Hope Fearlessly Excerpt III

Below is a continuation from the previous posts of a message I preached this summer at a local church. I hope you are able to get some benefit from it. Since I endeavor to be a better communicator, critiques are welcome.

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I say hope fearlessly because hope is not always easy. Hope is beset by fears all around. So often, our hopes remain nothing but dreams and later bittersweet remembrances of dreams. These dreams may concern a relationship, a calling, your church, the Church, the world, some great and godly thing that you yearn for, or some humble and simple desire to be satisfied. A certain perseverance in hope is required for a dream to become more than a dream.

Without perseverance, the life cycle of many dreams goes something like this:

At the beginning, we may dream easily. We may boldly develop a desire for that dream. We spend time imagining it. We may talk about it. We may even go so far as to write it down. We can see it, touch it, feel it as if it were already come.

However, after thoughts of what we call practicality and sensibility, after considerations of what we like to call reason and realism, and after taking assessments of our resources and the expenses involved as well as measuring our own insufficiencies, we stop imagining. We no longer talk about those hopes of ours. To read the written expression of our dreams is embarrassing and painful.

Later in life, we may regard with a sweet fondness the memory of the dream once held admiring that now lost ability to believe that such dreams will come true.

Later in life, we may remember with bitter regret the memory of the dream for now we wonder what we could have had if only.

Why this frustration except that our fears and doubts stunt our hopes in the early stages of development. Many hopes are aborted soon after conception because our fears are so great.

The truth is that the thing that so often separates hopes fulfilled and hopes unrealized is believing. While one may not always get what one expects, one will always get what one settles for. You may not get what you want but you will get what you are willing to put up with. When you stop believing, you stop trying. When you stop believing, the dream starts dying.


So I say, HOPE FEARLESSLY.