"Hard Times, Got HOpe?"

Hard Times, Got Hope?

One of my favorite things to do is watch movies. Even when I know a movie will have a happy ending, I love the hopeful feeling of rooting for the “good guys” to triumph over obstacles and conflicts. 

Hope keeps us going in hard times. It’s fuel for the future. It is a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. Hope is why we have cures for illnesses and ground-breaking technology that changes the world. 

One of the biggest challenges I think we face in life is to never lose hope. It’s hard to wait for desires that never seem to come, or to keep believing when we face disappointment, pain, and pressure. Choosing to hope when life is difficult is all about “rising up in spite of the ache.” 

In this message, we’ll look at 4 stories of hope in the Bible for when believing gets hard. 

These amazing men and women learned how to find hope in God in some very difficult circumstances. They endured the pain of waiting to be parents, the fear of physical danger, the longing to be healed, and the pain- filled sacrifice for a greater purpose. 

Let’s take a look at what we can learn to help us find hope when believing gets hard in our own lives. 

Hope Believes Anyway

We call Abraham “father” not because he got God’s attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn’t that what we’ve always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, “I set you up as father of many peoples”?

Abraham was first named “father” and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing.

When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, “You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!” Abraham didn’t focus on his own impotence and say, “It’s hopeless. This hundred-year-old body could never father a child.” Nor did he survey Sarah’s decades of infertility and give up. He didn’t tiptoe around God’s promise asking cautiously skeptical questions.

He plunged into the promise and came up strong, ready for God, sure that God would make good on what he had said. That’s why it is said, “Abraham was declared fit before God by trusting God to set him right.” But it’s not just Abraham; it’s also us!

The same thing gets said about us when we embrace and believe the One who brought Jesus to life when the conditions were equally hopeless. The sacrificed Jesus made us fit for God, set us right with God.

Abraham’s faith is astounding. He was 100 years old, had been through decades of infertility, and yet held on to the hope that God would give him a child in such unbelievable circumstances. He faced these disheartening facts that it was humanly impossible to have a child.  His decision to choose to “believe anyway” was firmly grounded in the fact that God was able to do the impossible.

Abraham believed God was more powerful than any challenge and could do literally anything. When we believe this deeply, we’ll be confident that God has a great plan and wants the best for us even when what we see in front of us looks hopeless. 

Hope Resists Resentment

1 Samuel 1:9-18 (NLT)

Once after a sacrificial meal at Shiloh, Hannah got up and went to pray. Eli the priest was sitting at his customary place beside the entrance of the Tabernacle.  10  Hannah was in deep anguish, crying bitterly as she prayed to the LORD.  11  And she made this vow: “O LORD of Heaven’s Armies, if you will look upon my sorrow and answer my prayer and give me a son, then I will give him back to you. He will be yours for his entire lifetime, and as a sign that he has been dedicated to the LORD, his hair will never be cut.” 12  As she was praying to the LORD, Eli watched her.  13  Seeing her lips moving but hearing no sound, he thought she had been drinking.  14  “Must you come here drunk?” he demanded. “Throw away your wine!” 15  “Oh no, sir!” she replied. “I haven’t been drinking wine or anything stronger. But I am very discouraged, and I was pouring out my heart to the LORD.  16  Don’t think I am a wicked woman! For I have been praying out of great anguish and sorrow.” 17  “In that case,” Eli said, “go in peace! May the God of Israel grant the request you have asked of him.” 18  “Oh, thank you, sir!” she exclaimed. Then she went back and began to eat again, and she was no longer sad.

Though Hannah was resentful of Penninah’s torture, her barrenness, her husband’s inability to understand the depths of her pain, and God not changing anything year after year, she prayed to God. She didn’t allow her resentment to stop her from believing God fully understood the extent of her pain and hopelessness and could take action on her behalf.

When believing gets hard, prayer can be one of the first things to go. We do not want to pray to God sometimes, because it just hurts too much. It feels much easier to be resentful.

Choosing to continue to hope has to be a deliberate decision. We have to decide to pray vulnerably when our hearts are in this state. Hannah didn’t just list the facts of her situation; she was vulnerable and she talked about how she felt about the facts. 

Vulnerability is where the magic happens. It’s where pain meets purpose. In Hannah’s prayer, her honesty and vulnerability altered her desire from just having a child for herself to a spiritual vision for her child’s life. She went from a selfish to selfless desire in her prayer. Sometimes, God wants to give us our heart’s desire, but he is waiting for us to change our motives from selfish to spiritual.

Do you think God pays attention to you? Do you believe that God cares enough about you to give you an answer?  Sometimes God says yes, sometimes he says no, but the most difficult answer is “wait.”  When God says to wait, we must fight to believe that he does care and he will move when he believes the time is right.

Hope Is Louder Than The Crowd

Matthew 20:29-34 (NLT)

As Jesus and the disciples left the town of Jericho, a large crowd followed behind.  30  Two blind men were sitting beside the road. When they heard that Jesus was coming that way, they began shouting, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us!” 31  “Be quiet!” the crowd yelled at them. But they only shouted louder, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on us!” 32  When Jesus heard them, he stopped and called, “What do you want me to do for you?” 33  “Lord,” they said, “we want to see!”  34  Jesus felt sorry for them and touched their eyes. Instantly they could see! Then they followed him.

These men couldn’t see. We don’t know if they were blind from birth or if their blindness happened some other way, but they couldn’t see. 

Then they heard that Jesus was walking by and started shouting. While the blind men were shouting in hopes that Jesus would help them, the crowd tried to “hush them up.”  When believing gets hard, the “crowd” is usually our doubt, pain or unbelief trying to hush up our faith that God will come through for us.

The voice of doubt makes us wonder, does God really care about my desires? The voice of pain makes us question, does God care about my pain? And the voice of unbelief questions, does God care?

We have to fight for our faith to be louder than our crowded doubts, pain and unbelief. We have to fight to pray specific prayers, asking for what we want. Jesus noticed the bold faith of these men. Their faith made them shout out to Jesus for what they needed. 

One of the ways we can stay more hopeful than “the crowd” is by debunking our doubt, pain and unbelief using the Bible. For every your doubtful thoughts and feelings, find scriptures that prove that God does care and he will help you. Keep these scriptures handy when your doubt, pain and unbelief try to stop you from continuing to hope in God.

Hope Hears God

Judges 6:11-14 (NLT)

Then the angel of the LORD came and sat beneath the great tree at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash of the clan of Abiezer. Gideon son of Joash was threshing wheat at the bottom of a winepress to hide the grain from the Midianites.  12  The angel of the LORD appeared to him and said, “Mighty hero, the LORD is with you!” 13  “Sir,” Gideon replied, “if the LORD is with us, why has all this happened to us? And where are all the miracles our ancestors told us about? Didn’t they say, ‘The LORD brought us up out of Egypt’? But now the LORD has abandoned us and handed us over to the Midianites.” 14  Then the LORD turned to him and said, “Go with the strength you have, and rescue Israel from the Midianites. I am sending you!”

Gideon is a guy I relate to. He was having a hard time being hopeful in his situation. He was surviving by hiding wheat from the Midianites so he had enough to eat. God knew the situation and called Gideon to help his people.  This challenged Gideon to believe not only that God was with him but that he would help his people. Gideon needed some help reviving his hope in God. 

Believing God will help us gets hard for everyone at some point. The thing is, God never stops believing in us. He believes we can and will change. We will hear and believe him. When we do, the impact goes beyond our own personal faith, it inspires and helps build the faith of those around us.  

Closing Illustration  

The Barcelona Olympics of 1992 provided one of track and field’s most incredible moments.

Britain’s Derek Redmond had dreamed all his life of winning a gold medal in the 400-meter race, and his dream was in sight as the gun sounded in the semifinals at Barcelona. He was running the race of his life and could see the finish line as he rounded the turn into the backstretch. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain go up the back of his leg. He fell face first onto the track with a torn right hamstring. Sports Illustrated recorded the dramatic events:

As the medical attendants were approaching, Redmond fought to his feet. “It was animal instinct,” he would say later. He set out hopping, in a crazed attempt to finish the race. When he reached the stretch, a large man in a T-shirt came out of the stands, hurled aside a security guard and ran to Redmond, embracing him. 

It was Jim Redmond, Derek’s father. “You don’t have to do this,” he told his weeping son. “Yes, I do,” said Derek. “Well, then,” said Jim, “we’re going to finish this together.” And they did.

Fighting off security men, the son’s head sometimes buried in his father’s shoulder, they stayed in Derek’s lane all the way to the end, as the crowd gaped, then rose and howled and wept. Derek didn’t walk away with the gold medal, but he walked away with an incredible memory of a father who, when he saw his son in pain, left his seat in the stands to help him finish the race.

That’s what God does for us. When we are experiencing pain and we’re struggling to finish the race, we can be confident that we have a loving Father who won’t let us do it alone. He left His place in heaven to come alongside us in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. “I am with you always,” says Jesus, “to the very end of the age.”