Exposing Holes in Pursuit of Wholeness: Part 4 (Hope)

This is week four in a five-week application of the first chapter of More Than Forgiveness by Steve DeNeff.

If you have been with us from the beginning of this five-week journey, and have actively engaged each week, you are probably understanding what I promised from the start: this is not a five-step program to holiness. This exploration of holes that keep us from wholeness is about a growing relationship with God. Each new need identifies a quality about God which we can choose to either delight in or reject, ignore or find elsewhere.

Significance was the fact that God is significant and only through him, his choosing and his image are we, in turn, significant.

In security, we must live by faith and trust because God is in control of everything. We are not.

Through intimacy God wants us to feel complete acceptance from him while we actively pursue more of him.

This week we address the need for hope, which Steve DeNeff suggests we fill either through pleasure (the Fall) or suffering (holiness). In hope we are consumed by the Holy Spirit and feel at peace with the joy the spirit offers.

Have you ever played in a ball pit, like the ones in the play place at fast food restaurants? Those things have a way of swallowing anyone who enters. When you fall into it you can be completely overwhelmed, yet completely satisfied.

When we are wholly hopeful, our longing is not for Heaven but for the perfect relationship with God that we are pursuing in this journey. But in this pursuit, we are tested. That test comes in the form of suffering. Is our hope truly in the selfless pursuit of an intimate relationship with God, or are we using that relationship as our ticket to Heaven?

Suffering will cleanse the heart of selfish aims - or at least reveal them. If our pursuit is of selfish ambition we will not endure the suffering. "For in suffering," as DeNeff puts it, "God withdraws and leaves us without the warm enthusiasm and the happy company we are used to." Said John of the Cross, "He does this to determine whether we love God himself or only our feelings about God."

This week, examine your heart and your motivations. Maybe you are not suffering now but you have in the past or you can imagine a circumstance in the future. How do you respond to suffering? How do you fill your need for hope? Here are some questions to consider:

-Are you longing for the glory in the next world or for holiness in this one? Are you living the prayer "Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven," or are you just standing in line at the pearly gates?
-When did you think you were serving God? Was there suffering involved? Or were you filled with warm enthusiasm and happy company from God?
-What have you done despite the expected adversity or obstacle because it was the right thing to do?
-When did you feel hopeless? Did it seem like God withdrew? How did you respond? Selfishly?
-Is there a time when you noticed suffering approach and you avoided it?