In Psalm 42:5 I was reading today “why so downcast my soul, why do you sigh within me, put your hope in God, I will praise Him yet, my saviour and God”. I got to thinking about the feeling of “downcast” and how I get into that situation. The connection with “put your hope” in God reminded me that it is when I drift away from the activity of “Hope” I will tend to drift toward the “woe is me” part of my life.
Many people think that “hope” means something like “I sure wish (hope) something good is going to happen when_______”. The idea here is what we call wishful thinking. Wishful thinking isn’t bad, but it isn’t hope. Hope is expecting God to do something great, loving, personal in my life this moment, the next moment and every moment that I am directing hope towards. So when I am feeling any kind of dread about anything coming up, I am not “in hope”. I’ve “fallen out of hope”. The lack of hope at best leads to a loss of enthusiasm for the moment and for life and at worst leads to complete despair. Jesus wants us to experience hope at all times.
This makes powerful things change in the body; worry is the outcome of lack of hope, of forgetting to stay “in hope”. This video goes into a little more detail.