hope in a hopeless situation…

when circumstances aren’t turning out like you want them to turn out, when a relationship isn’t working out like you would like it to work out, when things just aren’t going like you want, you’ve got one of three choices.  you can look down in discouragement or despair.  you can look around for someone to blame.  or you can look up to GOD in hope.

the bible says in psalm 88.3-4 (msg), i’ve had my fill of trouble.  [any of you feel that way sometimes]  i'm camped on the edge of hell.  [anybody feel that way sometimes.]  i’m written off as a lost cause, one more statistic, a hopeless case. 

i put that in there to remind you that for thousands of years people have been feeling that way.  and in spite of that for thousands of years GOD has been giving people hope.  you’re not alone in what you feel. 

listen, it is never too late to hope.  it’s never too late to look up.  in fact, if you’re feeling discouraged, if you’re even feeling in despair let me just remind you that discouragement, despair is just the hunger for hope.  that’s all it is.  it’s the hunger for hope. 

what do you do when you’re feeling hungry for hope?  wait for your circumstances to change?  that’s what a lot of us do.  “i’ll wait for the circumstances to change and then i’ll be ok.”  but what if they don’t change?  then how do you find hope?  you may be facing the worst of circumstances but you don’t have to live without hope the rest of your life. 

i can’t think of a better example of hoping in difficult circumstances than a guy by the name of abraham in the old testament.  you might remember the story.  GOD had told him to go to a promised land, a land that was going to be a place where he’d have a multitude of his family and it would be a rich place where they could really enjoy life.  abraham takes GOD at HIS word and he goes to this promised land and he finds rocks.  that’s about all that he found there at the beginning.  there was no place to live.  he had to live in tents.  he had to travel from here to there.  there were all kinds of problems and famines and difficulties.  yet abraham still trusted what GOD had said. 

in fact here’s what the bible says about him in romans 4.18 (msg), when everything was hopeless abraham believed anyway deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do.  but on what GOD said he would do.  a whole different way of living life even when things might look hopeless. 

just a thought from the front porch…