This morning, we’re going to be encouraged in how to receive and maintain hope in life.  Hope itself is a confident expectation; to hope is to, well, expect confidently.    Hope is an intangible substance and yet it is so real to those who truly possess it. 

Hope is like a placeholder that fills the gaps of our lack until we receive that which we long for.  Though hope is intended to be a positive and encouraging thing, it does have a dark side.  If we have hope, that means we have lack or need.

Romans 8:24-25

24 …But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? 25 But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Hope is a powerful thing!  Hope has enabled people to overcome impossible odds and experience firsthand the miraculous acts of God.  Hope has equipped people to endure through the harshest of circumstances and darkest of seasons and watch them fade away into their past.

Hope can be a dangerous thing, too!  Misplaced hope can lead to the very places which hope was intended to lead us out of.  Many heartbreaks in life are the result of hope placed in something or someone that failed us.  Perhaps you have recently felt this pain. 

When this happens, it tempts us to give up on hope and to lower our expectations.  It can even cause us to begin expecting the worst to happen.  Just because one relationship ends badly, we transfer that same expectation onto our relationships following it, just waiting for the worst to happen.  We get unfairly let go from one job and we start to expect the same thing to happen when things get rough at the next one.

However, God challenges us not to give up on hope, but to transfer what our hope is placed in.  People will fail us, jobs will fail us, cars will fail us, everything in this world will let us down at some point.  Therefore, if we place all of our hope in these things, we are setting ourselves up for failure at some point.

True and enduring hope is not hope placed in anything of this world, but in the person of God alone.  Our hope can’t even be in the abilities of God or in the possessions of God, but in who God is.  Our hope needs to be in the person of God and not in the solutions that He can provide.

Otherwise, if our hope is in God’s ability to heal, we’ll get hurt and confused when He chooses not to; our hope will be shaken.  Otherwise, if our hope is in God’s ability to provide, we’ll get let down when He chooses not to; our hope will be shattered.

To have our hope in God is to also trust His timing and His wisdom.  Listen to just some of these scriptures about hope and what they encourage us to put our hope in.

Psalm 25:3

No one who hopes in you will ever be put to shame…

Psalm 39:7

“But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.

Psalm 42:5;11; 43:5

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.

Psalm 130:7

Israel, put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.

Isaiah 40:31

…those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.

This morning, we are being challenged to hope again!  After all, hopelessness is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If we expect to see trouble everywhere and to get let down in life, it will happen.  In this world, we will have trouble, but that doesn’t mean that we will only have trouble. 

Without hope, we will never be able to move beyond hurt and disappointment to the incredible blessings that life can also contain.  Hope gives us a healthy perspective in life and equips us to move through troubling seasons to ones of abundance.  Hope enables us to expect better things even in the middle of the trials and tribulations.

As I was trying to conjure up a picture of what it looks like for us to have ho