Hope, Healing & Freedom Podcast: Episode 81
TRANSCRIPT
Are there situations in your life where you have lost hope? Maybe it is a situation with a loved one, or a health issue, or even the condition of the world right now. My goal in this podcast is to begin to restore your hope.
I’m Lee Whitman with Restoring the Foundations and today there are two verses. The first one is Hebrews 11:6, “But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” A little bit later in this podcast I am going to also join this verse with Romans 8:28 so let me quote that verse here as well. “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
As you know if you listen to the Hope Healing and Freedom podcasts, I was a Christian counselor for 18 years before we were introduced to the ministry of Restoring the Foundations. During those years I met with many people who had lost hope. Hope is essential to life. In fact, according to Louis Smedes “Hope is to our spirits what oxygen is to our lungs. Lose hope and you die. They may not bury you for a while, but without hope you are dead inside. The only way to face the future is to fly straight into it on the wings of hope…. hope is the energy of the soul. Hope is the power of tomorrow.”
I remember well ministering to people like Becca. Becca and her husband Ron were unable to have children and desperately wanted kids. They had gone to numerous doctors who put them on all kinds of expensive treatments with no results. They had been to the alter at church on again numerous occasions to receive prayer. They had even received several prophetic words about their coming children. After years of no results, they had become hopeless. That was why they came to see me in the counseling ministry. What would you have said to this sweet sincere couple who were heartbroken over not being able to have the children they so desperately wanted? That was a huge test for me at that point in my ministry.
Here is what I did with them. We started by having them bring their hurt and disappointment to Jesus. The best way to do that is by using the Restoring the Foundations method of ministry for Soul/Spirit Hurts. What we do in this part of the RTF ministry is have the person begin by telling Jesus about their pain and hurt. We encourage them to talk with their friend Jesus and tell Him exactly how they feel. This often is a time of great vulnerability as they “unload” the pain on Jesus. It is amazing how patient and gracious Jesus is with them as they tell Him about how they feel, even their very negative feelings. Even feelings like anger at God. It is almost like He already knows how we feel. That was a little bit of a joke because He does know how we feel so telling him about our feelings is no surprise to Him. Then we went the next step and gave Jesus those negative feelings. We have to choose to give Him our negative feelings because He is not going to take anything we are not willing to give to Him. Then we asked Jesus to bring healing to their broken hearts. How can Jesus bring healing to hearts that are broken by a real-life experience like not being able to have children? I don’t know how He does it but when He met Becca and Ron in the midst of their pain and hurt, He brought peace and healing to their broken hearts in an amazing way that only He can do. He is able to give hope to the hopeless.
God used my ministry with Becca to teach me an amazing truth about hope. He did it by combining the truth from two verses together. Before we go to those two verses, let’s talk about hope. In English the word hope has a much less powerful meaning than it does in the bible. According to dictionary.com hope in our world means “the feeling that what is wanted can be had or events will turn out for the best.” In other words, we use the word hope for something we want or desire or even for wishful thinking. For example, we would say I hope it does not rain on Saturday. It is not based on anything concrete other than our desire for something.
Biblical hope is very powerful. Biblically the word hope means “the confident expectation of good” based on the goodness of God as the giver of hope. It is not a desired or wishful outcome, but it is a confident expectation based on the character of God. Romans 5:5 says, “and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” The reason we can have a confident expectation of good (hope) is because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts. And because we can experience and trust that love, we can have a confident expectation of good based on that love and not based on our circumstances. I took this quote from my pastor Jarod Smith, “If you succeed in praying only what you feel, you will fail in praying what God has promised.”
Hebrews 11:6 is that great verse on faith. It says, “But without faith it is impossible to please God, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.” I had heard the first part of that verse many times in messages about faith. What jumped out at me that day with Becca is that this verse states a truth about the character of God. It says that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. He is a rewarder. That is not just something that He does. No, that is Who He Is! By nature, God is a rewarder.
Sad to say that even after having grown up in the church, I had never seen God as a rewarder as clearly as I did that day. I had been taught that God was more into punishment than He was into rewarding. The picture I got of God was that He was like a mean and angry policeman in the sky just waiting for you to mess up so that He could punish you. That picture could not be farther from the truth. Can you guess where that picture came from? It absolutely came from Satan who does not want us to have an accurate opinion of God. That is an Ungodly Belief that needs to be renounced and broken so that God can tell you, His truth. His truth is that God is a rewarder of those who seek Him.
Then God merged Hebrews 11:6 with Romans 8:28 that “God causes all thing to work together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purposes.” This is the revelation that I received putting those two verses together. God uses all things in our lives in order to reward us. How does He use everything, even things that in this world are horrible experiences to reward us? I don’t know how He does it, I just know that He does. He is always a rewarder.
I think about our friends and fellow RTF ministers Dennis and Debbie Jordan whose young son Ryan died of a terrible disease. How can a loving God allow that to happen to really good people? Again, I don’t know! But that event does not erase the fact that God does cause all things to work together for good and that He uses everything that happens in our lives to reward us. Dennis and Debbie are wonderful RTF minister who have used the lessons gained from their grief and pain to minister hope to others. In fact, Debbie Jordan has written a wonderful new book about dealing with grief called “Grief’s Deception: Overcoming the Twelve Lies Whispered to the Broken Heart”.
One of the lessons Becca and Ron learned is that you should not evaluate the love of God by your circumstances. When we do that, we are always going to struggle because our enemy is very good at planting thoughts of doubt and unbelief in our minds. Remember that not every thought that comes across your brain is God’s thought or even your own thought. Satan has the ability to trigger thoughts in our minds that are meant to keep us from living in God’s truth. That is why God told us in 2 Corinthians 10:5 to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. The Passion Translation says it this way, “We can demolish every deceptive fantasy that opposes God and break every arrogant attitude that is raised up in defiance of the true knowledge of God. We capture, like prisoners of war, every thought and insist that it bow in obedience to the Anointed One.” When we do that, taking those negative thoughts captive and making them obedient to Christ, we understand who God is according to what He tells us in His word and not by our opinions and circumstances. When I don’t take my thoughts captive, I can easily find myself looking at negative circumstances and making judgements against God, like Why did you allow this to happen, God? Not to be trite, but that is a question that is way above my pay grade. God is God. I am not. Understanding that God is a rewarder is a foundation for approaching God from a place of hope. An example of that might be, God I don’t understand why this happened, but your word says that You are a rewarder and that you cause all thing to work together for my good, so I am making the choice to trust you with this circumstance even though I don’t understand. The challenge of faith is to believe by faith everything that God says without being able to verify it with our feelings.
Let me encourage you that RTF ministry is the best way to deal with a lack of hope. Hopelessness can be coming from any one of the four problem areas ministered to in RTF ministry. Hopelessness can come down your family line through the generational sins and curses of your ancestors, which puts pressure on you to walk in hopelessness. It is also very common to have Ungodly Beliefs of hopelessness that are holding you captive and blinding you to the God of hope. I mentioned the Ungodly Belief I had that said that God was more into punishment than He was into rewarding. It is also very possible that you have wounded places in your life due to your experience with hopelessness giving the enemy a landing strip to reinforce your feelings of hopelessness. Then of course we have an enemy that will seize the opportunity given to him through these three openings to energize this demonic stronghold to keep you mired in hopelessness.
Maybe God wants to use your to be a tool that can be part of bringing hope to the hopeless. How can you do that? It might be by being available to someone who is struggling with hopelessness to listen to their struggle. Let me warn you that it is hard to listen without wanting to give advice. Advice to the hopeless person often comes across as mear words. We have a saying in RTF that words don’t heal. Jesus heals. Once you listen to their heart, you will be able to pray for them that the God of Hope will touch their hearts and their situations and give them hope. That is what they really need.
Prayer
Father God, thank you that you are a giver of hope. I don’t always understand how you give hope. I just know that you are a rewarder of those who seek You. I know today that there are some listening to this podcast that have given up hope in some area of their life. I ask that by the power of the Holy Spirit that you would go to them right now and touch that place of hopelessness and instill a spark of hope. Give them the courage to reach out to one of our RTF ministers in their area and schedule some ministry to remove this stronghold of hopelessness. I pray blessing on everyone who is listening today.
If you recognize that you need some ministry, go to our website at www.restoringthefoundations.org and click on the Get Ministry tab at the top to find an RTF minister near you.
