Three Widely Different Reasons

Three Widely Different Reasons

1) All our sins are forgiven and wiped out, and our names are written in the Book of Life.

2) All the glorious hopes we have according to the Scriptures about partaking of everything that we were promised, if only we fulfill the conditions that are attached to each promise. Taken all together, that is unspeakably much and inexpressibly glorious.

3) The joy that automatically comes in due course as we attain to, and do, what we have had a living hope of attaining and doing. It is able to do something which, as a result of it having succeeded in our life, creates an immediate heavenly delight and joy.

In other words, our joy increases as we progress on the narrow way of life, as it succeeds more and more, and as it gets better and better. It is God’s definitive will that our blessedness shall reach staggering, unimagined heights.

Something which most people have not understood, and have therefore not been in a position to do, is really to rejoice and be joyful in hope; in other words, to rejoice over something you have still not received and still not done—or have not yet been able to do, something which, according to the Scriptures, you can clearly see before your eyes in the television of a living hope! It is particularly rewarding to look attentively and meditatively into everything the Scriptures can give us a living hope for, and then follow and obey the especially effective exhortation in Romans 12:12.

Rejoice in Hope!

The condition is that your hope is not just a theoretical hope you read about in the Bible, but that it is very much alive and therefore effective in our inner being. Unfortunately, it is difficult—but far from impossible—for most people to rejoice over something of which they still have not partaken. It is so easy to think that something like that is not fitting, that it is not right, that, on the contrary, it is a kind of hypocrisy. Yet how can that be since the Scriptures exhort us to do it? Answer please!?

As far as this point is concerned, there is a void in most people’s understanding of life, which is very disastrous. This is a main reason it goes so slowly and so badly with so many people, and that it can come to a complete standstill. For God has ordered the way of salvation such that it is only through this living hope that we obtain this glorious salvation, transformation, and progress, of which we want to partake so dearly.

We can also say it in this way: This lack of the right understanding of life is the same as being sick; that is the correct diagnosis. Then it is useless to take medicines that are good for curing other illnesses. A certain ingredient is lacking, and this ingredient must necessarily be supplied to us; otherwise it will not go well.

It must obviously take some time before there will be much of the joy that comes from successfully doing all God’s will in all areas. For this very reason, God has ordered it so that I can still be full of joy at an early stage of development. This is the joy that comes from having a living hope of attaining to everything to which I have not yet attained.

Long live this living, effective hope that does not put us to shame!

It is especially significant that God is called the God of hope. Rom. 15:13.

It is meaningless to be without hope or to be discouraged when you believe in the God of hope.

It is a great folly to put your hope in anything outside of God’s help.

Add new hope to all your hope! Add new joy to all your joy!

“But I will hope continually . . . .” Ps. 71:14.