"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when dreams come true it is a tree of life." Proverbs 13:12
"May your unfailing love be with us Lord, even as we put our hope in you." Psalms 33:22
Have you ever longed for something so much that you made your self sick? Be it nausea or even worse a wearing down of your faith? Feelings of disappointment, despair, and even depression? But at other times, you had increased faith or absolute belief that something would come into your life? You knew so deeply that it wasn't a matter of if but just a matter of when? Consider the differences in yourself and the outcomes of your mindset.
Psalm 37:4 states that if you, "Delight yourself in the Lord, he will give you the desires of your heart" and in Romans 5:3-5 Paul states, "Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."
Breathe that in, God considers are desires! Those ideas that have come to us, those things that we long to see come to pass and then... he searches our hearts for our delight. It's touching, that he delights in bringing about our desires through our delight in Him. This sounds like a God that desires intimacy over anything else and as a good father he loves to provide for us those things we desire.
But he also knows our need to grow our character so that we can increase in our hope! Acknowledging his love through our struggles allows us to "count it all joy" because knowing that our faith and hope in him is being developed as we go through these times of struggle. To grow stronger we must consistently press through the resistance. The promise is that through our endurance we will find ourselves in a different place with stronger resolve and a character that grows into a tall tree! We become full of hope. So full that as it has been poured into us it begins to flow from us into the atmosphere around us. It is in this place that we can then be used by God in mighty ways to give hope to the hopeless. That is, out of the overflow of his intimacy and his faithfulness.., Hope brings the more abundant life that he has promised.
JB - Novus Church Leadership