How to Keep Your Hopes Alive
If you’ve faced overwhelming loss, repeated failures and betrayals of trust, you might find it difficult to live a life of hope. Maybe you feel like lowering your expectancy will protect you from more hurt and disappointment. The devil wants to keep you out of hope to keep you from obtaining everything that belongs to you. Don’t let him get away with it!
There are so many reasons to have hope as a believer. No matter how serious your circumstances, they can change. If you are going through hard times financially, in desperate need to move to a safer neighbourhood, or needing a miracle in your marriage, it can all turn around—you can have hope.
How can you push past fear and seize the reigns of hope again? Here’s how.
Build Some Dreams
“We put our hope in the Lord….” Psalm 33:20
Many people give up on dreaming big after facing failures and disappointments. But God never intended for us to give up on anything. He wants us to dream big!
How do you counteract the fear of failure? You turn up your hope. You meditate on God’s promises until the picture they paint is so clear on the inside of you that nothing can shake it.
If you’re lying on a sickbed and the doctor has told you you’ll never walk again, instead of wallowing around in that bad report, start dreaming. You could start building a dream of climbing mountains and witnessing to people in the backwoods.
If you’re facing an impossible financial situation, go to the Word that promises that God supplies all your needs according to His riches in glory through Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19). Picture yourself paying off all your debts, accepting the best-paying job you’ve ever had, and giving of your abundance into the kingdom of God.
That’s what hope is all about. It’s a divine dream. It’s an inner image that’s bigger than you are because it’s built on the promises of God.
Get Some Courage
“Be strong and courageous!…” Deuteronomy 31:6
It takes courage to put aside everything that’s happened to you in the past and press forward with supernatural expectancy, but that’s what hope does. It keeps you intensely focused on God’s promise. It keeps you seeing that promise on the inside, even when you can’t see it on the outside. It keeps you operating by the spirit of faith.
How do you get that kind of courage? Put your faith in action. You build that faith by keeping all negative information and people out, and the Word of God in. Keep it going in your eyes, in your ears and out of your mouth.
When you have hope, the devil can’t beat you down. He can’t tear you down. He can’t stop your faith from working. When he knocks you down, you just get up with a deeper resolve to hit him harder next time. You expect God to move with such vigour that all the distractions in the world can’t turn your head. All the failures of the past drift into nothingness. You can’t even remember them anymore because you’re so focused on the expectation of what God is about to do.
When you put these steps into practice and lay hold of God’s promises, you will watch your dreams come true. You will live the kind of life that those who give up hope will never know.