3 We give thanks to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, praying always for you, 4 since we heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all the saints; 5 because of the hope which is laid up for you in heaven, of which you heard before in the word of the truth of the gospel." (Colossians 1:1-5)
Notice the three words that are crucial in our personal relationships with the Lord: faith, hope, and love. In the Bible, faith provides the force of trust in something that is true, hope is the forward-looking assurance of a promise to be fulfilled, and love is a sacrificial choice that continues to seek the one who gave this gift of three.
The apostle Paul uses this triad in several of his letters. In 1 Thessalonians he writes about "your work of faith," "your labor of love," and "your patience of hope." In 1 Corinthians 13, "And now abide faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love."
As indicated in Colossians 1, as a believer in Christ, we have faith and love which spring from hope, and that hope is found in the gospel. Without hope we lose the desire to live. We all have had hopeless moments when we felt like giving up.
Hope is awakened by the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. The gospel is offered to losers, to the failures, to the weak, to the empty, to the lost, and it gives us hope. In order to access the good news, we must be willing to accept the bad news. The bad news is that we are broken sinners in need of a savior.
In Colossians 1:5, we read, "...the hope stored up for you in heavens." This term "the heavens" is a reference not to heaven after death, but to the invisible spiritual reality that surrounds us on all sides right now. The gospel reveals to us that there is hope for us immediately coming from that invisible spiritual reality.
This hope includes His strength and His wisdom which are granted to us to steady us, to strengthen us and to make us to stand. That is the hope of the gospel. That is what awakens our faith and hope.
This awakened faith acts upon this newfound hope. Faith means we believe that Jesus is here and involved in the good and the bad in our everyday lives.
