Unshakable Hope – Sarah Jakes Roberts

Whew, SJR kicks off this 3 part devotional minding all of our business. There is a difference between wishful thinking and having a hope so deep that there is a confidence and even expectation behind it. Are you applying your hope in a way that will allow what you hope for to come to pass? Sarah breaks it all down in episode 1. Spoiler alert: watch until the end for a moment with a special guest!

So I’ve been thinking a lot about hope lately.
You may have heard it’s been this big part of my life since probably October of last year.
I started praying about 2023 what God would have me share with those people who are connected to my voice.
And God gave me a small word that has so many layers that it’s gonna take the whole year for me to unpack it.
And I hope that you’ll be willing to unpack it with me.
I wanna understand our relationship with hope, the fears connected with having hope, the power connected with having hope, the release that happens when we have hope.
And so I plan on spending a lot of time talking to you all about that this year.
But first I had to ask myself, where is hope showing up in your life or a lack of hope showing up in your life?
And I started realizing that a little while ago, I can’t even pinpoint exactly when I decided that it was safer not to hope.
It felt like it was easier to navigate life. If I didn’t have any hopes, I tell this story.
A lot. But, um, well, actually I don’t tell it a lot. I’ve said it on the podcast before.
If you’ve listened to the podcast for a long time, you’ve heard it.
But when my husband and I first got married, he used to tell me, like, he was never going to cheat on me.
And I would go silent and he would be like, after a few times of him saying it, he was like, why do you always go silent when I say that, like, I would just be like, you know, because I had come to a place in my life where I’m like, you’re a good man.
I love you. I don’t want to set any expectations for, you know, what could or could not happen in our relationship because I don’t wanna be disappointment.
Our inability to hope has a lot to do with our protection against disappointment.
So, when we are hoping for things, people may think that we are unfocused.
They may think that we are not angered. They may think that we’re just floating through life without direction.
But the truth is, is that hope feels expensive. It feels like it costs more than we can possibly pay.
And so it becomes so much easier to not have any hopes at all.
You know, the problem with that is, is that we end up a little dead but alive.
Ah, I, I don’t know.
I feel like we need to take a moment there because that, that struck me at my core, so much of my life up until now was spent with me, not hoping for anything because I felt like if I didn’t hope, then I wouldn’t miss.
But if we really dissect hope, if we really take the time, which I want to do with you guys really quick, then we’ll realize why we can have hope but still feel dead on the inside.
Well, actually, we’ll learn that when we don’t have hope, we can actually end up feeling dead on the inside.
We’re going through our lives, we’re navigating people. We’re expecting the trauma to come. We’re expecting the disappointment.
So we do have some hope. It’s just hoping in the bad things.
It’s an expectation that bad things are gonna happen.
It’s an expectation that people will disappointment and we end up realizing and experiencing the very thing that we are hoping for still that is more comfortable than hoping for strength and hoping for things to work out for our good.
But let’s break this down. So Faith Hebrews 11 and one tells us that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
So if faith is a cake and like, what kind of cake is this? Ok?
The cake is a hope cake. So there are all different types of cakes, right?
They’re red velvet cake, pound cake. I feel the Lord on this.
There are all different types of cake and they’re all called cake.
But what each cake is made up of is different.
Faith is the cake but the ingredients that go into faith is hope. So where do I get hope from?
Um Hold on, I’m about to help you. You know what scripture also tells us.
It says that faith without works is dead, which means that if you are just working but you don’t have any faith because you don’t have anything to hope for, then you are going through life alive but dead.
I wanna bring you back to life.
I want give you something today that will help you have revival in your soul.
I wanna give you some knowledge that I believe will help you begin to break the chains of disappointment, to break the chains of expecting the worst outcomes and begin to move you in a space of hope.
I want you to come alive again to have a vision that requires faith, not just work.
Because if you spend your whole life working and you never have faith, then how can we be like Jesus, how can we experience the glory of God showing up in our lives?
We have to be willing to say I am going to hope again. So let’s break this down.
If faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen, I want you to consider asking yourself what happened to my hope.
Where did I lose? It. What thing was I hoping for that didn’t happen.
I think that if you’re like me, you’ll look back over your life and you will see that you were using hope as a wish that you were using it as a verb.
I’m hoping things work out. That’s the same thing as wishing.
If you can exchange the word wish for hope, then it is not hope at all.
The type of hope that I wanna talk to you about today is a hope. That is a confidence.
It is an anchor to your soul. It changes the way that you speak to yourself.
It changes the perspective and the outlook that you have in the world.
It changes the way that you engage with God because you’re no longer using God like a in the bottle hoping that he shows up for you.
But as a partner who you know, you can trust to show up when you need him the most. Ok?
So the best way I can explain this and honestly, it’s probably gonna be a terrible, terrible analogy, but stick with me.
I think it’s gonna bless you. So we got two girls, right? They going to their tenure high school reunion.
One of them, this was that girl in high school. She had all of the things that were working together.
She was on the cheerleading squad, she was dating the, the football player, the, the star football player.
Uh she was also GPA on four point oh, she was in honors classes. This was about that life, right?
Sis graduates high school life is like you’re not about that life. I’m about that life. Sis falls off.
Sis has a journey that is more challenging than she anticipated.
Life gets hard on her life gets rough and to be honest, the girl who has the most potential is now just hanging on day by day when she heads into her 10 year reunion.
She has one thought and one thought only I hope I don’t regret this.
And there’s another girl sis a wallflower when she was in high school and nobody was checking for her.
And to be honest, she wasn’t checking for anybody. She ate lunch in the bathroom.
What else happened to this girl? Um, she didn’t have the latest clothes. She didn’t have the hottest shoes.
She was about that life when it came to the academics, but she just wasn’t here for the social life.
Sis graduates from high school. She ends up going to college. She gets her masters.
She glows up on the kid. Nobody understands what happened, but this automatically glows up. She’s confident. She’s powerful.
She’s sure of who she is.
She walks into the high school reunion and she has one thought and she’s like, I hope they’re ready for me because they’re probably not.
But I, I hope they’re ready.
That word that she’s using is rooted in a confidence because she knows who she is.
The other one is, which is rooted in a longing that has her identity connected to the outcome.
The other woman, she knows who she is.
She just doesn’t know if the world is gonna be ready to handle the releasing of who she is.
I want us to begin really functioning with the level of confidence that we have from the girl who is the latter in the story.
Perhaps it seems impossible. Perhaps it seems challenging.
Well, that’s ok because I’ve got something that I believe is going to help you move into that level of hope.
The first thing that I wanna tell you as we move into that level of hope is very simple.
I’ve been using this scripture over and over again. It’s Colossians one and 27 Colossians 1 27.
I am pulling up because I thought I had right here, but I didn’t, everything’s fine.
Um So this is the writer Paul and he is talking about the hope, the, the glorious riches of the kingdom.
And he’s talking about this glorious riches that there’s this glorious rich, there’s something that is so powerful that if people ever lay hold of it, then it would make them wealthy.
Oh my goodness. I feel that for somebody who’s watching this, that there is a wealth assigned to who you are that has nothing to do with what’s in your bank account.
It is a wealth of your identity. It is a wealth of your faith.
It is a wealth of your knowledge of who you are in God.
This type of wealth cannot be taken away. This type of wealth cannot be shaken.
It sticks with you and it is with you in every season.
And when you have this wealth, it changes everything for you.
And it says Co Colossians one and 27 says to them, God has chosen to make known among the gentiles, the glorious riches of this mystery which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Ok? So the reason why I feel like this scripture is so powerful for people who are at a time in their life where they need to transition from wishing to really having hope.
I mean confidence and hope is because this is not a wish for glory when God created the heavens and the earth, when he breathed his breath inside of us and had a plan that would ultimately lead to the messiah entering the earth to Jesus entering in the earth.
He wasn’t hoping that there would be glory, that there would be a wish and glory would soon come.
No, God knew that if they ever lay hold of who Jesus is, if people ever get a revelation of who Jesus is, it would be worth me sacrificing my only begotten son, it will be worth my son being on the cross because this hope that they will receive will never be taken away from them?
Isn’t it ironic that Paul, the one who was least likely to be a follower of Jesus received this hope and it radically changes his life.
He is never the same again because he received a hope that could not be taken.
When we talk about our hope, having a revival, it’s about us returning to this place of comfort.
And that confidence is this, that when we focus on Jesus, that when the Christ in us is our only goal.
How can I release the Christ in me?
How can I look at this the way that Jesus would look at this? That is the hope of glory.
That is the confidence that cannot be taken away from you because you can trust that the way that you’re viewing it, the way that you’re praying, the way that you are seeing your life and the of what happened to you has so much peace, it has so much glory.
It has so much wonder connected to it that it makes you confident about what is to come.
Ok, Lord, help me to say this the way I hear it in my head. OK.
So here’s the the main message that I feel like we can begin to have as we move into a place of confidence if I am hoping for something and that word hope can be used interchangeably with wish I need to change what I’m hoping for and I need to move that word, hope from being a verb and move it into being a noun.
How can I change my perspective?
How can I change my language for what I’m hoping for so that it reflects confidence and not a wish so that it can reflect faith and not something that can easily, easily be taken away from me if something goes wrong.
So um instead of saying, I hope I lose this weight, what if we say, I hope I embrace every step of this journey like I am not making it about a goal or a destination that hope is going to fuel.
I’m making it about a moment that will require faith and will require me to stretch myself instead of Jesus being like, I hope that I can go on and get through this cross, what Jesus was walking around like I hope they really get it.
I hope they understand what this is.
I hope that they are able to tap into exactly who I am and the power that is connected with believing in who I am and following in my footsteps.
I hope this makes sense.
I hope that this encourages you to really take a moment and dissect your language.
Am I using hope as a verb that can easily be taken away that I can easily stop doing or am I using it as the foundation of who I am?
And if I am using it as the foundation of who I am then my responsibility is not to use it to make up something.
My job is to know that it is already made up.
I just need to have the faith to walk into it. Faith is the substance of things hoped for.
But I in vision for my life, what God has given me as the vision for my life, what God continues to lay out for me, that is my ultimate hope and whatever happens along the way, whatever happens along that journey, it’s gonna require faith for me to continue to color in that picture.
It’s gonna take faith for me to connect the dots. It’s gonna take faith for me to see it properly.
Faith is the substance of things hoped for.
If I cannot connect what I’m hoping for to faith and I am living a life that has no anchor that has no roots.
But if I can say what I’m hoping for my language has the faith to activate and my hands have the strength, my mind has the strength, my heart has the strength to work it out, then I can come alive again.
So instead of just hoping, hoping, hoping, let’s focus on faith. Faith, faith, the hoping is gonna happen.
The the hopes for has already been edged out in heaven, but it’s gonna require faith for us to really lay hold of it.
I can’t wait to keep talking about hope with you. It’s still being crystallized in my hand.
I’m still hoping to find the language and to have the words to help move someone from a place of just wishing and into a place of believing and trusting.
But I do wanna leave you with this when we think about hoping in the way that we have probably been using it, especially over the last few years, that way of using it as a wish.
I think it’s really easy for us to become anxious.
But Philippians 4637 tells us be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.
If we cannot access the peace of God, if we do not feel like our heart is being guarded, nor is our mind, then maybe we have moved into a place of anxious anxiety and that anxiousness is keeping us from hoping again.
And so I wanna leave you with this. If your hope is creating anxiety, it’s not from God.
If your hope is creating stress and pressure, it’s not from God.
God wants to give you a hope that gives you peace and confidence that this thing is gonna work out.
So any time you start hoping for something or resisting, hoping for something because you don’t want to feel that anxiety.
Maybe it’s the, maybe the solution is to not, not hope.
Maybe it is to move in a place of faith. How can I apply faith for this?
Hope in a way that ensures that I can have peace throughout the process.
Maybe that’s what we’ll talk about again.
I think I’m gonna do a video about having peace and hope live in the same place.
I’ll teach him.