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“I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits, and in his word I put my hope.” Psalm 130:5, New International Version
Hope requires faith and faith comes from love. Faith isn’t optional but required to witness to the world with the hope we have, and we can only do this when our hearts have experienced God’s love for us.
Experience. It was always at the center of God’s heart for us to know Him. Through His written Word we learn and we see, but through His Holy Spirit and the life of Jesus we get to experience Him and feel His presence around us. There is no “unexperiencing” His love for you once it’s happened. Once you’ve had a supernatural encounter with Him, you can’t be “unmoved” by the great lengths He goes to to love us. That experience is what allows us to exercise our faith in the form of hope. I pray an intimate moment you have shared with God or your desire to share such a moment with Him comes to mind as you read these words today, allowing you to pause for just a moment and praise Him for how worthy He is of our hope.
So much about experiencing God is about slowing ourselves down enough to put our “whole being” into waiting, sitting in His Word, and intentionally and faithfully placing our hope in Him. My mind often leads me to believe slowing down in this way is a weighty task, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Experiencing God in this way is just a moment away.
Let’s take a breath, for just a moment, together, not thinking about any of our realities in particular but only focusing our hearts and minds on how worthy He is of our hope.
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