Finding Hope in Dark Places

¹⁸Finding Hope in Dark Places

Good Morning Friends,

Think you know what today’s topic is really about? Read today’s scripture carefully and see if you come to the same conclusions as I that the greater the pain, the more desperate the circumstance, the stronger, more confident this asset becomes. This friends is not just optimism. It does not take its cue from present circumstances. In fact it may be more like how God uses pessimism. So today we contemplate the reality of Finding Hope in Dark Places.

Scripture: so I say, ‘Gone is my glory, and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.’¹⁹ The thought of my affliction and my homelessness is wormwood and gall! ²⁰My soul continually thinks of it and is bowed down within me. ²¹ But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: ²²The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,^* his mercies never come to an end;²³ they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.²⁴ ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’ ²⁵The Lord is good to those who wait for him, to the soul that seeks him. ²⁶ It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.

Lamentations 3:18-26 (NRSV)

And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Romans 5:3-5 (NRSV)

Message: Yesterday my friend, Albert Diepereen told a group of men…men I have been praying with for eleven years… what it was like to grow up under the Nazi occupation of Holland. At three years-old Hitler’s Nazi Army invaded his home town of The Hague in Holland. The date was May 10, 1940. He looked up as the parachutes filled the sky and said, “Look they are dropping eggs.” He was a child that witnessed Holland surrendered after four days and suffered through five years of Nazi rule…malnutrition, V-1 and V-2 rockets exploding in his neighborhood. He ate paper and tulip bulbs to survive. The dogs and cats on the streets disappeared. He saw death, starvation, long stays in hospitals and the separation of families. He believed in God and yet thought that a God who provided such pain in his life was certainly preparing him for hell not heaven. Still somehow he found a way to give thanks in all things…even in reliving the pain in telling the story…of immigrating to the United States and becoming a successful business man…in committing to reach other men for Christ. As he told his story I thought about the catacombs where Christians hid from Roman persecution and where they buried their dead. It seems odd that a symbol of firm and secure hope would exist in a place of hiding, in a place of death….that hope might be found in the dark story that my friend Albert told. Today’s scripture gives a similar description of the struggle of what seems to be unrecoverable despair and then matches it with an unintimidated confidence in the future. Here Jesus is invited to help heal the situation. Yes this is a bit like salvation….it is hope. And the surprising thing is that in the darkness God provides the bright light of hope. This is not about handling frustration and failure. It is about discovering hope in surprising places…painful places… and the amazing thing I witness is that the darker the pain the stronger the hope. So it is not about experiencing a glass half full instead of half empty or optimistically pointing out that a flat tire is only flat on the bottom…no, hope is much much more than being optimistic. In fact, today’s scripture is about Jeremiah, the weeping prophet… make no mistake about it, he was a pessimist about the present. Only in retrospect does it become clear that people find hope in desperate situations because of God. Only in retrospect do people thank God for pain. Friends, there is more to this thing we call hope than first meets the eye, for it is based on this experience of the past but also how we remember it. Friends, by reaching into the past we find assurances that the future will not be destroyed by the present. By rethinking the past we can discover hope.

Pray we realize that hope does not disappoint because it is of God. Pray we realize that hope is essentially knowing God’s will and acting on it. Pray we remember all those actions of God that reinforce us in the hope that God will act in the future. Pray we kindle hope. Pray we overcome despair. Pray we remember what God had done in the past. Pray we are honest about the present. Pray we are hopeful about the promise of the future, because our hope is in God. Pray that our hope grows out of our memory. Pray we remember that hope, in the face of persecution and death, rested on the memory of an empty tomb, a risen savior, and a coming King. Pray we have an anchor for our soul…firm and secure in Christ when we face difficult times. Pray we find strong hope in dark places.

Blessings,

John Lawson