Where Is Your Hope?

“But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.” (Jeremiah 17:7 NLT)

In what do you have confidence? Confidence is a rare commodity in the world in which we live. To have confidence in something or someone is to place our trust in it/them. Though we exercise trust everyday in multiple ways, we sometimes still struggle trusting God. Why is that?

We get out of bed every morning with full confidence that when our feet hit the floor, the floor will hold us up. We walk confidently across that floor in the comfort of our home, in whose heating/AC system we have trusted to keep us warm/cool throughout the night. We get the sniffles, so we call the doctor, who prescribes medication we often know very little about, yet take it with confidence it will make us feel better.

The list is virtually endless of the things in which we place our trust, yet we’re so often reluctant to put our full confidence in God, on whose sustaining grace we rely, often without giving it a thought. When has He failed to provide the air with which we fill our lungs? When has the sun ever failed to rise? When have the seasons ever failed to change? When has He ever failed to walk with us, especially when we didn’t know He was there?

Jeremiah wrote in the verse above: “But blessed are those who trust in the Lord…” The word translated “trust” in this verse means “to feel safe; to be careless; to have confidence.” “Careless” is the word used in the Strong’s Concordance, but it doesn’t mean what we commonly understand it to mean in today’s vernacular. It means exactly what it says: to care less! To be less and less troubled be the concerns of the day. But why? Certainly not because we have less cares.

It’s teaching us that to the extent we care less about the issues we face from day to day and instead place our trust and confidence in the Lord, to that extent our hope in Jesus becomes more visible. “Hope” here means “trust, confidence, security; act of confiding, object of confidence, refuge.”

William Gouge wrote: “Where there is no hope, there is no faith.” Our hope is an act of faith. Faith, according to the writer of the Hebrew letter, is: “…the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see.” Faith makes what we hope for visible in our mind and heart before it is revealed to our physical eyes.

The reality is, we don’t hope IN God, our hope IS God! Notice what Jeremiah said: “But blessed are those who trust in the Lord and have made the Lord their hope and confidence.” Faith leads to trust, and trust leads to hope and confidence. What’s the implication? If you’re having issues allowing the Lord to be your Confidant and go-to Friend for every detail of your life; if rather than running to the Lord and relying on Him to give you full confidence that He’s got your future, you’re wasting time worrying and fretting about all the things you see in the news, over which you have “0” control, where is your hope?

Our hope in the Lord can’t exist without faith, that leads to trust, that leads to placing our full confidence for our present and future into the hands of our ever-capable, all-knowing, all-loving, ever-present Savior, who alone is worthy of our worship and devotion of every fiber of our being.

To not trust Jesus with every detail of our lives is to deny the hope that only He can give, not only in this life, but the next.

Blessings, Ed 😊