Hebrews 11:1 tells us that “Faith is the substance of things hoped for…”
Hope is the raw material without which faith has nothing to work with – to make substantial. Elsewhere we are told that this “… faith works by love…” :-) (It doesn’t work without love either.)
What I want to focus on in the next few posts is the matter of hope. What are you hoping for, or more importantly, what is God hoping for? Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all get on the same page as God where this matter of hope is concerned?
Next time, I would like to take a look at hope from the vantage point of Romans 8:20:
“For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope…”
Again the question…What is God hoping for? :-)
Loving Like God 
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Godly children. MAL 2:15.
You visionary, you! Thank you for sharing this verse. Upon looking it up, I notice there’s something else to consider; a covenantal someone needed for godly offspring.
BTW, speaking of “hoping for” – I’m sure Jay would have appreciated your comment. Conversation was a real hope in starting the blog. :-)
-Pamela
So often people cite another verse from that chapter … i.e., “God hates divorce” that I failed to notice v15. No doubt I’ll meditate on it for a good long while. It came to the fore when writing the article about cleaving in marriage and standing up to those who habitually sow seeds of division in a marriage. Christians, who have listened to countless homilies at weddings and the charge “what God has joined together, let no one try to separate”. It’s not just a ceremony and words, God actually binds husband and wife together with His Spirit.
It’ll sound strange I’m sure, but when my first wife ended our marriage, I literally felt a tearing in my heart that hurt in a way I’d never felt before. It left me feeling naked and exposed, for lack of better words – raw and broken.
That God joins husband and wife with a portion of His Spirit, to produce Godly children, no wonder he hates fornication so much!
The messiness of life, and so many marriages, and shucks, my own failures, make sense only in remembering that only what God does is eternal, and won’t shake. Everything here will shake. Everything that is a pattern, or a less accurate pattern of a pattern, will end. Only the heavenly will remain. “This mystery is great–but I am actually speaking about Christ and the church,” Ephesians 5:32 NET