Painting God’s Masterpiece Part 6
Why Seeing Is Important
Scripture: Hebrews. 11:1; Romans 8:24-25; Habakkuk 2:2-4; Matt. 13:13-15
Introduction:
In my previous messages I shared with you that we are painting God’s masterpiece with our lives. God has a plan for each of us and He has drawn that plan on the canvas of our hearts. Although the blueprint is there, it is up to each of us to bring the image that God has implanted in our hearts into the reality of our life. This morning I will be focusing on why “seeing” is important and thus will be focusing primarily on hope. The first thing you will need to know is that hoping is not wishing. Let’s start with the book of Hebrews.
I. Hope Is Not A Wish
Hebrews 11:1 says “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” We often talk about faith and what it means to our walk as Christians. We know that without faith it is impossible to please God for in order to worship Him it requires some measure of faith. None of us have seen God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit face to face so it takes faith to believe that they are and that they are active in our lives right now today. But this morning, I want you to focus on the word hope. In the verse we read, Paul said that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for….” meaning that before faith happens, you must already be seeing something and what you are seeing comes through hope. Hope is not a wish list; it is what we see inside of us before it is manifested in the natural according to God. It is important that we understand that God does not grant wishes but He does respond to our faith which is activated by hope. When you have hope – seeing the vision on the inside of you – you see things differently. This is why when people are diagnosed with a serious illness, the physician attempts to give them hope so that they can see themselves recovering. This “hope” helps the patient to not give up. The physician understands that when all hope is lost the patient sees themselves dying versus getting better. Hope allows us to see things differently from what is present all around us.
Consider the times when you had a mountain of bills to pay. As you looked at the bills, you had two choices for what you could see. You could see a lot of bills with no hope of getting them paid and thus the worrying starts or you can see the bills being paid. When you have the hope that the bills will be paid, your faith is activated and you have given God something to work with. There have been many times when all I had was hope and nothing else. When you begin to see it, you paint the picture. Hope allows you to see what shall be before it becomes a reality. It is what makes it come to reality because your faith will connect to it. Remember, faith is the assurance of things hoped for so you must have hope in order to activate your faith. When you have the hope, you begin to see a picture that is different.
We have often talked about the power of prayer and professing God’s word when we are praying. It does not matter how much of God’s word that we know and profess if we do not have hope. God’s word will not override what we believe in our hearts. Do you understand this? The battle that is being raged spiritually is for our hearts. God knows that once we believe something in our hearts, we will act on it. Satan also knows this so he is constantly trying to influence what we believe in our hearts. Think about it this way, someone said “You cannot talk yourself out of a problem you behaved yourself into.” Remember, we act on what we believe in our hearts. If our behaviors (actions) get us into trouble, we cannot talk (profess) our way out of it. Profession only works when we put actions behind it. So if we are professing sins that we will continue to do or professing God’s word that we have no hope in, those professions will not do any good because there is no accompanying action. Hope is what gives us the ability to see something that will be versus the present. Look at Romans 8:24-25.
“For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.” (Romans 8:24-25) Imagine yourself hoping for a new house as you are standing in front of your new house. Would that make much sense? No, we hope for those things that we do not see; what we do not have. We have a visual picture of it in our minds because we can see it through hope and because we can see what no one else can, we wait eagerly for it. Now consider this (I am finding that I say that a lot – but I do want you to consider this), if you could not see yourself having what you are hoping for, would you wait for it? If there was no expectation that you would ever get what you were hoping for, would you bother waiting for it? Absolutely not! You would not spend time waiting for something that you had no hope of receiving. Is this starting to make sense? Your hope allows you to see what shall be and it gives you the ability to wait for what you’re hoping to come to past. We were saved by hope and now that we are saved, through hope our faith is activated and we are able to focus on and see what shall be. One last scripture before we move on; turn to the Old Testament to the book of Habakkuk (one of the last books of the Old Testament).
Habakkuk 2:2-4 records the following: “Then the Lord answered me and said, ‘Record the vision and inscribe it on tablets, then the one who reads it may run. For the vision is yet for the appointed time: it hastens toward the goal and it will not fail. Though it tarries, wait for it; for it will certainly come, it will not delay. Behold, as for the proud one, his soul is not right within him; but the righteous will live by his faith.” God told Habakkuk to do what? He told him to write the vision down so that when they read it, they could run with it. What is it about writing something down? When you write something down, you can see it and when you see it, you act upon what you see. For example, how many of you start your day off with a list of things to do? As you look at your list, what do you do? You work your way through your list. Your list allows you to see what needs to be done and you take action based on what you see on the list. The same is true when your spouse gives you something to do. You take action based on what you see. We will have a building – we can see ourselves in a building. We have written it down and we are taking actions to get there. It will take all of us and a serious commitment, but if we all see the vision and see ourselves there, it will come to past. God told Habakkuk to write the vision down and in doing so, the people could see and read it and once they did, they could act on it.
If you recall, a painter paints a picture one stroke at a time. Every experience in our lives is adding a stroke to the image that we are painting. What we see in our minds – our hopes – is what we will act on. We must stop focusing on our past and look towards our future. This is the reason it is crucial to give people hope when they are sick because they need to see themselves as being well as they already see themselves as sick. When they begin to see themselves recovering, their bodies will often respond better to the treatment. The fourth verse says that “the righteous will live by his faith.” Faith possesses what hope sees! Faith latches on to what our hope sees and through that bring it to reality. If our hope does not see it there is nothing for faith to possess.
II. Hope - Vision - Image
There is a direct relationship between hope, vision and image. Remember, hope allows you to see something different from what you are currently seeing. So with that in mind, hope can be seen as the eye glasses that allow us to see. I am not sure how many of you wear eye glasses, but I did not know how badly I couldn’t see until I went into the Air Force. When I entered basic training they tested my vision and recognized that I needed glasses. They issues me two pairs of what I call the “Malcolm X” glasses. They were solid black and block style. Although they had no style whatsoever when I put them on I could see clearly. What a difference those glasses made. If you need glasses, whenever you look at something without them everything is distorted and out of focus. Once you put the glasses on then everything that you could not see clearly before is now crystal clear. Hope is like the glasses in that it allows us to see clearly what shall be.
Proverbs 29:18a says “Where there is no vision, the people are unrestrained…..” Other translations says the “the people perish.” Now here is where hope comes in. If the vision exists and you cannot see it, you will not act on it. You will not wait for it because you will not be able to see and understand it. Hope gives us the ability to see the vision – just like putting on the eye glasses. So regardless of the revelation that God has given us, if we do not have hope, the revelation is null and void. Hope allows us to see what shall be. It allows us to see the vision of what God has already placed before us. For weeks I have been talking about painting God’s masterpiece but in order for you see what God is doing within you, you must hope for something more than what you have and what you are. You will never hope for anything if you believe you currently have everything that God has for you. Please understand this, and I will say it slowly so you will get this. I believe the Holy Spirit’s definition of hope is “when we are moved to the point where we agree with God that What Has Been IS NOT What Shall Be!” You see, everything that we can see is what has been. All of our experiences are what has been. All of our actions are what has been. We can see those things but those things may not be what God wants us focusing on now. When we agree with Him that what has been is not what is going to be, then we are able to exercise our hope and the door is open for us to see the vision of what God has already placed before us.
When we begin to transition from what has been to what shall be, faith latches on to the new image that we have before us. Too many times have we kept the image of what has been as the definition of where God is taking us. For some of us, what has been has not been all that great. Our hope takes us beyond what has been and opens the door for us to really see and grasp what shall be. When the Children of Israel came out of Egypt it took the 40 years to get to the Promise Land, not because of God, but because they wanted to continue to live in what has been. It took 40 years for them to get the mindset of what shall be. When you read about their change of mindset, the one thing you will find is they started to have hope. Hope was the foundation for their changing their mindset to what shall be. Hope was the core of their belief that God was truly going to bring them to a place of milk and honey. Hope allowed them to see, accept and believe in the vision. Hope gave them the will power to maintain until they got there.
III. Why Seeing Is Important
Let me make one final point why seeing is so important before I close this message today. When Jesus was teaching His disciples and the people who came to listen to Him, many times He spoke in parables. Some of those parables were readily understood by the disciples and the other people and some were not. One day the disciples asked Jesus why He taught the people in parables and Jesus answered them by quoting from the book of Isaiah. This is what He told them as recorded in Matthew 13:13-15.
“Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. In their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says, ‘You will keep on hearing, but will not understand; you will keep on seeing, but you will not perceive; for the heart of this people has become dull; with their ears they scarcely hear and they have closed their eyes, otherwise they would see with their eyes, hear with their ears, and understand with their heart and return, and I would heal them.”
Jesus said that some of the people had already closed their eyes – their spiritual eyes. They had no hope in Him and therefore there was not a vision or expectation of Him doing anything for them. You see they were closed to receiving from Him and this was evident by the fact they could not see. Isaiah said that should the people be able to see, they would understand (perceive) their need to return to God and if they did so, God would heal them. They must see first in order to perceive and understand. This understanding would lead them back to God and then God would be able to do something for them. The same applies to us. Jesus taught that our enemy, Satan, has blinded some of us. What has he blinded us to? He has blinded us from seeing and understanding what God has already done for us. He has blinded us from seeing who we really are in Christ Jesus. He has blinded us from seeing the promises of what God has given us. He has done this because he knows that if we cannot see it, we will not act upon it. He knows that if our hope is lost we will not have an expectation of God for who expects anything where there is no hope? For a long time I thought hope conflicted with faith. Even though I read these same Scriptures before, I did not make the connection between faith and hope. It is impossible to walk in faith if you do not have hope. It is nearly impossible to clearly see what shall be if you do not have hope. Without hope the vision will not last and would soon be forgotten. Hope keeps the vision alive
Do you have hope this morning? Hope is defined in the diction as “a feeling that what is wanted will happen; desire accompanied by expectation.” If you have no desire and you have no expectation then you can know that you have lost your hope. If you have no desire for God to do anything in your life and you are not expecting God to do anything for you, then you have no hope. If you believe that God has done everything He is going to do for you and you are left alone, then you have lost your hope. Spiritual hope is knowing that what has been is not what shall be. The key here is the knowing. We know because our faith latches on to the hope and we begin to see the possibilities. If you have no desire and you have no expectation of God doing anything for you, then you have lost your hope. I am asking you this morning to consider the possibilities. Try God out and prove Him. God said in Malachi 3:10 “….prove Me now in this….if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.” If you are need, place your hope in God. How will you know when you have done this? You will know when you start expecting God to do something. Remember, anywhere there is hope there will be a desire and an expectation. The two go hand in hand. If you have the desire and you have the expectation, you have hope.
I will continue to this series next week. May God continue to bless and keep you.
