548 Wishing or Hoping?

What are you hoping for? What are you still waiting on in your life? What does it mean to wait on the Lord? Does it mean to put living on hold until God shows up and does something? Hey … he did do something. He made the sun to rise today. He gave you breath today. Well, look at that … if you’ve been waiting for God to do something first, it seems to me he showed up and did something pretty darn miraculous. YOUR TURN. I’ve waited on the Lord before. But my wait turned more into procrastination with a holy label. I prayed, then I sat. I questioned. I waited for God to do something big, forgetting all big things first start small. God had done his part by giving me the seeds to plant, in my waiting I had forgotten to plant the darn seeds. Yes, once again we’re right back to the same truth … do what you can with what you have right where you are. Why are we back here again? Because this is how God works. Remember how Jesus turned the water into wine at the wedding. Could he have just magically filled every empty cup with wine? Yes, I have no doubt he could have. But instead he tells the men to take 6 stone water jars and fill them with water. After doing what they could with what they had, they tasted and the water had been turned into wine. God’s finest works often involve YOUR WORK! What is it you want? What are you hoping for? Well, what are you doing about it? Romans 8:25 “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” We say we are hoping and waiting. Hoping and waiting. But have we lost the real meaning of hoping and waiting and gotten it confused with wishing and delaying? There is a difference between hoping and wishing. A difference between waiting and delaying. To understand the difference, let’s look at the original text for Romans 8:25. But if we HOPE for what we do not have, we wait for it patiently. In Hebrew, the word for hope is tikvah. Tikvah is defined as a cord that combines expectation, hope and everything I long for. You’ve seen the twisted cord with 3 strands. Ecclesiastes 4:12 tells us “a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.” Hope is a triple-braided cord of expectation, hope and everything you long for, and this cannot be easily broken. Wishing alone can be broken. Desires and dreams alone can fray. Pressure and stress can weaken that which we hope for. But TIKVAH combines expectation, hope and everything you are longing for. Hope actually EXPECTS to obtain what is hoped for. We see this cord of hope in the story of Rahab. Rahab was a prostitute. A woman who had done wrong in her life, but the Lord chose to use her in his great plan to bring the Israelites to their promised land, and save her and her family. You can read the story in Joshua chapter 2. The Israelite spies had gone ahead to prepare the attack on the land and Rahab had taken them in and hid them in her house. In exchange for her protection of them, they promised to protect her and her entire family and save them in the battle. A sign of their covenant was after they left her home to prepare for the battle, she was to hang a scarlet cord from the upstairs window. This was a cord of hope. And after she hung this cord of hope, expectation and everything she was longing for, what did she do … she waited. Waiting is part of hope. In fact, Tikvah, the word for hope, comes from the root word qavah. Qavah means not only to expect, but to patiently wait and eagerly look for it. This cord of hope hung waiting in the window. Hope and waiting is not an abstract thought, it’s not a feeling. It can be seen and we can cling to it. Like a rope, we can hold onto it. Hope is rooted in waiting. We like the hope that’s more instant, but that’s not how hope works. Rahab hoped and she waited.