Past, Present, Future - HOPE 1 - David Mitts

My soul, wait silently for God alone, For my expectation is from Him. (Psa 62:5 NKJV) 

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. (Heb 13:8 NKJV) 

Click here to listen to "Past, Present, Future- HOPE" 

Past, Present and Future. These are words and concepts that frame our existence.  Our past is the realm of faith. Our present is the realm of love and our future is the realm of hope.  We draw strength and weakness from our past.  Our past, in many ways, is how we know ourselves.  It is, for many the source of our thoughts and because of that, it frames much of our reality.  If all we had, was our past then we would be robots who were programmed by our past, which would define our faith or what we know to be “true” in life.  This is the realm of healing in our life.  Our memories and the beliefs that we developed through our experiences and what we have learned build the life matrix that we live in today. 

Love shatters the matrix. Yeshua who is love took our past and redeemed it.   

being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Rom 3:24-26 NKJV) 

His love, brought to our faith, our knowing of ourselves through our past, redemption.  Redemption is changing the identity of the person in the story.  When a slave is redeemed, they become a free person. This is an identity transformation.  Love pays the price and when it is accepted it transforms instantly in the present the one redeemed! 

Because we are human, made in God’s image and likeness, we have the power to make our lives whatever we choose. Our story, with our strengths and weaknesses contains our faith, what we believe about ourselves.  These beliefs chain us to this world system.  Yeshua enters this darkness and shows us the light of His love for us and because we are the ones ultimately responsible for our destiny through the faith in our heart, we have to choose to accept His redemption for ourselves.  In this way, we take the authority we gained when we ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, our self-judgments and condemnations, and we receive His exchange of His death, the penalty of judgment and condemnation and we are redeemed, made new as sons and daughters.  This is faith, the redemption of our past through Love!  We are no longer the slaves to fear.  We are children of God.  This is what Paul was saying in Galatians 5:6 

For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails anything, but faith working through love. (Gal 5:6 NKJV). 

Neither circumcision, or uncircumcision matters, no past matters because they are ALL according to slavery, they are the past under the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, judgment and condemnation, powered by doubt and fear and resulting in shame.  No! We are redeemed by love which transforms our faith, or our belief about who we are based on our deeds and experiences of the past, how we knew ourselves! 

Now, through Love we are free! Now, can begin to talk about the future, the power of hope.   

What is hope? Hope is the power of the future, our Destiny to pull on and shape the nature of our lives.  At the end of the great chapter on love Paul states: 

And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (1Co 13:13 NKJV) 

Notice the word “abide”.  This means, to me here now in my presence.  Hope, the future, abides with me now!  Love is the power to transform, faith, the beliefs retained in the past.  It is also the power to activate hope in the future.  That’s why Love is called the greatest of the three.  Like faith, we become robots with respect to hope, without love. This is the whole realm of goal setting and PMA, it is all about performance and striving.  This is not the realm of hope, which is activated by the power of love. 

OK. So, let’s turn to hope.  Look with me at Ephesians 1:15-19: 

Therefore I also, after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, do not cease to give thanks for you, making mention of you in my prayers: that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, and what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power (Eph 1:15-19 NKJV). 

The Apostle Paul is praying about an activation of hope.  Hope is the power to draw us into the future that God has prepared for us.  Over the next few weeks, we will be pressing in for the activation of this power, what the Apostle calls exceeding great power, mighty power which is potentially released to us when we grasp fully hope. 

How do we grasp hope? Let’s look at hope to see how. 

First, as with many things of the Spirit, hope has been diluted by the culture we live in.  The word has lost its power because it has disappeared into the common speak of our day.  We casually say, “I hope so” and think we are speaking of hope when in fact we are redefining hope as wishful thinking.  Hope moves from expressing power to expressing doubt plus a low expectation of maybe something happening.  This is NOT the hope of the Spirit of God. 

There is no power in worldly hope and no love.  The Apostle Paul tells us that through wisdom and a revelation of God, our understanding will be enlightened, and we will see the hope, and know the power of our future, our calling that pulls us to its fruition. 

Like our past which is rewritten instantly through the receiving the love of God, through Christ Jesus, we have a future which is also being written in love, empowered by hope. Jeremiah 29:11 tells us: 

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. (Jer 29:11 NKJV) 

Notice that His thoughts, which are the substance of reality and the power undergirding al that is both seen and unseen, are thoughts that contain no evil. This is a direct statement against the outworking of the Tree of Good and Evil, of judgments and condemnation.  What God is saying, is that our future is not the outworking of our past, rooted in the understanding of good and evil that came to us through brokenness. No that is truly a life of hopelessness.  We are condemned by our past. 

No, it a future full of “good”, which is a way of saying it is a future full of God.  He alone is Good. So, when He declares that our future in His thoughts is “good” and not evil, then He is transcending that which we deserve based on our past. 

This is the true power of hope.  Hope is the promise of God for our future.  It is the key to the Kingdom of God operating in and through our lives.  Hope is like a tractor beam that is pulling our lives into a Divine Alignment with our destiny, our call in God. 

What do we need to activate hope?  We will be looking deeply into this over the next few weeks but let me start by saying, like most Kingdom operations, it is about how we see things. Turn with me to Romans 5 

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have* peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope. Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. (Rom 5:1-5 NKJV) 

This is all about perspective.  God’s Glory is promised to us and our response is to rejoice in hope.  God is coming to Earth. His Kingdom is come, His will is done! He is not coming to take us out of Earth but to posses and transform the Earth.  There is no Glory is defeat, only in victory. Yeshua came not to declare the earth experiment a failure but to redeem the Earth and the sons and daughters of God.  It is this hope that gives power to our lives. He works through those whom He calls to bring the message of the coming King and to exercise His dominion in advance of His coming be demonstrating His goodness and love.  We carry in our earthen vessels the deposit of His Kingdom which empowers us to live in this present darkness knowing that we are the light of the world. 

So, when we experience tribulations, we tap into the hope, the promise and we persevere and overcome.  This develops an identity in the King and His kingdom in us, what the Apostle calls our character.   One way of thinking of Godly character is it is the accumulated Kingdom reality we operate in.  We are thus in the world but not of it. 

This is His love plan in operation.  This is our hope, which is the advance guard of His victory, His redemption of the Earth. 

Next week we will look deeper into this hope and how we can fully possess it. 

Activate! 

The hope for the future gives power to the present. Goal setting is the process of activating the eyes of our heart, what is called our imagination.   This is the realm of dreams, wishes, and fantasies.  We all carry a God given desire to begin again towards better things in our lives.  This is key component to the abiding presence of Hope.  Prophecy is reaching into the realm of the Spirit and touching Hope. Prophecy also reveals what is in the heart, our desires and yearnings.  Let’s prophesy to encourage one another for a new day. Let’s ask God to speak hope to each other.  You may receive a picture, a word, or even music to encourage each other.