Psalms 31:24 – Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who hope in the Lord. Only those who kept their hope in the Lord and in His mighty power know if it is the right thing to hope in the Lord. They have gone through difficulties of various kinds. They faced burdens, failures, oppression, opposition, persecution, battles, intimidation, false accusations, gossip and misrepresentation in their lives. They would have been tempted to quit at times because of severe testing. But they can tell us today that they hoped in the Lord for deliverance and found Him to be faithful in all His promises. God’s children come out of utmost heat of situations only because of their hope, trust, faith and dependence in the Lord. When our faith is shaken, we can go to the hall of fame of faith in the Bible and meet great men and women of faith who made it to the end of their journey only through hope in the Lord. When we find stiff opposition in our ministries, we can go to the pages of the history of missions and listen to the testimonies of great warriors of faith like Moody, Hudson Taylor, William Carey, Studd, Judson, Muller, Amy Carmichael, Sundar Singh and others, and take comfort in the ways by which God kept them going to accomplish His purpose through their lives. When we put our hope in the Lord, we are able to believe that He will accomplish His purpose in and through us also because we know for sure that He is the one who has called us with an eternal purpose. We can then realize that opposition by the enemy of our souls is no hindrance for God to accomplish His purposes in us. God has made use of His choice servants throughout the past in spite of opposition by the enemy. Today we need to put our faith in the Lord of all possibilities and commit our availability to Him so that He can use us to accomplish His will through us.
Dear reader, are you discouraged today because of the fierce opposition that you face in your life and ministry from the enemy of our souls? Do you find road blocks, delays, distractions, Goliaths and darkness on the way? If you put your hope in the never-changing Lord, He will see to it that these hindrances are removed at the right time. He made sure that in spite of difficulties and hindrances, Isaac was born, Joseph was elevated in Egypt, Nehemiah was enabled to complete the wall within 52 days, David became king, Gideon defeated Amalakites, Joshua led God’s people to Canaan, water in Cana became wine and Lazarus came back to life. All of these were accomplished only because of faith and hope in the Lord. Hope in the Lord is trust in His power and strength and in the unmistakable determination of His sovereign will to fulfill His promises without the shadow of a doubt. Hope is the greatest driving force that God has planted in our hearts to keep believing on Him to take us through our wilderness journey. We can see all the milestones that He has already planted on our way as we travel with Him at His pace. Not a single syllable of His plan for us will ever be unfulfilled because hindrances created by the enemy on our way are no difficulty for Him to overtake. This Lord is with us today and He urges us to put all our hope and trust in Him. Then He will give us the courage to go forward in His strength to face the eventualities of life to ultimately accomplish His purpose in our lives.
Psalms 43:5 – Why are you so despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him for the help of His presence. Thought for TodayHope in God is the panacea to overcome all the despairing situations that God’s children face.
