I need hope in God. Do you? One look around and dismay fills my heart. Darkness abounds and it threatens to swallow me.
How does one stay hopeful and light-filled in a world of darkness? By finding refuge in the living God.
Last fall I wrote a series on Refuge Living. Today I revisit those articles because I’m discovering that hope is a lot easier if I make God my refuge. So, as we conclude The Hope Series, we remember God as our refuge.
I wrote this one because I deal with the difficulty of expectations versus reality. You know those times when you’re absolutely positive of one outcome and another one blindsides you? Yeah, those times when you feel like you hopped on a roller coaster and then realized the effects that spinning and twirling has on your stomach? Expectations, disappointment, and hope are entwined and if we can learn how to handle them, our hope grows.
Words matter. What you say to yourself impacts your beliefs about yourself, God, and others. In one short session of “stinking thinking,” we can dig up the seeds God plants in our heart or cut down the life he’s trying to grow in us. If our thoughts are hopeless, then how can we grow in hope? This article in The Refuge Series makes a way for us to re-write the words we say towards ourselves so that we don’t undo the work God is doing in our life. So that we might know hope in God.
When hope seems far off, and I’m broken, busted and bleeding, I remember the great eight. And I consider my circumstances to the great eight and know that as I make God my refuge, I will be blessed. I will find hope. There are circumstances that we can’t get away from, but we must live through. Prodigal children, wayward spouses, sickness, death, and abandonment. These are just a few of the things we live through in order to get through. But we can have hope in God even in the most dismal of circumstances. Consider the great eight.
Hope grows when we share it. I need to hear your stories. You need mine. Can I tell you one? I’ve struggled with rejection and fear of man for years. It’s my achilles heal, my thorn in the flesh, and my burden. But God is with me and as he peels back the layers, he reveals something more. Maybe it’s my own bitterness, my misplaced priorities, or pride that plays into this rejection issue, or maybe it’s resting in who he says he is and who he says I am. It’s all this and more, but the best part of it is this: God is giving me an opportunity to put these lessons about rejection into practice. I’m watching him rise up within me, and I’m seeing the healing hope he’s wrought, flourish like newborn seedlings. We need each other’s stories.
Hope in God. It’s part refuge living and part trust. It’s surrender to God within you.
The Hope Series: Trust and hope grow side by side. As trust grows so does hope. As we declare hope, trust grows. Both find their root in God’s love. How well do you receive God’s love? Do you receive it with arms wide open or do you feel you have to bring something to him first?
When we turn to our own efforts to earn God’s love, we cheapen grace. And when we live from a place of cheap grace, we have flimsy hope. This is what it means to look at God’s love through the lens of our own brokenness. But what if we exchanged our broken lens for God’s lens?
When I view God’s love through my brokenness, I see warped love. But when I view God’s love through His lens: I see a perfect love that casts out fear. I see a love that watched His son bleed a violent death so that I might know Him intimately as Father, Hope, Light and Life. I see a love that gave all so that I might know a hope and peace that defies all human explanation.
When I base my understanding on God’s love by what He does or does not do for me, I am doomed to struggle. But when I base my understanding on God’s love on His character and His word, I am unshakable.
Unshakable. Who wouldn’t love that? Who can really, truly understand that? Nothing in our finite world is unshakable. Buildings collapse. People disappoint. Jobs fail. Governments corrode.
But God is faithful. He is unmovable, unwavering, resolute, constant, and devoted.
When we get hit with bad news and our world is shaken. We equate God’s hope with peaceful, pleasant lives. But Psalm 23 says that God will prepare a table in the presence of our enemies. We’re invited to taste and see that the Lord is good even when the enemy of our soul surrounds us.
Can you sit peacefully and hopefully in God’s presence in the midst of devastating circumstances? Is your focus laser beamed on God’s good heart for you? Can you withhold from judging God based on how good or bad your life is?
“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works,not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” Hebrews 10:23-25
Step One
Hold fast to hope. Confess hope to yourself. Turn down the voice in your head that tells you it’s hopeless. Focus on God’s faithfulness and center your hope there.
Step Two
Stir one another to love. Love spreads. It’s the best kind of contagion. It’s the kind that spreads hope and gets passed around to one another.
Reach out to one another. That phone call you’ve been feeling nudged to make? Call that friend or co-worker and tell them you appreciate their kindness or dedication. Spread encouragement and watch hope blossom.
Step Three
Hope is found in the person of Jesus Christ and bestowed on us when we believe in our hearts and confess with out mouth that Jesus is Lord. Hope becomes our heritage and inheritance and it never disappoints. Stand in the hope Jesus provides. Don’t fight for hope, fight from a position of hope.
Peace seems fleeting and difficult to catch. It’s vapor and mist. I wonder what it would be like to know peace without having to wrestle for it? What happens when our days become night and what was once bright is now dark?
Our flesh may fail, but God never will. God’s plans will come to pass. We will know his healing for our brokenness. Once again our hearts will sing God’s praise. But what do we do in the meantime?
What do we do when we wait for God to move? Or when he does move, he moves us in the wrong direction?
His faithfulness is great. His steadfastness is consistent. He holds us in his hands and that is where our confidence, our peace, rests.
God guides us in ways that are for our best and for his glory. Hence, the struggle with peace. Sometimes it seems as though God is guiding us down a path that is not in our best interest. Then we stomp our feet, and attempt a detour, which sometimes lands us in the belly of a smelly fish.
After Egypt, the Israelites had cloud and fire. They only had to look up to be reassured of his presence. But I’m sure when they looked at their circumstances, they had to wonder. God took them down the desert road to freedom. Then he had them wander before leading them to the edge of the sea with their enemies behind them.
How many times do we want the direct route to a destination ordained by God? Yet, it seems as though we get sent down the desert road to wander here and there. We wonder if this is the best road.
We get so caught up in what is for our best that we forget that our lives are for God’s glory too. And a life for God’s glory may not always look like a “best” life on the outside. It just might mean tragedy, relationship aches, financial challenges, or dealing with personal wounds.
Finding peace in situations like these require us to look beyond our own capabilities within the circumstances and look straight at God.
It means coming to the complete, and total end, of ourselves and finding ourselves in the very best place to be: God’s heart.
He doesn’t fail you. Even when life is failing you, God is still for you. He holds you in his hands and cups you close to his heart. Can you hear it beating? It’s beating a rhythm of peace. It’s the whoosh-whooshing sound of a heartbeat that bled and died and rose again for you.
That’s where you find peace. That’s the place where you can be in an awful situation, and still know God’s peace. It truly is the peace that passes all understanding.
Philippians 4:7 “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your heart and your mind in Christ Jesus.
Peace comfort and guards. If we revisit the Israelites, we find that God battled on their behalf. He guarded their backs while he led the way through the sea. They acted confident until they had no where to go.
He knows what we need. Sometimes he calls us to the battle and other times he calls us to stand still. He knows when we’re acting confident, but inside we quiver like jello. Maybe the next time you feel that way, God is wanting you to be still so he can shock your socks off.
Peace comforts and guards. We reject his comfort because life hurts, and we don’t understand why God doesn’t just do something already. And when we step away from the comfort, we cannot know the protection peace brings us.
Life screams at us, but God whispers. Lean away from the scream and lean into the whisper. And when you lean into God, he will give you the strength to bring glory to him in your life.
Application
Write down one way that peace comforts.
Write down a way that peace guards.
Listen to Do It Again and think about the ways that God has shown up in your life.
