Crystal Lyons Ministries

By:  Crystal Lyons

The Bible speaks of guarding our heart, or the center of our being, above all else because the power of life flows from there. (Prov. 4:23) III John 1:2 says that a person’s life being full, healthy and prosperous is directly linked to the health of their soul. In other words, a person’s life and destiny is directly connected to the state of health that their heart stays in. Obviously I am not speaking of the organ of the heart that pumps blood but the center of a person’s being….that part of them that isn’t necessarily physical, but it’s like the physical heart because it’s the center of all life flow. If the heart goes, so goes the life. In some other places in scripture it’s called the soul. It’s the center of who a person is, their personality, the center of their being…..containing their hopes, dreams, wishes, beliefs, emotions, etc. This part of a person is so important that the Bible says to guard it above all else that we guard. With all this said, let me add a few more insights: Heb. 6:19 tells us that the soul is anchored or held steady and in place….on course….by hope. Whoa….ok, let me add all this together. Our soul is the power source of our life and destiny. The soul’s health or lack thereof directly affects a person’s future and literally determines a person’s outcome. And hope is an anchor to the soul. That tells me that if a person loses hope…..they lose all stability. What holds a person on course, steady throughout the adverse winds and storms of life is hope. Lose hope/lose course…..lose course/lose destiny. No wonder God declares that ABOVE ALL THAT WE GUARD….guard the heart!

Prov. 13:12 declares that “Hope deferred makes the heart sick but when the desire comes it is a tree of life”. If the health of the soul or heart determines the future and quality of a person’s life than keeping the heart healthy is EXTREMELY important, wouldn’t you say? Hope deferred is a very real enemy of the soul. Prov. 29:18 tells us, “Where no vision is the people perish”. Vision is tied to hope. Hope is something we envision…..something we picture in our mind that we set our hopes on. No hope/no vision and people perish or more simply put….cast off restraints. In other words, without vision or hope, we have no disciplines, no boundaries. Life has no meaning and therefore we cease striving towards anything because we see nothing to strive towards. When a person goes through a traumatic event, it does more to them than what the eye can see. Their inner hopes and dreams have been assaulted. Their inner image of how life was going to turn out just crashed and burned in front of their eyes. Hope in something has been swept away and unless they can get hope renewed, THEY will also be swept away. Oh they may still show up for work, live their life, be someone’s wife, husband, father, mother, etc. but somewhere deep inside they gave up on something and have simply resigned themselves to going through the necessary motions of everyday living. It doesn’t have to be a traumatic event, it can just simply be the daily grind, year after year with no change in sight of something better. Either way….hope deferred can enter into a person’s heart and do its damaging work. In Luke 18, the parable of the widow woman who unswervingly faced insurmountable odds, Jesus basically eludes to the fact that hope deferred is an enemy that must be defeated in the last days, because after telling the story of her persistence that brought forth victory, He asked this question: “When I return will I find faith on the earth”? That statement alone lets us know that discouragement and the temptation to simply throw in the towel and give up on life is going to be the atmosphere of the end days. Jesus’ heart cry is to have a people who can continue to trust Him in the midst of extreme discouragement! So, how do we overcome and defeat hope deferred?

Well to start with, I think it needs a two part answer. All of us have had our hopes, dreams and expectations dashed some time or another throughout life. What to do in each case actually depends upon whether or not it was God’s will for us in the first place. Example: My desire as long as I can remember was to rodeo. I remember going to a PRCA rodeo at the state fair when I was in FFA and I sat riveted in my seat thinking, “one day, I’ll be out there in the arena”. Problem was….I had absolutely NO direction or training and no one around me who knew anything. So as I grew older and the desire just wouldn’t subside, I eventually found myself tying goats at amateur rodeos. I couldn’t conceive anything bigger, so I set my heart on a year- end championship. When I just missed winning it, it broke my heart. You see….the basic desire within my heart was God breathed but I couldn’t conceive anything higher than my natural surroundings and I added my own imagination of how it would be and what it would look like. When that didn’t happen, I thought the whole thing was ditched. Hope lost. Then to make it even harder on me, God started talking to me about laying down rodeo because I had made it an idol in my heart….it had become something I was clinging to for an identity. It took a while but eventually I let go of it, so as to cling closer to the Lord. Right there is the KEY ISSUE.

During the times of seeing what we had hoped for crumble before our eyes, we are actually forced to make a choice. It might be unknowingly but we choose just the same. If we refuse to let go of our inner desire as it dies before our eyes…..we in doing so step on to the path of distancing ourselves from the Lord. He is LIFE and He will not go the way of death. If something isn’t going to be, HE isn’t going to hang around that something….whatever it is….and speak lying words of life to something that simply isn’t His purpose. It’s at that point that my inner priorities are revealed….whether I choose to acknowledge it or not…..they come forth. What matters most to me is what I will hold on to. If it’s my inner vision of something I want more than following the Master, then I will refuse to let it go and in doing so, my relationship with the Lord is stalemated at that point. Oh, I can continue to go to church, love Jesus, pray to Him, etc., but inside I quit clinging to Him as my LIFE. He just took a backseat to my personal dreams and desires. Sometimes in that case, if a person simply refuses to let go of a desire…..God goes ahead and allows that desire to come forth in their life…..even though what they got wasn’t His highest and best for them. Ps. 106:13-15 records this happening to the children of Israel when they demanded meat instead of manna, and God eventually gave them their desire and in doing so it says it brought leanness into their souls. Again….there we have a weakened soul…..that which keeps us from thriving in life.

Let me tell you the end of my story…… After I totally gave up all hopes of ever having a life related to rodeo, and actually hadn’t even been to a rodeo in over 2 years, I suddenly ….seemingly out of nowhere…..began to feel a strong nudging from the Lord to enter an all-girl rodeo that I had received a flyer for. It made no sense at all and I dismissed it for several days but it kept nagging at me, so after prayer and strongly feeling the Lord’s direction, I entered the bull riding even though I had never been on a bull before in my life. Unbeknownst to me, that was the beginning of an adventure that I couldn’t have dreamed up in a million years! I soon found myself in arenas at PRCA rodeos….just like I “felt” that day at the state fair. I traveled over multiple states, often times being flown in and paid to ride bulls at PRCA rodeos and also being paid to ride rough stock at two NFR’s during the crowning of Miss Rodeo America. Two decades later and I’m still getting to enter rodeo arenas horseback in several states across the USA, but this time it’s either to sing or bring the gospel at a rodeo church service.

Looking back…..what I would have forfeited if I hadn’t have let go of my dreams during a time of “hope deferred”! What I was clinging to was so measly small in comparison to what God wanted to give me! But I had to desire HIM more than anything else I could conceive to set my hopes on. So….number one…often times, the ONLY way to defeat hope deferred and the weakness it brings to our soul is to simply LET GO. Whether it’s a failed business venture, a failed marriage, a dream that dies before our eyes and yes….even a loved one who dies…..letting go and clinging to the Lord of life is THE ONLY WAY to not be taken down with it. If the dream IS of God…..like He did in my case…..He will resurrect it in a multiplied BIGGER way that only He sees at this point. You can’t think that big, so let go of your idea and cling to Him as KING. He can be trusted fully to have your best interest at heart. If the dream is not of God….never was…..then clinging to it is only going to derail you from what IS God’s will for you! Even if what died before your eyes wasn’t God’s will for that to happen but other people’s choices screwed it up or life just “happened”……trust God……He’s the Redeemer of all things and the ONLY ONE who can bring something good out of what the devil meant to destroy you with.

Now….#2……If our only interest is what we get out of this life, then we will be defeated by hope deferred. Most Christians have no true, heart filled belief in the resurrection. Oh we believe it as a doctrine, but most don’t really BELIEVE it. If we did we would be more Kingdom minded, knowing that our true calling and ultimate desires are eternally based. Life right now is simply training ground for the REAL. Having a true grip on eternity and Kingdom purposes keeps us from fainting when we see a failed dream or we lose a loved one. Because if they had their faith in Jesus as we also do, separation is only for a short while. Nothing is REALLY lost…… our relationship with that person isn’t lost…..just postponed for a short spell. It’s not over! That doesn’t mean we don’t grieve….of course we do, but it has its limits. All is not lost, therefore we pick our sword back up and step back onto life’s fields of battle, knowing that to finish well is the best thing we can take with us! And scripture tells us our loved ones are cheering us on while they await our arrival. IThes.4:13 encourages us concerning the loss of loved ones that as a believer in Jesus we don’t grieve as others do because we have hope. Eph. 2:12 says that those who have no covenant with the Lord are without hope and without God in this world. What a sad statement. Hope comes from God. Defeating hope deferred can only be done by clinging to the Lord NO MATTER WHAT BEFALLS US IN LIFE!

 

I have gone through the hardest time of hope deferred these last 3 years than any other time in my life. After going through a divorce and stepping down from ministering at our church body and seeing everything that had taken 20 plus years to build simply turn to ashes….not to mention the pain of seeing the heartbreaking effects on my sons. I simply wanted to curl up and die. All that I thought…..everything I believed about our life as a family was crushed. I figured my purpose in life had come to an end and therefore I even began asking the Lord to take me home. It has taken time, but hope is being renewed. My calling is still unfinished. God is bigger than our failures….greater and more powerful than the death of a family unit because of divorce. What I’ve had to do is to let go of ALL that I “saw” in my heart of how our lives would play out, what it would look like and where it would go. I had to let go of all my perceptions. All hopes were killed. Now I have a choice…..die with them…or allow God to begin to paint HIS future plans in my heart. I hold to an eternal purpose. I hold to HIM. He knew this would happen in my life before I was born and He has a perfect plan for victory! Let go of the disappointments. Let go of the anger and bitterness. Let go of the wrong that’s been done. Let go of the good that could have been. Let everything go and hold to HIM. HE is my Hope and therefore the anchor of my soul.

Now I feel alive again. I’m excited about seeing how God pulls this one out!
You see….I’ve been here before…..face to face with hope deferred and I’ve already experienced God’s faithfulness in impossible situations. Abraham had two sons. One that wasn’t God’s will and one that was. ALL of Abraham’s hopes were bound up in his sons. God asked Abraham to let go of them BOTH. Not just the wrong one, but the right one as well. One son Abraham never got back…..the other one he did. Defeating hope deferred demands a letting go so as to hold to the Giver of true hope. As Rick Joyner says….”We can be serving the vision of the Lord without serving the Lord of the vision.” Hope deferred is defeated by letting go of whatever it is we must release in order to cling to the Lord and make Him our HOPE. It’s not something we can go through quickly. It’s a slow, soul searching, heart wrenching process where we come face to face with how we truly feel and choose to trust God in the midst of not being able to see anything on the horizon. Sooo, we look to Him, the Painter of new horizons! Healing and renewing our soul takes time but the outcome will always bring forth a person with greater strength of character, greater courage and a depth of trust in the Lord that exposes the shallowness of religion in others that have never traveled down this path.

So, I end by saying this to you……..

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, HOLD to the King!