Heb: 11 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. 2 For by it the elders obtained a good testimony.
13 These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them,[c] embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. 14 For those who say such things declare plainly that they seek a homeland.
39 And all these, having obtained a good testimony through faith, did not receive the promise, 40 God having provided something better for us, that they should not be made perfect apart from us.
There are times in our lives when we will not receive what we desire and hope for. Of course at times we will receive what we ask for, but even those gifts will not fully fulfil the perfection that our spirit desires, as we have been made eternal beings, and so the eternity in us will always cry out for more:
Ecc 3v11: 'He has also set eternity in the human heart...' and 2 Cor 5v2 'For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, 3 if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. 4 For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. 5 Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.6 So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. 7 For we walk by faith, not by sight.'
Mortality brings with it sin and death, not in a fatal sense, due to salvation, but in the sense that we will all still face the sorrow that a measure of these things bring while in this world (Jesus: 'in this life you will have tribulation'). We all long for these things to leave us, and in desiring certain things we show that, to some degree at least, we believe that such sorrow will be lessened by the joy that we long via good desires. To some extent this is true, and yet we obviously cannot avoid life, and we cannot avoid the work that Christ wants to do in and through us in this life. For this reason, and others that are not known to us (Paul: 'perplexed, but not in despair') there are times when He will not give us what we desire. Instead, He reminds us of our eternal hope; a home with Him, and a perfection that does not depend on our definition of what we want or need, but upon the total life that is in, and will be given by, Christ when we go to heaven.
Many Churches and preachers get popular because they say that Jesus will give us everything we want. Unfortunately, in a earthly sense of looking at things, this is not true. Even a brief look at Hebrews 11, and any part of the Bible itself show that this isn't the case, whether we look at the lives of the Apostles, who lost much (even though they welcomed such loss for the sake of Christ), Israel in the Old Testament, who weren't fed with what they desired in the wilderness or any of the other countless stories in the Word. Fortunately the earthly sense is completely wrong and sinful, so we can rest assured that even in losing, we will gain in the way God intended. Hebrews 11 shows us that, one of the primary reasons God doesn't give us what we want at times is because He is concerned with us gaining a good testimony for the sake of His grace, power, wisdom, life and glory; all those things that He is and that He dispenses. God shows that, through both the triumphs and failings of His people, His will is worked out (not that sin is ok, but that God is gracious to us, seen in the example of Sarah and Abraham, and how God chose to characterise their testimony in a positive way- Heb 11v11+12- despite their not always obeying His will in the process but doing what they wanted), and a good testimony to His faithfulness, mercy, grace and power is displayed in our lives: Heb 11v2: 'For by it the elders obtained a good testimony'.
Amazingly, Hebrews 11 also reveals that even those who did attain some type of promise in fact 'did not receive the promise or the promises' (v13+v39). Read Heb 1v4-11, then note verse 13. There are times when we will receives things we didn't expect, and there are times when we won't receive anything at all that we desired, but we will obtain a good testimony. God has and will forgive our sins, just like He forgave the sin of Abraham and Sarah, and will turn our lives into a monument of His grace, and give a good report about us, soley because of the righteousness of Jesus that He imputed and does impute to us (when God looks at us, He sees us through the lense of Jesus Christ, because of the blood of Christ).
Even when you do receive a promise from God, realise that it will not bring us the ultimate perfection our sole cries out for. It is good for our sole to cry out for perfection, for it cries out for that very thing God has designed us for: 2 Cor 5v5 'Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God...' But we must realise the testimony that God is concerned with creating out of us, and also that the perfection we desire can only be found in Christ, the homeland (Heb 11v14) He has prepared for us and in the final bringing together of the family of God, in perfect union (Heb 11v40).
God wants us to hope for the future, and He wants us to be expectant, for this is how we, like Enoch, are drawn to come close to God, and are drawn to follow Him and His will, despite not knowing so much about why sometimes. God desires that we seek Him and find him, all other things being secondly, and He wants us to be able to sacrifice other things we may want. Easier said than done, but He keeps us through our weakness and our failings. Those He chose He predestined, so He knows how He'll keep us (Rom 8v29).
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