“Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it with an oath. There is one underlying reason why hope should spring into your heart as a believer. Photo credit: RNS/Klimkin/Creative Commons Without that, your hope simply reverts back to a wish. If God is not the object of your hope then you don’t have true biblical hope because the certainty has been removed. Your hope should be based on the fact of who God is and nothing else. The thing that separates the basic definition of hope and the biblical definition of hope is what I call The God Factor. What matters most is the object of your faith and hope – that makes all the difference. However, you don’t just have faith in faith or hope in hope, there is no real value in that. In essence, you have hope because you have faith and you have faith because you have hope. Why do I bring up this verse? You cannot have hope unless it is tied together with faith. “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see” ( Hebrews 11:1). Let me use a verse from Scripture to illustrate the point. One is a wish or desire, the other is a certainty or guarantee. Hope is an expectation with certainty that God will do what he has said. Hope (Bible) – A biblical definition of hope takes it one step further. Hope (Dictionary) – The general consensus from all dictionary definitions is that hope is a feeling of expectation, a desire or wish for a certain thing to happen. Let’s start by taking a look at what hope is from both a dictionary definition and a biblical one.
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