Can’t Live Without This

Romans 5:2-5 The Voice

“Jesus leads us into a place of radical grace where we are able to celebrate the hope of experiencing God’s glory.  And that’s not all. We also celebrate in seasons of suffering because we know that when we suffer we develop endurance,  which shapes our characters. When our characters are refined, we learn what it means to hope and anticipate God’s goodness.  And hope will never fail to satisfy our deepest need because the Holy Spirit that was given to us has flooded our hearts with God’s love.”

Hope is hard to describe. I think even the biblical authors struggled to describe it.  But I’m going to try to say at least a few things about it in the next few reflections.  Today I say this:  we can’t live without it.  People who are fighting disease die when they lose hope.  I believe people who commit suicide often do so because they lost all hope of something better.  When we give up hope, we lose our will to keep moving forward.

To put this more positively, hope keeps us living a life that is really life. It helps us endure hard and painful times. It helps us keep trying when we just can’t seem to get it right.  As we keep trying, keep enduring, and keep holding on the vision of something better, something significant happens.  Our character is strengthened.  Our faith expands.  Our trust increases.

And Jesus leads us into hope.  More on that on tomorrow.

Prayer:  God who is the only infallible source of hope, lead us into that “place of radical grace” that causes our hope to increase.  Help us keep going when “the going” is tough.

Prayer Focus:  Pray for all kinds of people who are losing hope today. 

Song:  Dennis DeYoung (Show Me the Way)  Dennis is the former lead singer of 70’s/80’s rock group Styx (one of my favs) and he is 76 now.  This is a song he wrote back in the 70’s, but his voice is still captivating.  He recorded this during the worst part of the pandemic and it is still just as powerful to me today. I hear this song as a prayer for people who have lost hope – a prayer that God WILL answer.