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A Glimmer of Hope in the Shadows of Despair

Today for my devotions I was reading in the book of Lamentations.  This is a powerful book, written by the prophet Jeremiah, over the destruction of Jerusalem.  The book as a whole is really a downer.  It is verse after verse of hopelessness, helplessness, despair and anguish.  The prophet is lamenting what has become of this amazing city, the kingdom, and the people.

But while most of the verses in this book are sad and discouraging, in reality the book contains a message of hope.  Actually, because most of the book is so bleak, the verses that are not become like brilliant little lighthouses of hope.  Nestled in the middle of the book, among all the despair, we find this phrase, “Yet, I still dare to hope when I remember this:” (Lamentations 3:21, NLT)

What a powerful statement.  Jeremiah gives us a glimmer of hope in the shadows of despair.  This is a profound statement for those who are living in dark places right now.  In the midst of such darkness, when a glimmer of light shows up, like this verse, it acts as a beacon of hope, beckoning all who are in despair to come and bask in the light.

Jeremiah is calling out to all who are hopeless, discouraged, anxious, and lost.  He says, I have found hope!  Even when the world is falling down around me, I still have hope.  Actually, it is because Jeremiah says these words while in the midst of such lamenting that the words take on such power and shine so brightly.  Jeremiah has hope, and then he tells us why…

“The unfailing love of the Lord never ends!  By his mercies we have been kept from complete destruction.  Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each day.  I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!”

What powerful, hopeful, encouraging words!  Jeremiah reminds us that even in the darkest of times, still we can hope in God.  I want to encourage you with those words today.  If you want to find out more about this hope, then please feel free to gives us a call, or send an email, or even come on out and visit us some Sunday.  We would love to talk more about this hope!

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Am I Going Backward?

Today in my devotions I was reading in the book of Jeremiah and came across a very powerful rebuke from God to His people.  He said, “But my people would not listen to me.  They kept on doing whatever they wanted, following the stubborn desires of their evil hearts. They went backward instead of forward.”  (Jeremiah 7:24, NLT)

I know that God was talking about the people of Judah, but it also sounds so much like us.  We have a terrible tendency to follow our own desires instead of God’s plans for our lives.  We forget that God’s ways are so much better than our own and we run off chasing after things that just don’t matter.

We should be like David who said in Psalm 17, “My steps have stayed on your path; I have not wavered from following you.”  (Psalm 17:5, NLT)  But instead we are like those mentioned in Isaiah 53, “All of us have strayed away like sheep.  We have left God’s paths to follow our own…”  (Isaiah53:6a, NLT)

What we don’t realize is that when we go our own way instead of God’s way, we are moving backward instead of forward.  We are heading in the wrong direction.  We don’t realize it, because our eyes are focused on the wrong things.  We are like a hiker who finds himself lost, because he was focused on the wrong landmark.  We get so focused on what we think we want and when we finally arrive at it we realize that things are really not quite what we had hoped for.  But worse, we find ourselves alone and lost, looking around to figure out where God is.  But God didn’t leave us.  We left Him.  We thought we were walking forward and all along we were walking backward.

I challenge you to stop and ask yourself, “am I going backward?”  Are we chasing after our own desires instead of listening to God and following Him?  We need to learn from that rebuke that we find in Jeremiah.  It’s time for us to move forward!