Get Your Hopes Up!: Expect Something Good to Happen to You Every Day (17 page)

I love looking around and finding people I can bless. It’s such a blessing to bless others! If you really want to enjoy your day, I suggest you help someone else enjoy theirs. Maybe you can buy someone’s lunch, give an encouraging compliment, or tell someone they are important to you and that you appreciate them.

Ask God to show you how you can be a blessing and then follow His instruction. As you look to meet the needs of others, you’re going to be surprised at how easy it becomes to hope and believe that God is going to meet your needs as well. Don’t put off being a blessing. Do it today! Be a blessing NOW!

Hope thrives in an atmosphere of thankfulness. If you want to live with hope on a continual basis, spend each day looking for ways the Lord has blessed you. You’re going to be surprised at the number of things you’ll find. The more you realize how God is blessing you NOW, the more hopeful you will be that you will see even greater things.

At the end of each day, take a moment to write those things down. Start a “testimony of hope” journal. Some days you might
have one or two things to jot down, other days you might have 10 or 20 things, filling an entire page. Start documenting God’s goodness in your life and watch how easy it is to never live one day without vibrant hope.

Let hope rise up now. You don’t have to wait days, weeks, months, or years to expect God to move. He’s with you, and He’s already moving in your life. Pray for greater awareness so you never fail to see what God is doing in your life.

There will always be a temptation to live in the procrastination of
when
rather than the power of
now
. Don’t let the difficulties of the day talk you into putting off your anticipation of God’s goodness. Go ahead and get your hopes up. Something great could happen today. A breakthrough could take place today. Don’t wait until tomorrow to believe it—believe it today.

Sometimes you just don’t know how things can possibly work out. Have you ever felt that way before? You’re reading your Bible every day, you’re trying to keep a positive attitude, you have good friends who are encouraging you to hang in there, but try as you might, you’re still discouraged. You just aren’t experiencing the kind of hope we’ve been talking about so far in this book. Sure, you may have some days that are more hopeful than others, but you wouldn’t consider yourself a hopeful person.

You’re not the only one who has felt that way. Many people struggle to find hope—and many more struggle to hang on to hope. Hope cannot be based on your circumstances; it must be founded on Christ alone. Hope doesn’t just show up because you wish it would. Hope is something that has to be nurtured and developed, and regular study of God’s Word is the fuel needed to feed it. You don’t have to wait—hope is here. You can begin receiving hope today. You
don’t have to wait to feel it, but you can simply make a decision that life is miserable without hope so why not be hopeful NOW! Expect something good to happen today!

One of the most important things you can do to live a life of hope—a life filled with the happy anticipation of good—is to get God’s perspective. As long as you are seeing the situations in your life through a natural, fleshly perspective, you are going to be tempted to feel helpless and defeated. But when you begin to see your life the way that God sees it, hope takes over.

This is what happened with Abraham. In Genesis chapter 15, Abraham was feeling pretty hopeless. God had made promises that Abraham would be a father of many nations (see Genesis 12:2) and that the land of Canaan would go to his posterity (see Genesis 12:5–7), but Abraham just didn’t see how things could work out. He loved God, and he wanted to have hope, but he had no children. How was God going to make him into a great nation if Abraham didn’t even have an heir?

In Genesis 15:2–3, Abraham prayed one of those honest prayers we all pray from time to time. He said, “Lord God, what can You give me, since I am going on [from this world] childless?…” And Abraham continued, “Look, You have given me no child.…” Abraham was frustrated. He was looking at things from his perspective, and his perspective wasn’t offering much hope.

Knowing that Abraham wasn’t seeing the big picture, God did something amazing. Genesis 15:5 says:

In the middle of Abraham’s pity party, God knew what Abraham needed—he needed a change in perspective. There he was, hopelessly
praying to God about the small picture—one descendant—and all the while God was planning to bless him with descendants too numerous to count. So God brought him outside and gave Abraham a new perspective: a sky full of stars. The moment Abraham got God’s perspective, his hope came alive. Romans 4:18 (NIV) says: “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’ ”

Abraham’s story is so encouraging. It tells me that even the best of us can get discouraged from time to time. It’s natural to question God when we can’t see how the promise could possibly come true. But we don’t have to stay stuck in those feelings of doubt and discouragement. God wants to give us His perspective in order to fill us with hope and faith. Rather than looking at the small picture, God wants to show us the big picture—
His
picture—because His perspective changes everything.

Let’s put on what I will call our “God glasses,” and look at some things from God’s perspective. He sees things very differently than we do because He sees the end from the beginning.

How does God see you? He loves you more than you will ever understand, and He has a good plan for your life. You are never alone because He is with you all the time. God’s forgiveness is greater than any sin you have committed. His mercy is new every day. God has given you, as a believer, power, and you do not have to live a defeated life. You have been made brand-new in Christ, given a new life, and you can let go of all that is behind you and look forward to the things that are ahead. When you know who you are
in Christ—and how God views you because of the sacrifice of His Son—it will change the way you live.

God looked at creation and said it was good (see Genesis 1:31). You’re part of creation, so you’re good. But we may have a hard time believing that. I’m not talking about your flesh. The apostle Paul said, “Nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh.” (Romans 7:18). Our flesh is flawed, and we all make mistakes. When God says “You’re good,” He’s talking about the newly recreated spiritual you!

It is very important that we understand the new creation realities and begin to identify with them. A lot of people act badly because they think they’re bad—they
believe
they’re bad. People often stay stuck in a sinful lifestyle because they don’t believe they have been set free from it through Christ. They look at what they’ve always been and they don’t understand the real power of the new birth—that if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, old things have passed away, and all things have become brand-new (see 2 Corinthians 5:17).

As difficult as it is to understand or to truly believe, God now views us as righteous through Jesus.

As someone who felt “wrong” most of my life, learning about the doctrine of righteousness through Christ was and is amazingly freeing and wonderful to me. I love to help people understand this so they can stop rejecting themselves because they can’t seem to be perfect on a daily basis. Our right standing with God is not based on what we do, but it is based on what Jesus has done.

As we learn more and more about the love, acceptance, and grace of God, we notice that hope becomes our continual companion. I honestly cannot recall the last time I felt hopeless! We can learn to trust God and to always have confidence that as we are growing and changing, God sees our love and commitment to Him and still views us as being in right relationship with Him.

There is a big difference between who you are and what you do. That’s why I encourage people to separate their “who” from their “do.” You are a child of God. You are born again. You are filled with His Spirit. Instead of looking at your flesh, get God’s perspective and look at your spirit. See yourself in the mirror of the Word of God, and then get excited about who you are in Christ Jesus.

I urge you to also get God’s perspective on your trials. See them the way God does. He sees that they are temporary. No problem lasts forever, so keep your hopes up because your breakthrough is closer than you think. When you look through your God glasses, you will have to say “This won’t last forever and I will outlast it!”

God desires that you go all the way through with Him. Going on or giving up is our choice. God gives us His promise, but it is up to us to stand steadfast and wait out every storm in life. Of course God
helps us. He gives us His grace, His strength, and His encouragement, but, ultimately, we must decide to press on or to quit. One of the benefits of trials is that God uses them to harden us to difficulty.

This is an awesome Scripture that tells us that even when we go through something difficult, God will work something good out of it. He does many things, but one is that He makes us stronger. We are hardened to difficulties. In other words, things that once upset us, or frightened or worried us, won’t bother us at all.

A person who works out at the gym with weights will get muscle, but once he or she reaches a certain point, the only way to get more muscle is to lift heavier weights. When we ask God for promotion in any area of our life, we can expect God to do something in us before He can do something for us. We might say that we have to become accustomed to lifting heavier weights in the spirit.

For example, we may pray that our love abound more and more, but that may also mean that we will be around more people who are difficult to love. I remember one time praying for the ability to love the unlovely! A couple of weeks later, I was murmuring to God in prayer about the difficult people who had come my way, and He reminded me that I could not learn to love the unlovely if I was only around lovely people who never irritated me in any way.

When we pray for God to use us in greater ways, we should remember that Paul said that a wide door of opportunity had opened for him, and with it came many adversaries (1 Corinthians 16:9). Satan opposes anything good. He hates growth and progress of any kind, but if we remain steadfast, God will deliver us and simultaneously He will help us grow spiritually through the difficulty.

This doesn’t mean that God is the author of our problems, but He certainly does use them to help us in many ways. When you are in the midst of a challenging or painful situation, try to think of the good that can come from it, instead of merely how hard it is. When all reason for hope is gone, hope on in faith, as Abraham did.

From God’s perspective, good things are happening even while you are waiting for your breakthrough or deliverance. You are growing spiritually, you are developing patience, you are enduring a test, and when you pass it you will experience promotion. And you are glorifying God by loving Him the same now as you will when your circumstance changes.

Trials are valuable. They hurt, but they are valuable! We all go through them, but we don’t all go through them successfully. I often say that after a test, some people have a testimony, but others only have the “moanies.”

In order to get God’s perspective, you may need to develop some new routines in your daily life—some new habits. Hearing the word “habits” might cause you to think of bad habits (because bad habits get most of the attention these days), but you can develop good habits too. Most notably, you can make hope a habit. Hope can be something you develop over time until it just becomes your natural disposition.

An attitude of expectancy—looking, longing, and anticipating that God is going to do something great—isn’t something that will always come naturally to you. This is a mind-set of hope that you’re going to have to intentionally develop until it becomes second nature… a habit. One of the ways to do this is to remind yourself to be expectant of good things. Maybe you should put signs up all over your house that remind you to have a hopeful heart. I believe
in employing all methods necessary when I am working on developing a new habit. Good habits leave no room for bad ones, so if we have a habit of hope, there will be no room in our mind and heart for hopelessness, discouragement, and despair.

Habakkuk 2:2 says:

Write your vision down. It doesn’t have to be anything long or elaborate. You could make small signs that can be read “easily and quickly” as you and your family hasten by. Think of how much more hopeful you would be if…

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hopeful already! If you want to live a life of hope, do whatever it takes. There are a lot of things during your day that try to steal your hope. Decide you’re going to outnumber the “hope stealers” with reminders of hope.
Plaster them everywhere! This is especially important if you have had a tendency to be negative or depressed, or if you are going through a particularly difficult time.