The opposite of hope is despair. Despair is the exact feeling Satan wants us all to experience and live with. He wants us to feel there is no use in trying. He wants us to feel we may as well throw in the towel.
It is the feeling of despair that encourages us to go deeper and deeper. Despair turns a "slip" into a binge. Despair tells us, "Well, I messed up yesterday. I may as well get some more today." Despair is our enemy. Despair is one of Satan's greatest weapons against us. We must fight despair and our first weapon against it is hope.
Hope comes from God. Hope gives us the courage to fight on, to not give up. Hope increases with each personal victory. Hope knows that we are weak and that sometimes we will fail. But hope persists and will feed and strengthen us just as despair saps our strength and weakens us.
We may feel we are a long way from where we want to be in the spectrum of righteousness, but hope gives us the vision that someday we can become what we are not today.
Hope leads to faith in God. Faith is exercised and exhibited each time we pray for strength, each day that we study the Scriptures, and each time we put off our natural tendencies. We exercise faith when we heed God's Spirit of Holiness, as He whispers to us to turn away from sin and back to Him. The more we listen to His Spirit, the more our hope will grow, the stronger our faith will become and the more complete our repentance will be, until that day when we can stand before God to be judged and He will welcome us into His house. This must be the hope we carry in our hearts.
No matter how deeply immersed in our addictions we may be, we can conquer our addictions through the help of the Lord -if- we always remember that the battle is never lost until we give up hope.
As unworthy as we may feel at times, the Lord's love is infinite and he will never give up on us.
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