Have you ever been in the middle of a faith stand, when suddenly it seemed like your faith just quit working?

Maybe you were believing God for healing, or financial deliverance, or the salvation of your family. Spiritually, everything was in place. You found the scriptures that promised you what you need. You were firing off confessions of faith like a machine gun.

But as time went by, your spiritual battery began to weaken. The power you had when you first took your stand began to wane, and you developed a gnawing suspicion that nothing would happen.

In desperation, you tried to shove those doubts away by confessing louder and longer. You frantically tried to force your faith to work. But to no avail.

You wound up still sick, still broke, still surrounded by unsaved relatives...and wondering what went wrong. In the end, you probably just chalked it up as a faith failure.

But I'm about to tell you something that will change your life if you'll pay attention to it. It certainly changed mine. It's this: What you experienced was not the failure of your faith...it was a breakdown of your hope.

Faith...or Desperation?

Most believers don't pay much attention to hope. They don't think of it as very important. They certainly don't consider it to be as important as faith. But the fact is, faith won't function without hope.

That's because "Faith is the substance of things hoped for" (Hebrews 11:1). Sometimes I say it this way, "Hope is the blueprint of faith." When hope is lost, faith loses its aim. It no longer has a mission to accomplish. It just scatters uselessly in every direction.

Supernatural Expectancy

Before you can understand how important hope is, you have to realize that real, Bible hope is not "wishing." That's worldly hope. People in the world say, "I sure wish I would get a raise at work," when what they mean is, "I want a raise. I don't think I will get it...but it would be nice if I did."

The kind of hope the Word of God talks about is much stronger than that because it's not based on wishing or wanting. It is based on your covenant with God and the anointing God has provided to carry out that covenant in your life.

In fact, Ephesians 2:12 says before you knew Jesus, you were "...without Christ [or without the anointing], being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world."

You might say, "I'm a believer. I know God's promises. Doesn't that mean I have all the hope I need?"

Not necessarily. You see, hope comes when you take those promises, keep them before your eyes and in your ears until they begin to build an image inside you. Hope comes when you begin to see yourself with what God has promised you - instead of seeing yourself without it.

When you have hope, you have a supernatural expectancy that what God has promised will come to pass in your life.

The Apostle Paul talks about that kind of supernatural expectancy in Philippians 1:19-20 where he says, "I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed...."

In that scripture, Paul uses two different words from the Greek language, each of which can be translated hope. One of them means the happy anticipation of good. The other can be defined as eager longing, strained expectancy, watching with an outstretched head, and abstraction from anything else that might engage the attention.

When divine hope comes alive in you, you're so locked in on the Word of God, you can't be distracted from it. I know what that's like. There have been times in my life when I was so focused on something God had called me to do, and I was so tuned in to what the Word said about it, I couldn't think about anything else.

People would try to have a conversation with me and I'd always end up talking about my hope. It would come up so big inside me that at those times, I was bigger on the inside than I was on the outside.

When your hope gets that strong, it doesn't matter what kind of unbelief the devil tries to throw your way, it just bounces off you. You're so one-track-minded, you can't be drawn off course.

The Spirit of Faith

The Apostle Paul refers to the spirit of faith in 2 Corinthians 4:13 saying, "We having the same spirit of faith, according as it is written, I believed, and therefore have I spoken; we also believe, and therefore speak."

The spirit of faith speaks! It calls things that be not as though they were. It makes faith confessions - not because it's "supposed to" or out of desperation, but because it's so full of eager anticipation and confident expectation it can't keep its mouth shut!

The spirit of faith says, "I don't care what God has to do, He'll turn the world upside down if He has to, but He will change this situation for me."

This material was taken from Kenneth Copeland’s teaching on Faith.