I read something that I believe will be an encouragement to you today! If you are in the ministry and have not seen near what you have dreamed then read this. I want to share this with you all today.

This reads better with a laptop. If you use a phone is cuts off portions.

Hope Deferred

Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
 but a
 desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”

There’s a certain lyrical quality to this proverb which
 makes it
 beautiful, but there’s also an intriguing ambiguity about
 its meaning that makes you read it over and over again.

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick.” When your dreams 
do not come true, it is easy to become depressed. 
But notice, the hope is not necessarily failed. It is only
 deferred. The Hebrew word in this place
 means “to drag.” And so the Proverb is saying
 that when your hope takes a long time to come to fruition,
 when it drags, the time of waiting can be very sad and 
disappointing.

You can imagine how it feels to wait for something,
 something  that you believe to be very important, 
even the realization of
 your dreams. You start to wonder if God is ever going to 
give it to you. You start to wonder why He’s taking so long. 
Does He really love you after all?

And this is where the second half of the Proverb comes in,
 and it seems to cut both ways. “But a desire fulfilled is
 a tree of life.”
 A tree of life– that’s an interesting metaphor.
 A fulfilled desire
 is like one of the trees in the Garden of Eden,
 the one that granted immortality. 
What could this mean?

There’s a simple contrast at work. The fulfilled
 desire is very good,
 whereas the deferred hope was sad. I think there’s
 something else going on, though, and I think the Eden
 imagery is an
 important clue. You see, Adam and Eve’s sin was a 
sin of false hope. Instead of trusting in God’s timing
 and being patient and content with His plan, they
 decided to take the object of their desire,
 the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good
 and Evil. Genesis 3:6 says that this fruit
 was “desirable,” and so we can 
see that the original sin was a false desire fulfilled.

Thus while the fulfillment of our desires
 can be a very good thing,
 the pursuit of this fulfillment can always also
be a temptation to sin.
 Are we allowing our heart to become sick
 because of our desires and our expectations 
about when and how they should be fulfilled?
 Are we, like Adam and Eve, trying to
 grasp now what might be given to us at a later time, 
on our own terms rather than on God’s?

“Heart sickness” is a very complicated thing,
 but it always takes us to an encounter with God. 
What do we think about
 Him and what He is doing in our lives at this moment? 
Do we place our hope, as well as our faith,
 in Him or are we still
 hoping for something else?

We must make sure that our desire for the
 Tree of Life does not become a desire for something more,
 for something that is not ours to take on our own terms. 
We must learn to wait on the Lord, to trust that He knows best.
 And as we trust Him, we will find that He is the true
 fulfillment of our desires.

All of this should drive us to the Cross.
 Jesus Christ must finally be our Tree of Life.
Posted on May 14, 2013 by Steven Wedgeworth