Bill Johnson - How to Find Hope and Why It Is Key to Success
It is the birthplace of hope, seeing who is there, seeing His heart, His purpose, His plan. You cannot help but have hope in that situation. Every commandment of the Lord is to ensure that I succeed; every commandment of the Lord ties me into the purpose for why I’m alive. The commandments of the Lord connect me to why I’m alive, and they ensure, if you will, my success. Success is a biblical term; I realize Wall Street has a definition, but don’t fall for that. There’s a better one: the absolute fulfillment of why we’re alive—the gifts that we carry, the joy, and the satisfaction of doing all that He has said to do, that He directed us to do. Every one of us will appear before the Lord to give an account of our lives, and the commandments of the Lord actually link me to my design.
There’s also this element called the testimony: that’s the spoken or written record of anything God has done in His partnership with people. The reality is, God can do everything better than we can, and He does not need to say, «Here, people,» teaching all the time, «God needed us, so He created"—no, don’t be foolish. The One who lived eternally past has no needs; He has lots of dreams, and you are that dream, that desire. Hopelessness robs us of potential, and hope always leads to great faith. Hope anticipates; hope actually attracts circumstances that aid us in fulfilling our purpose. Hope is a magnet; people with hope attract opportunities and actually draw in the building blocks of prophetic words, if you will, into their lives so that they can fulfill their reason for being. Hope really is a magnet; it magnetically attracts into our lives the building blocks of things that we need. Hope comes from His nature.
Our hope doesn’t exist because we’ve psyched ourselves into believing we just have to do better; hope is not the product of determination. Much like faith, hope is the product of surrender—yielding to the reality of who He is. I want you to look in your Bibles at Psalms 42; we’re going to look at just one simple passage in a moment. But to help us with this, hope actually is the product of His presence. Nobody looks into the face of God and walks away without hope. Hopelessness only reveals the distance between my face and His; it grows in the space between encounters. It increases in the space between the awareness of the Spirit of God upon my life and in my life. Hopelessness grows when I give my heart to what others will call common sense. I’ve never been impressed with any thought I had that was common. There’s nothing life-changing that has come from it.
Just a brief little tangent here: the more the fear of man controls your life, the more you will think to fit in and please others instead of being challenging and transformative. It’s not that we become careless in our regard for other people; it’s just that we regard His thoughts of us more than anybody else’s. In a time of heightened social awareness, people live monitoring their lives by how many likes or approvals they have. One way to silence many Christians is merely to call them conspiracy theorists; it only affects those with the fear of man. All right, I feel better; let’s move on. Now, let’s go to the Bible and see if we can find in verse five of Psalms 42. Did you find that 20 minutes ago? All right, verse five: «Why are you cast down, O my soul? Why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him for the help of His countenance.»
That last phrase—I don’t know what it is; I forgot to look in the New American Standard and some of the others—but there is a translation that I really like; it’s the Complete Jewish Bible. Instead of «for the help of His countenance,» it says, «for the salvation that comes from His presence.» So let me read that verse again with that last line because it actually helps. The reason I’m reading this is that I am reminded in this scripture of the birthplace of hope in my heart, the place where this tangible sense of the Spirit of God becomes so pronounced in me that the circumstances around me can all shout one thing, but I’ve got something burning in me that says another. It’s that element of hope, and hope is displayed in the middle of controversy, in the middle of conflict.
So let me read that verse again with that in mind: «Why are you cast down, O my soul? Why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him for the salvation that comes from His presence.» Hope in God. There’s a verse in Ezekiel 39:29 that says the Lord speaks, and He says, «I will not hide my face from them any longer, for I will have poured out my Spirit on them.» Okay, so think through this: God says, «I’m not going to hide my face.» Now, when we think of the face of God, we have to think of the perfect, affectionate, loving Father whose countenance expresses delight and joy over His child. So when we talk about the face of God, we are talking about that which displays favor—not that which displays displeasure. That which marks us with eternal purpose is all in that countenance. So He says, «I’ll not hide my face from them any longer.» Why? «Because I will have poured out my Spirit on them.»
What is He saying? The outpouring of the Spirit always contains the face of God. Anytime the Spirit of God begins to move in a room, maybe it’s in worship, the face of God is there. Anytime God begins to move in a room and people start getting healed, or people come to Christ, or marriages start getting restored, people abandon their bitterness and the resentment that they came into the room with, and they start getting freed up and delivered—what’s happening in that move of the Holy Spirit? The face of God is behind it all, which is what the delightful face of a loving Father is behind that outpouring. And it is the birthplace of hope, seeing who is there, seeing His heart, His purpose, His plan. You cannot help but have hope in that situation.