Faith, Hope and Love

Faith, hope and love.

These were the three things I had been searching for my whole life, long before I understood where I was supposed to find them.

I remember having a dream where Jesus spoke to me. At the time, I didn’t know what was real or what the dream meant. I wasn’t a follower of Jesus, and I wasn’t someone who truly understood Scripture. But as I grew older, I found myself searching more and more. I wanted acceptance. I wanted peace. I wanted to understand why certain things had happened in my life and where I truly belonged.

In that dream, three words kept coming back to me:

Faith. Hope. Love.

For a while, I continued having this dream without understanding what those words truly meant or why they stayed with me.

It wasn’t until I began seeking God for myself that those words started to make sense.

I remember opening my Bible, and there they were:

1 Corinthians 13:13 - “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

The same three words.

Faith. Hope. Love.

What I had spent so much of my life searching for in the world, God was showing me could be found through Him.

FAITH

 Hebrews 11:1 - “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Faith is believing even when we cannot see what is ahead.

It is trusting God when life doesn’t make sense. It is trusting Him when our prayers haven’t been answered yet, when we don’t understand His timing and when the path in front of us looks completely different from the one we imagined.

Faith brings peace because it reminds us that we don’t have to have everything figured out.

There will be moments when we question where our lives are heading. There will be times when fear tries to convince us that everything is falling apart. But faith tells us that God is still there.

Believing in our Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit gives us something the world cannot give us: the reassurance that we are never walking through life alone.

Faith doesn’t mean we will never struggle.

It means that even through the struggle, we still choose to trust God.

HOPE

Romans 5:5 - “Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” 

We all need hope.

Hope that tomorrow can be different.

Hope that the thoughts weighing heavily on our minds will eventually quieten.

Hope that healing is possible.

Hope that the things we have prayed for are still in God’s hands.

Sometimes we even spend our lives hoping that other people will accept us exactly as we are. We look for reassurance from family, friends, relationships and the people around us.

But when our hope depends entirely on people, we can easily become disappointed.

God teaches us to place our hope somewhere greater.

When our hope is in Him, our circumstances may not change immediately, but something inside of us begins to change.

We begin looking towards the future differently.

Instead of constantly asking, “What if everything goes wrong?” we begin trusting that whatever happens, God will walk with us through it.

Hope reminds us that our current chapter is not necessarily the end of our story.

LOVE

1 John 4:19 - “We love Him because He first loved us.”

Everyone searches for love in some way.

We search for it within ourselves. We search for it through relationships, family, friendships and sometimes even through the acceptance of people who were never meant to determine our worth.

We want to feel chosen.

We want to feel valued.

We want to know that we are enough.

But one of the greatest things I have learned is that before we ever went searching for love, God already loved us.

His love isn’t something we have to earn.

We don’t have to become perfect first. We don’t have to have our entire lives together. We don’t have to prove ourselves worthy of Him.

God loved us first.

And when we begin understanding His love, we also begin learning how to love differently — how to love ourselves without seeking constant validation, how to love others with compassion and how to forgive without allowing hatred to live within our hearts.

Most importantly, we begin understanding where our worth truly comes from.

FAITH, HOPE AND LOVE

These three things are so important in our lives.

We need faith to keep trusting when we cannot see what God is doing.

We need hope to keep looking forward when today feels difficult.

And we need love — the love of our Heavenly Father, the love shown to us through Jesus Christ and the love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Faith teaches us to trust.

Hope teaches us to keep going.

Love teaches us how to live.

Without them, it becomes easy for anger, bitterness, fear and hatred to take over our hearts. But when we begin seeking God, He teaches us another way to live — with peace, forgiveness, obedience, compassion and joy.

For so long, I thought faith, hope and love were three things I needed to find.

Now I understand that they were leading me somewhere.

They were leading me to God.