You can lose hope in this life. After you have made enough mistakes, after you have suffered enough disappointments, after you enough people have let you down, you can turn into a cynic. The good news is that hope can be restored. Here are three thoughts from Bible on how hope can be restored.
The first thought is that God may be silent but that doesn’t mean that God is absent. Learn to accept that sometimes God is silent. Learn to accept that sometimes there is no word from the Lord. We have a relationship with God but it is not a relationship between equals. We can’t demand a response. Sometimes it may feel that God is not there, but he is. He is just silent.
The second thought is that sometimes God’s answer to prayer is “not yet.” Sometimes God says “yes” to our prayers, sometimes he says, “no,” and sometimes he says, “not yet.” The Bible is very future-oriented. Our lives are very future-oriented. We are always thinking about where we are headed. We cut off a lot of possibilities when we interpret “not yet” as “no.” Learn to accept some uncertainty in this life. Learn to accept “not yet” not as a word of frustration but as a word of encouragement.
The third thought is that we need to preach hope to ourselves. We are always talking to ourselves. We have a lot of other influences, but nothing shapes us more than the thoughts we tell ourselves over and over, all day long. We want to be careful about the thoughts we allow ourselves to think. We want to be telling ourselves that God is good, that there is a plan, that everything is going to work out. We need to preach hope to ourselves.
In our sermon this Sunday we will look at how hope can be restored.