at the way I had been living, knowing it wasn’t because of me that we were all spared. As I was still waking slowly and returning to an aware state, I found myself screaming in my mind and heart (more like wailing in my spirit) that I was so sorry for failing my God. It was then just before the dream entirely faded that I asked the question, “Why am I so sinful? Why did I forsake the right path?” It was these words that filled my mind suddenly, “Three things remain, Faith, Hope, and Love. The greatest of these is Love!”

It was then I knew as I lay there awake now that the reason many fall and have fallen from righteousness is due to this common scenario: first we lose Hope in our hearts, then after losing all hope, we soon lose Faith in anything good ever happening to us and for us, then finally when our faith is weak and all but gone, we find that we have lost most if not all the Love we once had deep in our hearts and so we plunge into darkness and sin. Bitterness, unresolved pain, and utter hopelessness remains in our hearts in place of the once quite faith and hope that indeed ALL things work for our good if we would just trust the ONE true righteous and JUST GOD to bring fairness to our lives. Deep down in that hidden place we all know that HE does exist but we believe the lie that HE does not care and we lose Faith that HE will make all things right someday if not in this life, the next.

When we start to lose all hope that He does in fact care and that He will make things right, we naturally shrink back from the work that it takes to keep ourselves in Faith, Hope, and Love. If we lose Hope of his justness and complete fairness, we start to fall into the lie the evil one tells us that nothing will ever be right and good in our lives so we might as well just enjoy all those nasty selfish things we wish we could do. Like sexual fantasies we know deep down are just plain wrong and the looking out for ourselves first even if it hurts others. When we lose Hope of things ever being made right, we join the group that lives only for self. We have bought that age-old lie that says, “If we don’t take care of ourselves first, no one else will that’s for sure!” And when we walk down this path of hopelessness for a while, we start to lose Faith that our lives will ever change for the better and we believe that none of our dreams will ever happen. We start to die.

Down, down we plummet until we have become so embittered by it all that we finally lose that small deposit of innocent childlike unconditional Love that we were all born with. That small token of love from the FATHER OF LIGHTS! We feel like and believe that no one REALLY loves us so why should we love anyone else! Everyone hates us and doesn’t care at all about us so why should we care about them!

How about this one: “I have been slowly dying for a long, long time and no one even notices, so why should I notice or help anyone else!” When we lose the love that GOD has given us, we are only nice to those who happen to be nice to us and even then it is shallow. We only show kindness to those who are at the moment being kind to us. Because of the bitterness and unfairness of it all, we are only friendly to others if there is something in it for us and we can benefit from it. Sound familiar? The world is obviously full of people who have lost their Faith, Hope, and Love. Only these three ingredients from heaven will stand in the end. Everything else will die! So if we find ourselves caught in this never-ending journey to the center of the earth, destination HELL, and Without GOD, it is most likely because we have given in to one of Satan’s oldest and most ruthless tricks! If he can get us to believe that GOD doesn’t really care about justness and righteousness, if he can get us to swallow hook line and sinker that GOD doesn’t really LOVE us, then he has put a great gap, an unreachable abyss between God and us. Without God there is no Hope. There is no Faith or Love period.

When Jesus came, He came as a bridge between God’s loving truth and us! The truth that He does care about us so much that He used his own son Jesus to show us how much He still loves us deeply. So deeply that Jesus took our eternal punishment on His own shoulders. All we have to do to receive this is simply accept it as truth and therefore believe it. When we start to believe this, we supernaturally somehow start to get some Hope and Faith back. We find ourselves believing again in Love. God’s love comes shinning back into our wounded hearts and we start to come back into the light of truth. The truth that God is a God that deeply cares about His creation and that God is a God of complete fairness even though this world is unfair and cruel. If we can believe in Jesus, God’s truth, we can again have a renewed Hope that sooner or later everything will be made right. Eventually ALL things will be reckoned with. Someday, even if not in this life, we will be made completely happy and completely whole.

Simply put, it boils down to this one fact, Are we going to believe in God’s truth or the devils lie. Right now down here it’s all too easy to believe the lie because of our unjust circumstances we find ourselves trapped in and so we struggle with sin and disobedience to what we know down deep. It’s so easy right now to lose Faith, Hope, and Love because of the wrong done to us, and the wrong we do to others. But if we can just somehow hold on and believe in the truth about God, the truth that Jesus can and will save us in the end, we can have renewed energy in the Hope that we are LOVED.

This Faith in something that we don’t yet see, can and WILL bring us safely back to our FATHER OF LIGHTS, back to the great lover of our souls. Jesus Himself said that our sin is our unbelief in Him and what He came to do. He didn’t even mention our sinful acts. He simply said that our sin is our unbelief in Him. So please hold on child! Hold on to your Faith and Hope! I know full well how difficult and impossible it seems most of the time. I too struggle with sin and disobedience. I too feel like I can’t go on. Even if all we can do is lay there in our beds and plead in our minds, “Jesus please save me!” because we are so shut down and bleeding, that we can no longer say it with our lips, He HEARS us! If we could only hear Him, He is whispering back to us, “Child I already have saved you! I died in your place! My very own life and blood has satisfied ALL God’s righteous anger toward your disobedience and sin. Believe in me child! I can make you white as newly fallen snow! I can renew your Faith, Hope, and Love.”

Soon and very soon, Jesus will return to this old lump of earth to see how many have held on to their very own measure of Faith, Hope, and Love. He loves us, He surely does. Just believe child! Make a choice today!