Faith Hope and Love at Easter

My youngest son has big dreams. He is 10 years old. Sometimes his dreams are not very realistic and his self awareness is not yet developed and I wonder what life will hold for him. But I love the fact he is a dreamer.

As I parent him I am reminded it is not my job to quash his dreams or to expect that he will have the same limitations I put on myself, or to constantly warn him off. Instead, I seek to build his life foundations on the goodness of God. And then to teach him as circumstances arise that not everything works out as we had hoped. But our security and hope is based on a different foundation. That God is bigger than disappointment and that His arms are big enough to pick us all up.

A Christian’s foundations are Faith, Hope and Love.

We centre on all three at Easter time and all three mature and deepen at times of uncertainty as to the future just like we’ve experienced through this COVID19 crisis, when it feels like a loss of control and a lot of disappointment to work through.

Faith: When we seek to be in “control” and set our goals, targets and predictions we lose a sense of dependency and desperation for God. Controlling people find it difficult to trust others, especially God. As John Mark Comer put it this year “Anxiety, as human as it is, is a kind of temporary atheism, a suspension of faith in God.”

Faith trusts a person and His character.

Hope:

Disappointment happens where we have unrealised expectations. At times disappointment can reveal misplaced hope, but it is an opportunity for us to re-centre on everlasting and eternal hope in the person of Jesus.

Love:

As we take time to engage with our Heavenly Father, we meet the suffering God who meets us in an in incredible way in our own suffering, and who softens our heart with love to the world around us.

This Easter time let us lean into Jesus.

Not relying on our manufactured happy feelings, a short-term hope or even our own meagre faith. Our faith is in the person and works of Jesus Christ, who is the greatest source of hope to humanity and whose very definition is love.

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:12-13

BLOG AUTHOR: Marjorie Allan

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash