Overwhelming Trials vs Invisible Hope
This year of 2020 refuses to die off… here we are less than 2 weeks away from 2021 and there seems to be no relief in sight.
Most, if not all of my friends, share the same mindset: This has been a year of tsunami-sized trials. And, to make matters worse, the multiple waves of spiritual oppression almost blot out the visible horizon of hope. At times, the waves seem to be so big that they look like one huge single wall of doom!
Job faced worse! In one single day (12 hours of daylight hell), his world was completed destroyed. Without one single plausible explanation. He lost everything, including his own health (Covid-19?).
It is at times such as these (days) that we cannot give up hope… even when hope is swallowed up by the darkness of the storm.
Paul, facing a huge hurricane storm as he journeyed to another painful storm (court trial in Rome), described what he saw midst the driving rain: “…there stood by me this night the angel of God, whose I am and whom I serve, saying, Fear not, Paul…”(Acts 27:23, 24). It is sometimes VERY HARD to see an angel when surrounded by dense fog from hell!
Sometimes, hope seems to become elusively invisible … it just disappears! The challenge is to find and grasp that “invisible” skinny thread of hope hidden in another dimension of our soul and use it to tie our desperate situation(s) to miraculous faith (also totally invisible)! Stormy trials are not so dark when there is a tiny candle of hope flickering in the wind.
Prayer makes invisible hope become tangible… and that is what takes the sting of hopelessness out of our overwhelming trials. Job said it best (paraphrasing): “with these sick and feverish eyes, I WILL SEE my Redeemer!
Hope is the main ingredient used to build faith when defeat seems to be so overwhelmingly final.
Abraham hit rock bottom when he neared the 100 year mark… the promised child was not to be (so it seemed) … it was when he was overwhelmed by the impossibility that he…
> “against hope, believed in hope” (Romans 4:18) (please reread this three times) then…
> “he considered not his own body now dead” (v. 19) which helped him…
> “stagger(ed) not… through unbelief” (v. 20) this is what hope does…
> “giving glory to God” (v. 20) Hope generated worship, … which caused him to be…
> “fully persuaded that what he had promised, he was able also to perform” … Faith in the fullest form… which is all strong with “hope against hope”.
Find a thread of hope… have hope… faith is already in action!
Brad Lambeth