Category Archives: Led by

Hope Maintained

Maintaining the expectation of His return

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This week the Lord surprised me by dropping two verses in my heart just before church which I knew He was pressing me to make the center of the message for today. It was on topic to what we were going to cover, only coming from an entirely different approach.

The passages were found in 1 John 3:1-3 & Romans 2.

This placed the focus of our teaching on maintaining the hope of Jesus’ return within our hearts which works to the purification of our souls. This is 100% in step with the direction our teachings have taken the past two weeks regarding all our expressions of hope in God needing to align with the overall Hope we have been given in Him which is Christ being formed in us.

As it is, I had no notes to teach from and so on our website, I have very little in terms of an associated article as we typically do.

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Bricks Hope

The Bricks in our House of Hope

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One of the BIG lessons from last week is that all of our little expressions of hope in God need to be linked to our GREAT hope in God.

Our great hope is “Christ in us” according to Colossians 1:27.

So if the house of hope which faith is supporting as a foundation IS our maturation into Christ’s image, then all the bricks of hope which make up that structure must in SOME way be connected to the final product of Christ in us.

Let’s see how this works!

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Hope Faith Support

The Type of Hope, Faith will support

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For WEEKS I have pressed the need for Hope in order for Faith to have something to support.

I have pressed the fact that our Hope MUST be based upon what we can RIGHTLY expect of God.

There are 3 primary sources of Hope:
God’s inspired, written word.
The inward witness, leading, counsel and teaching of the Holy Spirit.
What we have come to experience of God ourselves.

The 2nd and 3rd in this list NEVER go beyond what the written Word has already revealed!

But the most powerful of all three is our experience because it is relational and we see this and the basis for faith among many of those set forth as our examples in scripture!

TODAY however, I wanted to play the other side of the field a bit regarding hope from experience. All REALLY hope cannot go beyond God’s personal self-disclosure in scripture and it cannot go against Hope’s primary purpose in the life of the believer – which is producing the Image of Christ!

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God Creation Hope

Hope in God through what He’s made

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Regardless of how God first caught our attention, be it:
• The splendor of the Creation itself
• A word from one of God’s children
• a passage from the Bible
• the inner awareness we are all born with that there is more going on behind the scene of life than we can figure out with our minds
• by a direct inward work of the Holy Spirit
…whatever we saw, bid us to come, and come we did!

Over the course of the last two weeks, we’ve discovered that there are 3 basic sources of Hope in relation to God.

God’s inspired, written word
The inward witness, leading, counsel and teaching of the Holy Spirit
What we have come to experience of God ourselves

But the most powerful of all is our experience and discovering God in what He has made, in the most ordinary of life experiences recorded in scripture and in the person, ministry and human interactions of Jesus – God incarnate is where you will be encouraged to turn to develop your Hope in God which your faith can support!

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Hope Lord Always Before

Hope: Setting the Lord ALWAYS before you

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The only Biblical purpose for faith is to serve as a firm foundation for what we can rightly expect of God. So faith is the foundation of the House of Hope.

Because our hope MUST be founded upon Who God really is – His character, nature and intentions for us as those who bear His image – coming to know the Lord by way of experience is an indispensable necessity.

As such, the words of David ring true from Psalm 16:8 which say, “I have set the Lord continually before me; because He is at my right hand I will not be shaken.”

We used this as our text of focus this morning and considered its application to our growing understanding of Faith and Hope.

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