Desperate Housewives - Mother's Day 2005

2 Corinthians 1:3-4 says, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

That verse tells us that God intentionally allows us to go through some hard times so that we will turn to Him for help and so that we can then pass on to others the help that we have received from Him. You need to ask yourself: Am I a dam – damming up the blessing of God into my own personal reservoir? Or am I a channel – allowing the blessing of God to flow freely through my life and into the lives of others.

Maybe it is no coincident that a dam is called a dam – because it is a damning thing to keep the good news from those who so desperately need it. It is a damning thing to hoard the grace of God to yourself – to keep spiritual truth from your fellow believer.

1 Peter 4:10 in The Message says, “Be generous with the different things God gave you, passing them around so all get in on it.” Are you passing around what you have learned so that everyone can get in on it? Remember that someone passed it on to you so that you could get in on it. Don’t be the weak link. Don’t break the chain.

Conclusion:

1. Recognize the reason.

2. Search for the solution.

3. Communicate the cure.

Why?

Because the world today is full of desperate people – housewives and otherwise – and they are waiting for someone just like you to offer them hope. The word desperate comes from the Latin sperare, meaning “to hope.” However the prefix “de” indicates that there is a diminishment of hope – even the absence of hope. In other words, desperate people are hopeless people. Not hopeless in the sense that there is no hope for them, but hopeless in the sense that they have no hope in their hearts – they have lost hope.

Hope is so important. It was hope that enabled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to strive for civil rights. He had the hope in his heart of a future in which his children would not be judged by “the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Hope is what kept Archbishop Desmond Tutu fighting against apartheid or racial segregation in South Africa. In his book, God Has a Dream: A Vision of Hope for Our Time, he writes that all the “objective facts were against us – the passes laws, the imprisonments, the tear-gassing, the massacres, the murder of political activists – but my confidence was not in the present circumstances but in the laws of God’s universe.”

That is hope. And it is precisely that hope that encourages us, nurtures us, and empowers us to keep on living faithfully for God another day.

Sources:

Homiletics. “Wisteria.” May-June 2005, 16-20.

www.abc.go.com/primetime/desperate

Please email me if you use this message or an adaptation of it. Thank you!

steveamanda8297@hotmail.com