Hope the Key to Destiny - HOPE 4 - David Mitts

Hope deferred makes the heart sick, But desire fulfilled is a tree of life.

(Pro 13:12 NASB)

A healthy heart is a successful heart. There are many keys to the health of the heart, but I want to suggest that one of the master keys is hope. Along with love and faith, our heart is transformed by hope. These 3 are the abiding doorways.

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

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The key to a fruitful heart is one that knows how to abide.

"Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. "I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. "If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. "If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.(John 15:4-7 NASB).

The abiding reality is the realm of Shabbat, the 7th Day.  This is also the rest of Hebrews 4.

So there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His. Therefore let us be diligent to enter that rest, so that no one will fall, through following the same example of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Heb 4:9-12 NASB)

This is the place of abiding, the place of rest, the place where things just work, and as Hebrews points out, it is related to the intentions or purposes of the heart.  This is a foundation stone of living our best in life, being equipped for spiritual victories.

So, I am suggesting one of the access portals to this abiding reality is HOPE.  Hope deferred makes the heart sick. The word sick in Hebrew is the word “Choleh” which literally means to be “pierced” with a sickness. It is the literal word picture of a hole.  It is also used as a word picture for a wall or a barrier protecting a city which has a hole bored into it and therefore breaches the defenses.

So, that is a little background. Hope is an entry point into abiding and when it is prevented from being accessed a piercing occurs into our heart, a sickness. The delay of our hope can if allowed to, make a hole in our heart, separate us from the place of abiding, the place of rest, our inner Shabbat.

So, how do we access hope and enter into abiding. Well, I think one of the answers is in the second part of the verse, the longing fulfilled opening up the Tree of Life.

Who or what is the Tree of Life? We know from Genesis that it was planted in the garden of Eden, the place of Shabbat.

The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.(Gen 2:8-9 NASB).

And we know that the Tree of Life was what man was separated from by disobedience.

Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"— therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken. So He drove the man out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.(Gen 3:22-24 NASB)

From this, we can deduce that “knowing good and evil” and partaking of the fruit of the Tree of Life are incompatible. If we go back to our messages on love and the devastating effects of doubt that arises out of the Tree of Good/Evil or the need to be Right and not wrong, we can see the beginning of an opening into what hope is about.

Let’s go a little further and see if it can become more clear. A longing fulfilled is a tree of life.  The key, I believe to decoding this verse segment is the fulfilled. Fulfilled, is similar to experiencing rest, peace, shalom or abiding.  So when our desires enter into rest, Shabbat, the abiding reality then fulfillment is possible. How do our desires enter into rest? Through hope. Give me a little more patience and I’ll share what I’m working to get to.

First, let’s look at 1 section from James.

What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: "He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us"?(Jas 4:1-5 NASB)

This is a picture of what hope deferred looks like.  It isn’t that we don’t have desires, ambitions, things we want. It is that we have become friends with the world.  A friend is someone we lean on for support when we need someone to talk with and get help from. James is telling us that we have become world-system dependent which is why we don’t live in the abiding reality of true hope, the place of the Tree of Life.

Ok, enough negative. Now for the other side.  When we enter into hope in our heart we access eternity.  There is no deferred. All we need or want is present now. As Yeshua tells us in John 15:7

"If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you”

So, how do we enter into the realm of hope? We do it by activating hope in our heart.

Therefore, prepare your minds for action, keep sober in spirit, fix your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ. (1Pe 1:13 NASB).

You see it was always about the Tree of Life.  He is the Tree. What needs revelation is that He who is the Word is also the Tree.  The Word is the seed and the Tree is the vehicle for the production of the fruit that was present in the seed.

His words live in our heart as seed, Mark 4, and through His Spirit connect us to eternal life, which is the fruit of the Tree.

Next week we’ll dive deeper into the full revelation of how to fully engage the power of hope and live in eternal life without regard to delays.

For now, I want to activate the revelation of Jesus Christ and the eternal hope in our heart through the open face exercise.