Hope

What is Hope?

Hope is the confidence that what God has promised will happen. If God said it, don't sweat it. He will do what He has promised. Hope provides me with this confidence: 

• That God will forgive all my sins, He will renew me
• He will give me peace in times of turmoil,
• He will heal my sickness and comfort my sorrows,
• He will fight for me,
• He will guide me, 
• He will protect me,
• He will strengthen me, 
• and He will care for me until all my fears are swallowed up by an undying faith in a God who is more that able to supply all my needs.

Faith believes that God is real, and hope is the confidence that He'll do what He said He will do. 

--taken from An Untroubled Heart; Micca Campbell

Psalms 91:1-4

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most high will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the Lord, "He is my refuge and my fortress, my God in whom I trust."

Surely He will save you from the fowler's snare and from the deadly pestilence.

He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge;

His faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.

---

Right now, I need to keep reminding myself that it is by His grace that I am here and saved. It is He who keeps me going everyday. It is He who supplies every single need in my life right now. I will keep at it. Move forward. There is HOPE.

Confessions

Yes, I will say it again: I have neglected my blog (yet again). I do not have a good enough reason as to why I neglected it, but I will try my best to be on at least once a week.

Let's change it up a bit this time. I promise (..ish) to update my blog more often now as part of my therapy and we'll see how things go. Every week, I'll write a confession about my daily struggle with my relationship with God. I still struggle. Yes I do. 

I have a whole lot of things I want to rant and write about, but I will leave it here for now. 

Stay tuned.

Is Something Missing In Your Life? (by Rick Warren)

(taken from The Daily Hope by Rick Warren)

“I am like a caravan, lost in the desert searching for water.” (Job 6:18 CEV)

If you feel like God is a million miles away, guess who moved? God didn't move; you did.

Do you ever have that feeling that something is missing in your life, but you don’t know what it is? Maybe there’s a longing in your heart, and you feel disconnected from God.

The answer is simple: “[Y]our iniquities (your sins) have separated you from your God;  your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:2 NIV).

If you feel like God is a million miles away, guess who moved? God didn’t move; you did. 

When you live on earth, you will sense a disconnection from God, where you feel he is far away. This disconnect leaves a hole in your heart that nothing else can fill. A lot of people look for ways to fill that hole, but they look in the wrong places. Why? Because they don’t know they should be looking for God. In today’s verse, Job described it as being like someone lost in the desert searching for water.

You want something to fill the emptiness, to satisfy the unmet desire. You try to quench that unquenchable thirst. But the longer you continue to look in the wrong places, the more darkness will increase in your life until you get to a place like the one the Bible describes: “They’ve refused for so long to deal with God that they’ve lost touch not only with God but with reality itself” (Ephesians 4:18 MSG).

This darkness is easy to see everywhere you look; in schools, in businesses, in government, in Hollywood — in every area of society, there are people who have lost touch not only with God, but also with reality.

Instead of identifying sin and hating it the way God does, our society laughs at it. It’s popular to make fun of sin. Listen to just about any comedian’s routine, and there will be jokes that make fun of sin. It’s no big deal for someone to cheat on his wife or take drugs or do something illegal. And on top of that, there will be jokes that make fun of people who try to do the right thing. People think it is all good comedy, right?

But when you get closer to God, his light reveals what sin really does. It creates natural disasters and deformities, physical decay and death, emotional distress and disappointment, relational distance and discord, financial difficulties, and spiritual disconnect. That’s no laughing matter.

Ask God to show you if there are things in your life that you are using to fill the hole in your heart that only he can fill.

Saddleback Resources offers a small group Bible study related to these devotionals: The Invisible War-Winning the Battle of Temptation.
© Copyright 2011 Rick Warren. Used by permission.