Did you know that there is a big difference between wishing and hoping? These two words are interchanged sometimes, yet they have different meanings. To hope is one of the most beautiful gifts given by God to His children.
When we experience challenges or disappointments, we often turn to God. But our prayers vary in intensity according to the conviction of our heart. Either we are lamenting ourselves, wishing things would change or that God would intervene. Or we can pray with joy as we perceive our answer based on His promises. That’s the big difference between wishing and hoping.
To wish is to desire something without knowing whether it will happen. We feel that we have no control, that the outcome is out of our reach. This can be negative, like the men who desired the misfortune of David (Psalms 40:15), or Jonah who wished to die (Jonah 4:8). But this can be positive as in the popular verse, 3 John verse 2. “Beloved, I pray that in all respects you may prosper and be in good health, just as your soul prospers” (3 John 1:2 NASB). This verse is a greeting. The apostle wished the recipients of his letter to be in good health, but he had no way of knowing if that was indeed the state they were in.
Hope is different, it is to expect what we want to happen. The best example is in 1 Corinthians 9:10 (NASB). “Or is He speaking altogether for our sake? Yes, for our sake it was written, because the plowman ought to plow in hope, and the thresher to thresh in hope of sharing the crops.” When we desire tomatoes in our garden we do not just wish for them to appear. We plant seeds, we water and we weed continuously because we can already imagine these tomatoes. If they are not as we imagined, we pray on them (yes, yes, I did that this summer!) and we give them fertilizer. Wishing doesn’t make you move, but hope does.
For the desire to get married, some singles are just wishing to do so. “Oh well, if God wants…” Their prayers are weak, without conviction (James 1:5-8), or religious and without power (Matthew 6:7). Yet God has given us His promises to help us pray with confidence, with conviction, and with hope. God has given us all kinds of general promises, such as healing, deliverance, provision, but He also gives us personal promises through His Word. Read this other article on this topic. Through these promises and our Father’s reputation for keeping His promises (Psalm 138:2), we can pray for our future marriage with hope (Romans 12:12).
We are not talking about positive thinking here (because positive thinking does not make tomatoes grow). We are talking about the legacy we have as the children of God that gives us a vision of what God will do for us. Hope is to already imagine ourselves with the answer. Having faith is when we declare the answer and to be convinced that our request is already on the way (Hebrews 11:1). Wishing to marry is praying that God sends a partner. Hoping for marriage is praying that God sends a partner, imagining that you are already married. Then begin to change all that should be changed to have a solid and harmonious future marriage.
But how can we hope? How do we know if God wants us to marry? First, by asking Him! And He will answer you by His Word (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Then believe that He will keep his promises because He is not a liar (Numbers 23:19). To trust Him, we must develop our relationship with Him. We have to get to know Him. He will lead us into small victories to show us that He will also keep the great promises He has made us (Romans 5:3-5). All we have to do is thank Him and do everything He tells us to. This way you will not miss His blessings and you will be able to keep them.
(This article is a summary of the October 27, 2018 conference. You can watch the entire conference on our YouTube channel. It is in French.)