"DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FAITH AND HOPE"

"DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FAITH AND HOPE"
 

“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

1 Corinthians 13:13

Beloved Unchained Family, highly estimated friends:

The text mentioned above is a much loved, well known and extremely important passage of the Bible, but also gripping and intriguing, because many times we are inclined to mingle and fuse the meaning of faith and hope, whereas the Apostle Paul makes it clear here that, yes, there is a very discernible difference between them. Let’s amplify a little on these terms.

By academic definition, to exercise faith is to put your trust completely in something or someone, and the Bible goes beyond, when it says in Hebrews 11:1 that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Faith does involve the use of your intellectual capabilities, and it is not a simple feeling or state of spirit, and it is not a subjective blind spur of a moment whim, it’s much more than that; it is a conscious decision made with your whole heart, emotions, your reasoning and will. 

Hope, on the other hand, it’s faith lived on a daily basis, it’s the very practical exercise of that faith and trust you deposited in the Lord, in our case, when we first believed. I, therefore, have hope that I will see the elements of the covenant made with the Lord based upon His promises and His faithfulness, and that I will see the materialization of all the things I believed when my faith was deposited in Him.

We can have a better understanding when we use the example of Abraham. We all know that the patriarch called “friend of God” received a promise made by God Himself that he would be abundantly favored, and that in Abraham and his descendants all families of the earth would be blessed. Now, Scripture says that Abraham believed in the Lord, and that’s faith.

Nonetheless, with the years passing by and no heir to call his own offspring, Abraham needed a “tool” to keep his faith alive, and that tool was hope. The pact had been made, he still considered his faith from the beginning valid, but hope kept him going, believing that the promises would come to fruition. In his pilgrimage, the Bible states that Abraham had to hope “against hope” to become the father of multitudes, which started with Isaac and reached its zenith in Jesus, from whom, all of us, gentiles, even today, are the recipients and beneficiaries of all those promises made by the Lord to Abraham. 

However, I think it is important to include a third element here, that I understand to be very interconnected with faith and hope, and that would be “patience”, the “vehicle by which we exercise hope”.

At this point, I think it would be important to delineate a full scope in a simple definition of faith, hope and patience, altogether in the same sentence, and that would be:

Faith is that act when I deposit my trust in the Lord in complete surrender to His will, and after that I keep walking with Him in the hope I have that one day all the promises I expected when I first believed, it will come to pass. In order to not lose focus, amidst the challenges in my walk with God, I exercise my hope with patience, until the day all the promises made by the Lord will come to complete fulfillment in my life.

Let us always remember: “the just will live by faith.”
 
Wishing peace, health and many blessings to your body and soul,
 
Pr. Joshua Mateíne