  Four Banners Four banners were hanging at the front of the First Baptist Church today. From left to right they read: Hope, Peace, Joy and Love. I started meditating on them. Hope is in what He will do. Peace is in what He has done. Joy is in what He is doing.
Love is in all that He does. The hope, peace and joy that we experience result from His love. These four are magnificently interwoven. These four are proven again and again, cyclically. It is quite difficult to separate these four. Hope once fulfilled is peace.
In turn, our peace is evidence that our hope is not in vain. These four are not void. God has established them, however we experience them according to time. Peace and joy are the two most difficult for me to distinguish between. I suppose the difference is this: Peace is that God has calmed the sea and joy is the ongoing act of the sea being calmed. Still, these two best define each other.
They go hand in hand. Joy, peace and hope are the present,past,and future tense of God's movement in history. In the sense that God is love, love is the foundation of all of these. Without love they would be empty. 
