Kris Vallotton, Sunday February 3, 2013

Hope

Prayer for people dealing with hopelessness. 

• What if today is the beginning of your life?
• If your future isn’t gleaning with hope, you’re believing a lie. – Steve Backlund

• Faith sees, hope feels and love never fails.
• 1 Corinthians 13: Now faith love and hope abide in these three but the greatest of these is love.
• Faith comes out of hope.
• In the world seeing is believing, in the kingdom believing is seeing.
• Faith sees what is not yet visible. So there is no such thing as blind faith.
• Faith is not mindless, it is a spirit lead adventure.
• Everyone has faith, but if you don’t invest it in the infinite one, you are investing it in finite expectations that don’t reap results.
• Heb 11:1
• Faith sees what is not yet visible.
• Men and women of faith didn’t receive what was promised but they saw it from a distance and they welcomed it into the world for another generation.
• Hope feels, it’s the expectation that something good is about to happen.
• You don’t see it until you anticipate it.
• You need hope first.
• Faith means to wait with anticipation and pleasure.
• Hope is what gets you off the couch and on to the porch because you’ve begun to seek.
• I expect with great pleasure that something good is about to happen even though I don’t know what it is.
• Hopelessness is not fun.
• Lamentations 3:1
• I remember what God has done for me so that I carry hope. What God does for me is a prophetic declaration for what He will do next time.
• In order to have a “mony” you have to have a “test”.
• What is a history for you might be a prophecy for me. That’s why we share testimonies.
• We are working on creating a site where testimonies are recorded so that you can search a topic like “liver cancer” and have all the testimonies in one place.
• We want to create that sense of expectation and increase hope.
• Jeremiah in the midst of Israel’s bondage says “I know the plans I have for you, plans to give you a hope and a future.” Pray for Babylon’s prosperity because even though they are your prison, you can make it a palace.
• I have a struggle any time we teach a theology that destroys hope for the future generations.
• The gospel is the good news, so when I preach it it should inspire hope, not hopelessness.
• Psalms 37:17
• Part of the reason we lose hope is that our hope is in things that we think we can control.
• The horse is prepared for the day of battle but the victory belongs to the lord.
• We are instructed to prepare for battle and to pray even though God knows what you need before you pray.
• We pray for our sake, to prepare for battle.
• Preparing is good for me, but my hope is not in my preparation or ability but in Him.
• I want to be prepared but it’s not the solution, He is.
• You aren’t going to grow when you pray
• When he said “it is finished” he didn’t say “you are finished” we still need to prepare.
• Psalms 62:5 He is talking to his own soul and saying prepare for battle, but don’t think that’s going to give you the victory.
• Be ready, do everything you can to be ready, but don’t have your hope in what you can do.
• Hope differed makes the heart sick.
• It’s not talking about dissapointment making your heart sick, it’s because you don’t have hope that your heart is sick. Just because the promise hasn’t been fulfilled doesn’t make my heart sick, but if I lose hope, that will cause illness.
• It’s when my hope is differed, not when my answer is differed, when my heart becomes sick.
• It’s really important that I don’t stop believing because when I stop believing, I stop receiving and everything in the kingdom comes through faith.
• Psalm 42:5
• We are tri-polar. We think tri-dimensionally. Soul, spirit and body. We need to be spirit lead. So here David’s spirit is talking to his soul and saying “why are you in despair?… Hope in God because of who God is!”
• If you know who your daddy is, and you know who you are, then discouragement, despair and fear is irrational.
• What’s a bummer is when you are in despair and you don’t know why. So David takes his soul aside and talks to it through his spirit.
• Hope in God because surely our hope comes from his presence.
• Thankfulness is our response to God’s actions. Praise is our response to God’s character. Worship is our response to God’s presence.
• There are times when we need to take ourselves aside and speak to our souls.
• Our souls aren’t bad. Paul prays that our soul will prosper just as our body and spirit. One way that our soul prospers is by ministering to it through our spirit.
• Say “don’t despair because I know how good our God is!”
• Romans 4:18
• Abraham has been called to father nations but he didn’t have any children. He wasn’t supposed to be the father of nations, not just Israel. Selah (think about that).
• God promised that Abraham’s children would outnumber the sand and the stars, which is part of the reason I think the world is going to exist for a lot longer, because that’s a lot of people. I’m prepared for God to come back now, but I will also prepare to bless my children’s children’s children’s… because I want to be a father of many nations.
• Abraham and Sarah have this promise, but no kids. She’s past menopause. But he still believed.
• There is a big difference between living in denial and faith. Faith sees, denial is blind. If I can’t look at the problem, don’t call it faith, say I’m scared to look. Faith can look at the facts and still believe the truth.
• When Nehemiah was called to build the wall, the first thing he did was survey the walls and say “can you see the problem we are in?”. Faith can look at the problem and still believe with hope.
• Hebrews 10:23 “confession of our hope”
• One of the ways we cultivate faith is to confess our hope.
• Recall it to our mind. Share what God has done.
• Remember who God is.
• Confess that I have hope in God. “I understand the facts, but my hope is in God, not the horse”
• Hope feels but faith sees.
• 1 Peter 1:15
• When you look at tomorrow’s challenges with today’s grace it’s overwhelming. If your going from faith to faith it means you’ll need it. Today’s grace isn’t enough for tomorrow. So Peter says “gird your mind for action” fix your hope on the expectation that it will be there when you need it.
• Some people think “we aren’t ready for children” and that’s true. You won’t have the grace for it until you have them.
• If you think you aren’t ready to be married, the truth is you never will be, because nobody’s ready to die. But the grace will be there when you need it.
• If you are a man, you’re on a death march to a life camp because you are called to lay your life down.
• When He appears, we will be like Him.
• You can’t punish people into purity. But you can hope them to it.
• Fear is faith in the wrong God.
• Hopeless is actually hope in the wrong God. You are actually thinking that something is moving you towards destruction.
• You can always measure how much faith you have by how much hope you have.
• Remind yourself of who God is.
• Depression comes from hopelessness. When you are hopeless people often avoid you because they think they need to provide an answer for you instead of providing hope.
• The best thing you can do for someone who is hopeless is to remind them that it would pass. You don’t have to give them faith, or an answer… just give them hope. Point them to God.
• We might not have faith yet, but we have hope. I don’t know the plan, but I know the God we serve and His plan will bring us hope. It might not feel true but it is.
• As you speak that over people, over time you will see a sparkle return to their eyes.
• All you have to do is change the expectation for them. You might not know the answer, but you do know the answerer.
• If you haven’t seen the answer and if you don’t have faith, you can still have hope. You can know it’s going to work out for their benefit because you know who they are and who’s they are. You can hope, not in your circumstances but in God who’s working it out.