Faith, Love and Hope

Last week we talked about faith, this time what goes with faith?

Love & Hope

The kind of love the Bible speaks about, agape love, is something that can only come from the Spirit of God.

There are three kinds of love. You have probably all heard this so many times. There are three different Greek words that describe love.

Eros - Love of the Passions

There’s the Greek word ‘eros’ which refers to the love of the passions. Your dogs and cats know how to do that kind of love. There is nothing special about it. It is physical. It changes with the wind. It varies from one day to another.

Phileo - Love of the Emotions

Then there is ‘phileo’ love. That is the love of the emotions. It is the ‘feely’ love, the love that says, "I feel good and I feel something towards you. You make me feel good so I love you. And I’ll carry on feeling good until you say something nasty to me."

That kind of love is easy to create. Just be nice to people and they will love you that way. You end up in performance orientation – performing for people to get them to love you. Be nice to people, become what people want you to be so that you get their emotions stirred nicely towards you; so that people look at you and say, "You’re such a nice person. She really is great to be around." Then you go into another crowd and they have another set of rules and standards, so you have to start being nice to them in a different way.

Agape - the God Kind of Love

Phileo is not the the kind of love I am talking about. The kind of love I am talking about is the Greek word ‘agape’. It is the word that’s used in 1 Corinthians 13, describing that divine love. If you read 1 Corinthians 13 and look at all those kind of loves, and if you try and look at them from the point of view of your feelings and your emotions and passions, you cannot love that way. Then just to make it worse, God commands us to love that way.

God says, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind." Well God is fairly easy to love because He blesses us all the time. "And thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."

"Husbands love your wives."

"Well, if she’s submissive and does what I say, that’s easy enough. If my neighbor is friendly and doesn’t cause me any grief, that’s easy enough. I think with a push I could handle that one."

"Okay, ‘Love your enemies.’ "

"What?"

"Yup! Love that guy who says nasty things and goes out of his way to tear you down; criticizes you behind your back; throws stones through your window; gives you prank calls in the middle of the night; turns all your friends against you; does his best to make your life a misery."

"I must love that person?"

"Hey, don’t look at me. It wasn’t my idea. Love your enemies."

"But I can’t! I can’t. I can’t drum up feelings for somebody that I hate."

Who said anything about feelings?

From the Spirit of God

Agape love has nothing to do with feelings. Agape love is a commandment. Where does it come from? It comes from the Holy Spirit. That is where it comes from. Romans 5:5 says:

And hope does not make ashamed, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us.

You are going to get that love only one way, by causing your spirit to come into communication and communion with the Spirit of God. And you come into communion with the Spirit of God the power of the force of love, which is the very nature of God. The Bible says, "God is love" not, "God loves." God is love.

Light, Life and Love

That is exactly what your human spirit is like. If you want to have this force of love, you are going to have to get into the presence of the light. And you know what is interesting? The Bible uses three words that always refer to the same thing. They are light and life and love. Do you know that light and life and love in the Bible are used almost interchangeably?

Switch on the light and the darkness goes. Switch on the love and the hatred goes. Switch on the life and the death goes. They cannot exist together. You cannot have light and darkness mixing. You cannot have love and hate mixing. You cannot have life and death mixing. You either have one or the other. And the moment you put one of those in, the other one gets displaced.

Spend Time with Him

Love, the love of God, comes from the communion of the human spirit with Him. How do we get it? By coming and bathing in His love. That is how you get it, just by bathing in His love. I am not talking about spending hours in prayer praying, because I tell you what you are doing when you are coming to pray, you are coming to bombard the Lord with all your petitions and your requests. I am talking about coming into His presence just to be there.

All you need to do is come into the presence of the Lord and tell Him that you love Him, and tell Him that you love Him, and tell Him that you love Him. Then tell Him some more that you love Him. Then just be quiet and listen and you will hear Him telling you that He loves you. You will hear it coming up deep down inside.

"I love you. I love you. You’re special to Me. That’s why I died for you. That is why I gave My all for you. You are important to Me. You are very important to Me. I love you."

Listen, you will hear it. Get into His presence, just like a loving couple. You do not have to say anything. Just be there. Hold your spirit up into His Light, and you will find it begins to pour forth. Something begins to take place deep within you. A charge begins to build up. Maybe you will get butterflies in your stomach like a person does when they are in love.

The power of love is just get into His presence and be with Him and hear His words of love, and you tell Him over and over again, "I love you, I love you Lord. Oh Lord, I love you so much. You mean so much to me. You are all the world to me."

Forget about your needs, forget about your cares, forget about the problems. Just come and tell Him that you love Him, and hear Him tell you that He loves you.

Loving the Unlovely

How will I know when it is there? Well for a start you will be able to love the people that are unlovely without even trying. You will start to glow. All of a sudden you will find those ill feelings just gone. You do not even need to grit your teeth and try. It is just there. It flows. You will be able to forgive the people who hurt you and you will not have to force yourself to do it. You won’t have to grit your teeth to do it. It will just come naturally.

Love Gives

Then you will become generous. Yes, you will become generous, you know why? Because love always gives. You cannot help it. If you have love you want to give. If you love this person you want to give them your all. The Bible says that, ‘God so loved the world that He …’ ‘hogged it all to Himself.’? No, ‘that He gave.’

Jesus said, "This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friend. God commended His great love towards us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us."

Even when we were His enemies, He gave His life for us. Love has to give. And you know the amazing thing about giving is when you give something to somebody they kind of cannot help but love you back. Do you know that? You be nice to somebody and keep giving and keep giving and keep giving to them, after a while they kind of start feeling a bit obligated to you, and they just want to give back to you. Because you have blessed them so much they just want to bless you back again. The Scripture says that, ‘We love Him because He first loved us.’

If you want to see the force of love go to work in your life, start giving, giving and giving. I am going to show you shortly that faith and love work together. If you want to release the power of faith, you are going to need love to go with it. And

Hope

There is one third force, and it comes from the spiritual capacity of wisdom, or premonition, or foreknowledge. It is the force of hope. Do you recognize those three – faith, love and hope? You will read it all over the New Testament, especially in Paul’s epistles. "And now abides faith, hope and love, these three …"

You will find that when Paul wrote to his churches, he commended them for their faith or their hope or their love if these were there. And if there was one that was missing he would say, "Well, I thank the Lord for your faith and I thank the Lord for your hope, and I’m praying that the Lord will show you His love now." You read it carefully when you read the New Testament and look for those three and you will see them intertwined all the way. So what is hope?

"Well, I sure hope that things are going to get better. I sure hope the Lord provides for us in time. I sure hope this pain will go and the Lord will heal me. I sure hope …"

A Positive Expectation

Forget it. You are not hoping at all. That is not hope. Hope is not negative. Hope is positive. Hope is a positive expectation. Why? Because it comes out of a premonition in your spirit. It comes out of a spiritual foreknowledge. It comes out of an assurance that what you are looking for, what you are believing for is going to come to pass.

It is a visualizing of the goal. Hope paints a picture in your mind where you can see; you can literally hold in your hands the thing that you are believing for. Hope is positive and strong.

Well, where do we get it from? How do I get it? Do I get it by trying hard? Do I get it by forcing pictures in my mind, forcing myself to visualize this thing? Where does hope come from?

Enduring Under Trial

Romans 5:3 says:

And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation causes patience, and patience experience, and experience hope.

Hope comes from endurance under trial. You were not expecting that answer were you? It comes from endurance under trial. If you want to develop hope you are going to have to get ready to go through the fire. Because you see, the Scripture says that tribulation causes, or produces patience. What is patience? Patience is persistence, endurance. And when you learn to hang on to your faith and hang on to your love, in spite of circumstances, you begin to develop an anchor of hope. You hang onto it strongly, and you learn through experience.

What happens when you hit a disaster for the first time? You go to pieces, but you learn, after a while, that it came to 'pass.' It did not come to 'stay.' You learn after a while of going through experiences like this, that you did not die; that actually God had a plan in this, and God worked it out, and He brought you through the situation. And you learn, when you face a similar situation in the future, to go back on your experience, from previous tribulation, and from previous problems.

Now you can stand firm in hope. You are not caught by surprise anymore. When it comes upon you, you say, "Hold it, I can handle this one. I’ve been through this one before." It is endurance under trial. You begin to learn. If you had never been through that before you would go to pieces, but you have been through it before.

How can we develop it and strengthen faith, love and hope? By filling ourselves with the Word. Romans 15:4 says:

For whatever things were written beforehand were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope.

In other words, we can learn from other people’s experiences, too. We can learn from our own experiences, and we can learn from the experiences of others.

How do I know when it is there? When I am not moved by what I see or by what I hear. When I expect my faith to work, even though it looks impossible. Even though there is no sign of any movement, I expect my faith to work.

Putting them Together

These are the three spiritual forces - faith, love and hope. And as we release those forces into the earth, they are going to go out and accomplish, and bring about that creation from our human spirit.

All Three Needed for Results

Those three forces faith, love and hope are like the three primary colors of light that must be mixed together to make the purity of white light, before you are going to get results. They are going to have to flow as one. You are going to have to have all of them working together. Because if you do not have all of them working together you are accomplishing nothing, absolutely nothing.