The Opposite Of...FHL

Faith, hope and love are three of the major themes of the Bible. Most of us assume that we start out our life with God bringing a little bit of each, and that after struggling through life, doing our best to grow in these, we are supposed to have FAITH, HOPE and LOVE in huge capital letters like the Hollywood sign. Here's the problem: it
doesn't work like that. We just can't create that much in ourselves, and we often have the opposite attitudes instead. How do we get faith, hope and love? How can we have more? (For this post I am grateful to my friend Gary Deddo, whom you can follow at www.trinitystudycenter.com.)

It's true, we start out our lives with some faith, some hope and some love (let's call them FHL for short). But you and I also learn negative "opposing" emotions that can crowd out these gifts from God. Let's propose, for the moment, that the opposite of faith is fear; that the opposite of hope is anxiety; and that opposites of love include guilt, shame and blame. Have you ever spent a day in some sort of fear about something? If so, you may have realized that you didn't have a lot of love to spread around; for instance, that you were so afraid of the future that you weren't willing to be generous to someone right in front of you. That's what fear does. Anxiety (fear of the future) pushes out hope, which is a confident expectation of a good future. And how negative it is -- and false -- to feel guilt, shame and blame, when Jesus has already resolved all those for us! Those opposites are painful, and they are untrue!

Our FHL are only weak shadows of their true selves. True FHL are qualities of God, given us by God our Creator. Jesus Christ was and is the only perfect Human, fully God fully man, and so had those qualities perfectly. Along with all the other spiritual gifts, Jesus gives us his own FHL through the Holy Spirit -- so whatever we manage to experience, it is a gift from him.

The only real cure for continuing to feel the opposites of FHL is learning to trust Christ to give us HIS perfect FHL, allowing God to "transform you into a new person by changing the way you think" as Paul writes in Romans 12. When the opposites start up in our heads, the enemy is trying to keep us in slavery to his lies, but Jesus gives us his FHL, which change the way we think. So why not refuse the lies, and let Jesus' true FHL come in?