When I was a teenager, my husband, who was my boyfriend at the time, our best friends, and I went to visit my grandparents. They live on a lake in Alabama, so we decided to go up there for spring break and go skiing and boating. While out and having a blast, we ran over a huge log that ended up knocking off the entire motor! We were stranded out in the middle of the Tennessee River with no help. Every boat that passed us just kept on going. We ended up flagging down one boat that towed us to someone’s pier. I decided that I’d call my dad. He was like, “Brittany, what am I supposed to do for you? I’m in New Orleans.” He told me to call my grandparents, who ended up sending someone to get us. Duh! In the middle of everything, we looked on the floor of the boat and saw water. We were so convinced we were sinking! It turns out, the cooler had toppled over and spilled water everywhere. We had a good laugh after that.
The point of the story is that I had a lot of hope in my dad to tell me what to do, even from 500 miles away! All I was thinking was, “He’s dad. He’ll know what to do.” I didn’t even think about him not being there. I was so used to him being able to “fix” everything, that this situation was no different. My dad had never let me down in helping me get out of a situation, so I was convinced he’d be able to help me here. We still laugh at that today.
I think when we’re young, our sense of trust and hope is so strong. Somewhere along the way of entering into adulthood, we tend to lose our hope. We get let down by people, and possibly by God, or we go though something terrible that we lose hope in who God is. We let our situation control our hope instead of letting our hope in God control our situation.
Life isn’t fair and things will happen that make us question our hope. We tend to skim over hope by saying we have faith. You can’t have faith without having hope. Jesus is the only hope we have. If you’ve ever lost a loved one, and they were a believer, you can have hope that you will see them again one day because your hope is in Jesus – that He came, died, rose again and is living in heaven right now just so we’d have that opportunity to be with Him forever. I don’t know what people do that have no hope in Jesus when they lose someone they love. That has got to be a hopeless feeling!
Feeling hopeless is an absolute miserable way of living. It’s actually offensive to God because we are magnifying our problems over Him. We’re telling Him that we don’t believe He is who He says He is. We question His abilities and His strength. We wonder if He’s really there. How could He have let this happen to me? If He’s really God, why did this person hurt me? Why did this person die? Why is my life harder than other people’s lives? Hopeless people have no sense of drive because their focus is on their circumstances.
God, the Creator of this world, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, sits on The Throne. There is no other god before Him (Isaiah 44:6). He created you and me, He knows every single hair on our heads (Luke 12:7), He knew us before we were in our mother’s wombs (Jeremiah 1:5), and He cares for us (1 Peter 5:7). He is omniscient (all-knowing), omnipresent (always present) and omnipotent (all-powerful). Resting in the aspects of who He is, is our hope. He’s bigger than the enemy. He’s more powerful than anything that comes our way. HE IS GOD! There’s absolutely nothing you will go through that will make Him any less than the God that He is. The enemy will deceive you into thinking that because he wants you to take your focus off of how mighty God is. All God has to do is breathe on the enemy and he will disintegrate. Stop magnifying the enemy!
The Bible says in Romans 5:2-5, that we should boast in our suffering because suffering produces perseverance, and perseverance produces character. Character then produces hope. Our character gets tested through trials and suffering, and when we persevere through them we find our Hope.
Hope is seeing God in your situation and believing He is bigger. Hope is peace and rest in the midst of a struggle because you know your God is mightier than what you see in front of you. Hope is laughing in the face of the enemy because he’s about to get slaughtered by Jesus. Hope is a joyful expectation that you will get through this.
Hope is Jesus.
We serve a mighty God, and there’s NOTHING impossible with Him!
Lavah Ministries 