This is a blog post that I wrote 2 years ago today. After reading through it, I thought it was worth sharing again. I hope this will encourage you!
I’m sure most of you reading this blog have heard the popular blues song by BB King, “The Thrill Is Gone” at least once in your lives. If you haven’t, it’s a song about love gone sour, and how the singer is no longer “thrilled” or “excited” for his former love like he once was.
Upon thinking about this idea of the thrill being gone, I couldn’t help but think that this is a situation that we probably all have faced in our lives multiple times. It was in the form of a new, exciting career opportunity that turned into a dreaded, dead end job. It was the promising future of a marriage, spending your entire lives in unity together that turned into arguments and a lot of nights spent alone. It was the pursuit of that coveted college degree that now collects dust in some box in the garage. It was that new, beautiful home that turned into a house mortgage that makes you feel more worried and unsure than secure. It was the life-altering relationship with Jesus that transformed your life and perspective that now seems so distant, so irrelevant, and something you do grudgingly every now and then because you feel the obligation to. What can you say? The thrill is gone.
So I kept thinking about this idea. What happened?? What went so wrong from Point A to Point B? How do we go from one extreme to the other? The other day I was watching a message given by T.D Jakes, and through it I received some revelation pertaining to this thought.
He quoted Hebrews 11:1 (KJV):
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. “ He then brought up an interesting point.
For my entire life, I had always thought that faith was the star of this scripture, that faith was the key ingredient here—but it’s not. If you read the text a little closer, you’ll see that faith is the substance of hope.
So I decided to Google the word “substance” and found the definition to be: “The real physical matter of which a person or thing consists and which has a tangible, solid presence.” Underneath the definition, there was an example that I found pretty interesting: “Proteins compose much of the actual substance of the body.”
Having this example helped me to visualize things a bit. Proteins have a lot of different jobs in a body: much of the muscles, organs, and tissues are made of it, they carry nutrients in the body, proteins are an agent of metabolism, hormones, and digestive enzymes just to name a few. So if the proteins are taken away from the body, it would cause the body to deteriorate and it would cease to perform its functions. It would leave something that looked somewhat like a body but couldn’t fulfill its functions or even survive. So even though it might look similar to a body, and the body might even have a name, it’s void because of its lack of complete function.
I then realized the same relationship applies to hope and faith. Hope is the protein and faith is the body. Having hope is an absolute necessity for faith to function and to thrive. That’s why it has been hard for a lot of us to “keep faith” because we haven’t kept hope. We live in a world that doesn’t “want to get their hopes up” because we live in a world conducive to hopelessness.
After thinking through all of this, I couldn’t help but feel a little convicted about my hope and faith. I’ve been guilty of having a body of faith from which I have starved and withheld the protein of hope. So it kind of looked like faith, I had a name for it, and it even functioned to some degree; but after discovering this connection of hope and faith, I’ve realized how I have functioned so grossly beneath the full potential of my faith. It’s no wonder that we could feel like the thrill is gone when we are operating like this.
The truth is for everyone reading this blog, God has a plan for you. In the book of Jeremiah it says that God knows the plans He has for you, and that they are plans to prosper you, not to harm you, and for a future and a hope. I feel that a lot of us have lost our hope because we have been trying to find our hope from the world and our circumstances. We have been trying to get some hope out of hopeless sources. It’s time that we start using God and His plans as our source of hope. If we truly used God as our source for hope, we wouldn’t lose hope when something didn’t happen or pan out the way we wanted because we would know that God has something better in store—and we would keep the faith while we waited for God’s best!
So today, I want you to take some time out of your day and take some inventory of your life. Where is your level of hope at in every area of your life? Could you be a little more hopeful and optimistic? Do you find yourself sometimes being pessimistic or cynical? Take a look at what or whom you use as your source of hope.
If, like me, you’ve realized you need to switch your source of hope to God, I would encourage you to start spending some time with God daily—even if it’s only ten or fifteen minutes a day to start. Start asking him about those plans and the future that He promised you in the book of Jeremiah. Listen and let Him tell you and reveal to you His plans. Then put your hope in Him and you will have the real, tangible faith needed to fulfill every single plan that He has for you.
Let’s get the thrill of faith back again through hope.