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).