Faith, Hope and Love: A programmer's view.

Learning just how much it isn't about me!

Several years ago I heard a message by a friend of mine on “Faith, Hope and Love.” I don’t remember much about his message, but it started me on a quest to find out how these three things interacted. As a programmer I needed to know how these things worked. I thought I needed to be more adequately prepared to put them to use in my own life, however my journey would teach me something completely different ...

God really is sovereign and I really am not - in fact is is humiliating just how much "it" is not about me.

I formulated a theory and so far I believe the theory to hold true.

The theory is… “Faith is a catalyst that acts on hope to produce love”

Faith is a free gift of God – As a human being I cannot “muster up” faith – I must depend on the spirit. Lord I believe – please help my unbelief.

Love and works in this context are interchangeable. From the human perspective any act of love can be mimicked. (I have yet to come up with an exception) – so I find that I cannot “muster up” love either, in fact mimicked love is actually sin.

So I am left with hope – initially I was quite discouraged by this since I had spent many years under the notion that hope referred to something to come in the future – ie heaven. The more I studied the scriptures regarding hope I found that hope kept getting larger and larger. I struggled to put a definition to “hope” that really helped me understand what it was, and I was growing concerned because hope seemed to be the only part of this equation that I had anything to do with.

He is hope, and the more I know Him and am known by Him the more equipped my life is to produce love. It is interesting that in Matthew 7:21-23 – the claims of the condemned were seemingly very cool spiritual acts, but Jesus said the issue was that they didn’t have the relationship. Faith didn’t have hope to act on in their lives – what looked like acts of love were actually sin.

• I have found that if I focus too much attention on faith – I tend toward “name it and claim it” doctrines.
• I have found that if I focus too much attention on love – I tend toward legalism.
• I have found that if I focus on Him (hope) – I become a vessel better fit for what he would desire to do through me.

I hope this note to you is born out of a prompting by God to spill out of the hope in my life and be a blessing to you. I pray that it is not pride causing me to want to look spiritual in front of a man. Weird – the same act could be sin or love depending on how it was born.