Hope Deferred

 I have heard people quote from this verse for a long time. I have read it many times, too. I always thought that it sounded kind of poetic, but I didn't really know what it meant. This time it reached out and touched my heart because of my present circumstances. Hope is a glorious gift from God. We all need hope, and we have hope if we know the Lord. However. sometimes our hope is not realized until farther in the future than we thought it would be.

The Bible tells us what happens when hope is put off or deferred. (Proverbs 13:12) Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but when the desire comes, it is a tree of life. Now, that is a beautiful verse, but the true beauty comes in pondering its meaning fully. I pray we will all do that and benefit from this verse today.

Hope is when we look forward to something happening in the future. Christian hope is sure hope. It is not just wishing something will happen. It is when God has promised us that something will happen, and we are just having to wait for His timing. Christ's second coming is our glorious hope. Heaven is our eternal hope. However, we might have hope for a new job or some other desire the Lord has laid on our heart.

When we have those hopes, and they are deferred our hearts are sick. We are sad. We wonder why God is not bringing them to fulfillment. It can even cause us to be depressed, since we think we can't live well without it. However, the key is this. We need to know that the extra waiting time, just makes the coming of the desire that much better. It makes it a tree of life that keeps on giving us the fruit of joy. Therefore, we should not allow ourselves to be overly sad in these cases, but to focus on how great the realization of the desire is going to be when it comes.

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Tomorrow, I intend to read Proverbs 14-16.