4For we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus, and your love for all of God's people, 5which come from your confident hope of what God has reserved for you in heaven. You have had this expectation ever since you first heard the truth of the Good News.
They had faith in Christ, and love for people, which came from their hope of all that God had for them. This reminded me of 1 Corinthians 13:13.
13Three things will last forever - faith, hope, and love - and the greatest of these is love.
These three things are obviously related in some way. I am continually discovering these three terms used in the same context in many parts of the New Testament. So far, this is what I have discovered:
Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen; it gives us assurance about things we cannot see (Heb. 11:1). So that means you can't have faith without hope. After all, if you don't have anything to place your hope in, what good is faith? There would be nothing to have confidence about! In the same way, hope without faith is weak and floundering. Even hope in the right things won't do us much good without at least little confidence. But something glorious happens when you place your hope in the right thing (God and all He has in store for you - Psalm 42:11), and you place your faith in that hope: love is produced. Love is the evidence, the fruit, of these two things combined. Let that sink in for a while. God's Word is fraught with deeper meaning - sometimes it takes a while to wrap your brain around it.
I loved what you said, I never thought about it that way, in fact, I've been reading through Colossians for the past 3 months and that verse seemed brand new to me when I read your blog. I love to learn too :) I also liked reading your About Me, the description was so fun to read.
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