What is Faith? Hope? Love?
I'll take you through the really long Bible study sometime if it seemed good to both you and the Holy Spirit, but briefly: faith, hope, and love are biproducts of the Written Word becoming a revelation in the heart, preferrably through the preached Word, whether it's your hearing it from others or your own preaching to yourself in the way that David preached to Saul and Goliath as a true Pentecostal at heart. Dude could/can preach! Firey little red head/beard!!
But besides being biproducts of the Word, they're also quality-decisions that are made about which there is no further argument and from which there is no retreat. Romans 4 says Abraham wouldn't even go there with you about how old he or Sarah were. Wouldn't even go there!! But became strong in faith and hope giving glory to God, and when he had patiently endured, he inherited the promise. Other passages that could be brought up about it being just as much an act of the will as of the Spirit. There's tons and tons of books on that when it comes to agape being an act of the will that will activate your spirit that's been recreated in His image by the Blood and Priestly ministry of Jesus Christ at work in your life through God's grace, but hope and faith are as much responsibilities as gifts as well. We're accountable for how vibrantly alive they grow in us by what we give our attention, most dominant words that we speak to, and how yielded we are to the promises of God's Written Word for our lives.
A lot of people try to talk about yielding to the Holy Spirit and some of the sovereignty folks would balk at that, and it's one of the few areas where I'd genuinely agree with them all day long. We submit ourselves to God's redemptive promises in His Written Word expecting Him to glorify His Name in the land of the living by what He makes of our characters in the process of walking out His Covenants and what after we've patiently endured in doing His Will that He decides to make us wealthier with than the dreams of avarice as we become Christ Jesus in the fullest sense of the transfiguring work of His Spirit in our lives according to Romans 8, Ephesians 4, and countless other passages. Our responsibility is abiding in the Written Word, on the side of the resurrection of all things rather than in false humility trying to identify with the curse in rebellion against God. That's our part. His part, after we've refused to identify with the damnation of this world, [rightly discerning His/Our Bread and Cup,] is the green pastures and still waters, the deliverance from the valley of the shadow of death, helping us to keep
the commandment that we shall not want, and making sure to it that goodness and mercy follow us all of the days of our lives as all men are drawn to us all of the days of our lives because we are the house of the Lord forever.
Paths of righteousness for His Name's sake were very wealthy paths in the lives of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Jabez, Job, Boaz, David, Solomon, Jesus' parents (his earthly father is said to have been THE carpenter), Jesus (who was given very very heavy amounts of gold, frankinscence, and myrrh at his birth, perhaps a ton or more by a carivan of over 50 to 300 wise men), His Apostles, etc. Takes a whole lot of religion to miss how wealthy those men were in the Scriptures. And the wealthiest men of God in the history of the world are not going to have been produced by the Old Covenant, but by the New. If Jesus is a greater than Solomon and you're in Christ, then....if the least in the Kingdom is greater than John the Baptist who was the greatest of the Old Covenant according to Jesus... Solomon ought to pass out if he ever saw your Psalm 112 lifestyle of faith, hope, and love, like the Queen of Sheba got light-headed over what little he had by comparison with a Covenant that's sworn in the Blood of God that says that all things are yours!!
