When A Hopeless Situation Gets Worse Pt. 1 — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

Have you ever found yourself in a hopeless situation which only seems to get worse? I think quite a few people do. Life becomes a nightmare. You don’t quite know what to do. And you might speak to God saying, Look, God, why doesn’t this disease I’ve got go away? Why does my career just happen to be over? Why am I losing my house? And why can’t I just find the right person to marry? Can I still trust God if my hopeless situation doesn’t change?

They’re the sort of questions that are real, and you know, you’re not the only one who struggles with things like this. And I guess what I’m asking this morning is this – how do people deal with difficult events that change their lives? For example, the death of a loved one, you lose your job, experience serious illness, or even terrorist attacks, other traumatic events. These are all examples of very challenging life, situations, life experiences, and many people react to these things with a flood of very strong emotions. They might not really know how they feel.

How do we keep going?

And of course it’s scary. These things can happen to anyone, where you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it’s amazing how, generally speaking, people cope with awful or stressful situations. And I think the word that is used is resilience. Some of us are, are good at being resilient, others are not. It means basically bouncing back from difficult experiences and sometimes we get life out of perspective, out of all proportion.

It was the well known poet Alexander Pope, who once said, Hope springs eternal in the human breast. But I wonder, does it? A young married woman suddenly faces the prospect of life without a partner after he walks out. They’ve been married 3 years, and there’s a huge debt there, or a man in prison who had to leave his family and friends feeling so guilty, or a young person goes to the doctor for just a routine checkup, only to be told, I’m sorry, you’ve only got 12 months to live.

How do you deal with those situations? So where is the hope when all hope is taken away? These circumstances can crowd in.

I want to say today that God’s grace is the secret to help us in hopeless situations. The apostle Paul said in Romans 15 that God is a God of hope. It’s a very simple statement. It’s true. If you trust in Christ, you have every reason to hope and to be hopeful, because God knows where you are right now and God knows the future. You’re not the only one that’s felt there’s no hope. I mean, even Bible heroes had their times when they wanted to give up. There was Job, Moses, Jonah, Elijah, the powerful prophet of the Old Testament, and then there was Jeremiah, who was known as the weeping prophet.

We read in Jeremiah 15:18. Why then does my suffering continue? Why is my wound so incurable? Your help seems so uncertain as a seasonal brook, like a spring that’s gone dry. That’s a very interesting version, the New Living Translation version of Jeremiah 15:18. So have you ever felt like that? The prophet Jeremiah, he was saying, Look, God, I’ve had enough. Can I really trust you?

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And yet this great man was called to minister in a really awful time in the history of Israel.

Let me quote from Psalm 34:18. The Lord is close to the broken hearted, He rescues those whose spirits are crushed.

In Psalm 130, the psalmist was trying to encourage the Israelites. Israel, trust the Lord. He is always merciful, and he has the power to save you. So this is not something new, and I want to take this another step forward tomorrow on the same topic. What do you do when the hopeless situation gets worse? God’s promises are not just meant for the Old Testament times – they are relevant for today as well. Try and cooperate with God because God is your rock, and I think there are 4 words that we can think about humility, surrender, acceptance, and obedience.

Now these are very powerful words actually. Humility acknowledges that God is in charge of life, not us.

Let’s Pray

Well, Heavenly Father, all too often we take things like our health for granted, and yet we know that others are struggling with sickness or bad news or misfortune. So Lord, I want to thank you for good health and the blessings that you give each day. In the name of Jesus, I pray. Amen.

When A Hopeless Situation Gets Worse Pt. 2 — Morning Devotions