Making The Best Of A Bad Situation

Have you ever felt like you were at the end of your rope?

- Seeming possibilities--crushed.

- Dreams—deferred.

- Hopes—handcuffed.

- Hands—tied.

- Predicaments—problematic.

- Vision—diminished.

- Life—over

We are living in perilous times. And what tends to add insult to injury, amplify our agony, magnify our misery—is when our present state appears to be our permanent reality.

Can we be real? Have you ever felt like you were at your wits end? Where the situation, not only appeared to be getting worse—but there seemed to be the end of the possibility of all hope of it ever getting any better?

And it was nothing deep that kept you going—you had all but threw in the towel. You were yea shy of calling it quits/giving up/waving the white flag of surrender. You had all but given up physically and externally…but spiritually and internally you were a done a deal/closed case.

An inquiring mind wants to know—have you ever been there? If you have never been there—just keep on living. Because God’s got a way/life’s got a way of turning some peculiar corners that are filled with despair, unexpectedness, trials, tribulations, setbacks, confusion, danger, and disappointments, ups and downs—where inevitably you will find yourself at your wits end, at the end of rope, having hit rock bottom, on the verge of giving up, past the point of no return, in the middle of bad situation—and you’re trying to contemplate how to get over. If you haven’t been there just keep on living. But I don’t have to stay there very long—because the number of people who have never been there…are few and far between.

Most of us have been at the point where we wanted give up.

Most of us have been at a place where we said ‘this is enough’.

Most of us have been at a place where we have written a check paid to the order of “I quit’.

Where the situation was beyond my control/The circumstance was beyond repair/The funeral procession has been done/The eulogy has been spoken/The benediction has been pronounced/The fat lady has sung her song—and you are saying ‘Lord…this is bad—it’s OVER!’

Can I free somebody today? In the midst of your situtation…while you are going through what you’re going through—realize and remember that God is in control.

I. In order to make the best of a bad situation—stop concentrating on the situation and start focusing on the Sovereign Lord. (Vs. 7)

• You do know that He’s sovereign?

• Most of us spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on the TIMING of the season that we miss and bypass and retard the PREPARATION required for the season.

- He said in VERSE 4 ‘wait for the promise’. The word promise here is the Greek word epangellia—announcement, message, or pledge or declaration. It is the same rendering of old testament Hebrew word MAKAWSH that we find in the book of Jeremiah 29:11 ‘I know the thoughts I think toward you’. The word thoughts, MAKAWSH, means purpose, intent or imagination.

- In the book of Jeremiah he has a purpose, intent and thoughts for you. In the passage here, He prepares through Jesus Christ to bring the promise to fruition through the promise, announcement, message, pledge and declaration.

- The Bible says that He’s the same yesterday, today and forever more.

- He told Moses, I am the Lord…I change not.

Which means that every thought and every promise He made about you before the foundations of the earth, before time began—must come to pass. Because He is a God that can not and will not tell a lie.

• If His word is true…He is true. And if He is true…His word is true. And there is nothing about God character/nature that should ever cause us to wonder whether or not He will keep HIS word.

• If He couldn’t back it up—He would have never spoken it in the first place.

• I know why we have a problem with this point because, we know how we are—Flaky, Shady, Some-Timey, Performance-Driven relationships….

R.C. Sproul in his book “The Holiness of God” says this about God’s holiness. “What God does is always consistent with who God is, He always acts according to His holy character. God’s internal righteousness is the moral excellence of His character. It is rooted in His absolute purity. There is no “shadow of turning” in Him. As a holy God, He is utterly incapable of an unholy act. . . .There is a consistency in God, a “straightness” about him.”

Again, R.C. Sproul said it this way about God’s seperateness. “When the Bible calls God holy, it means primarily that God is transcendentally separate. He is so far above and beyond us that He seems almost totally foreign to us. To be holy is to be “other”, to be different in a special way.”...