A man approached a little league baseball game one afternoon. He asked a boy what the score was. “It’s 18 to nothing - we’re behind.” The man said, “I’ll bet you’re discouraged, aren’t you?” “Why should I be discouraged?” the little boy said. “We haven’t even got up to bat yet.”
Hope is essential to our survival. Webster defines hope as “Desire accompanied by expectation of, or belief in fulfillment; to desire with expectation of obtainment; to expect with confidence.” How vital that expectation and hope is!
When life hurts and dreams fade, nothing helps like hope.
Without hope, prisoners of war languish and die.
Without hope, students get discouraged and drop out of school.
Without hope, athletic teams slump and keep losing.
Without hope, amateur authors will stop writing.
Without hope, addicts return to their habits, married couples decide to divorce, inventors, artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs lose their creativity.
Without hope, even preachers, and strong Christians, struggle to press on.
Hope is not merely a nice option that that helps us temporarily clear a hurdle. It is essential to our survival. It is something that is as important to us as water is to a fish, as vital as electricity is to a light bulb - hope is that basic to life. We cannot stay on the road to our anticipated dreams without it, at least not very far. Many have tried, but none successfully. Without that needed spark of hope, we are doomed to a dark, dismal existence.
Think for a moment about suicides, or murder-suicides, and how often the word “hopeless” arises in the details of the situation. If it’s not left in a note, you can still read it between the lines. If you take away our hope, our world is reduced to something between depression and despair.
But true hope is hard to come by for some. I’ll tell you why: Because it’s only found in God. And a lot of people aren’t looking there. This week, in preparation, I did an experiment. I typed the word “hope” into a search engine on the computer, and to my amazement, it brought back 22,000,000 returns. (No, I didn’t look at all of them.) But what saddened me was that many that I did look at had nothing to do with real hope. It had nothing to do with the fact that hope comes from, and is only found in God. Hope is a wonderful gift from God, a source of strength and courage in the face of life’s hardest trials.
When we are trapped in a tunnel of misery, hope points to the light at the end.
When we are overworked and exhausted, hope gives us fresh energy.
When we are discouraged, hope lifts our spirits.
When we are tempted to quit, hope keeps us going.
When we lose our way and confusion blurs the destination, hope dulls the edge of panic.
When we struggle with a crippling disease or a lingering illness, hope helps us persevere beyond the pain.
When we fear the worst, hope brings reminders that God is still in control.
When we must endure the consequences of bad decisions, hope fuels our recovery.
When we find ourselves unemployed, hope tells us we still have a future.
When we are forced to sit back and wait, hope gives us the patience to trust.
When we feel rejected and abandoned, hope reminds us we’re not alone…and that we’ll make it.
When we say our final farewell to someone we love, hope in the life beyond gets us through the grief.
And so we desperately need the substance of hope in our lives! We’ve all heard those words - “There’s always hope!” But sometimes, we find it hard to believe them. All of us suffer through bouts of discouragement. In fact, to that “D” word, we could add doom, dishearten, defeat, and despair. The mind dwells on them when life has pinned us down. And I’m glad that we can find such things discussed in the Bible. God doesn’t give us this false sense of “everything will be perfect.” The Bible terms discouragement as “fainting,” or “growing weary.” And it tells us that it is a real part of life.
We may believe that there is hope, but hope is often elusive - hard to get a hold of. It’s hard to hold on to our hope. So for a few moments, I want us to look at some of the things that come against us that tries to loosen our hold on hope. These things have to be dealt with in our life if we are going to maintain hope in our lives. (As we look at these, let me encourage you to go home and read Nehemiah 4, because these things are found there.) What are some of the factors of hopelessness, or discouragement?
1. Fatigue - Vince Lombardi once said, “Fatigue will make cowards of us all.” In Nehemiah 4, they were rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. It took 52 days of backbreaking labor. When they got half-way through, though, fatigue was catching up with them. And when energy runs short, so does courage and hope. I have found out, that if I push too hard for too long, I’m going to see diminishing returns on the investment of my time and talents - and the deluge of discouragement will begin. That happened in Jerusalem. The people were weary, and they began to lose hope, and become discouraged.
2. Frustration - Have you ever worked and worked, invested time and energy into something, and then stepped back and wondered if your efforts had any significance? That’s what happened to the workers on the wall. All they began to see was broken bricks, mud, and debris. Nehemiah 4 tells us that they were frustrated with the ever-present rubbish and rubble of heavy construction. They were suffering from what we would call: Burnout. That’s a buzzword of our times. And some people think that burnout means that they have been working too hard. But that’s not exactly true. Many people work hard and never burn out.
The difference is that some work hard with hope, with a vision, with a purpose, while others have been fatigued and frustrated, and they have lost the focus of their efforts. Burnout comes when we’re working too hard at the wrong thing, or when we’re doing the right thing the wrong way. And when your efforts seem worthless and ineffective, you get burned out, you get frustrated with the fact that you’ve “wasted” your time, talents, and energies.
3. Failure - The Israelites threw up their hands and pronounced their failure. Fatigue and frustration are two ingredients in the recipe for failure. “We’re tired. We’re fed up. We’ can’t do it anymore.” *Negative thoughts become negative talk, and negative talk is infectious, spreading like a virus through a community. If you listen to them, it will poison your purpose. The Bible says, “All have sinned…” So in one sense of the word, we’ve all failed. The difference is how we deal with failure, or with the feelings of failure. The great danger is in letting our negative thoughts and impressions be compounded by our circumstances. *When things go wrong, we are more prone to give ear to the enemy, the greatest de-motivational speaker, and we end up muttering, “I’m no good. I’m a failure.” We buy into his lies.
4. Fear - The Israelites also had adversaries they had to worry about. As long as the walls weren’t built, they were open to attack. And the enemy had sent word that they were going to get them! So they were fearful about the threats or about the possibilities. Sometimes we get fearful about possible adversity. If we think people aren’t happy with us, or don’t like us, we get fearful. Criticism is toxic, poisonous, lethal. We all have had it. What amazes me is how the enemy knows when to let it come to light. He knows when to use it against you. And when it comes at a time of fatigue, frustration, and while you already feel like a failure, it can almost destroy you.
What’s amazing to me also, is how that God has covered all of these things in His Word, and how that He is the answer to all of them.
For fatigue, He says, “Come unto me you who are weary, and I will give you rest.” Matthew 11:28-30
For frustration, He says, “Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” 1 Corinthians 15:58
For failure, or feelings of failure, we know that He is the God of a second chance. Jonah 3:1
For fear, He says, “Fear not, be not afraid, do not let your hearts be troubled.” There are 366 such remarks made by God in the scriptures, one for every day, including the extra day every leap year.
So you see, there is hope. There are enemies of hope, who war against it, but God is a God of hope. In 1 Peter 1:3 it says, “God…by his abundant mercy, has begotten us unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…” Because Jesus lives, hope lives. Perhaps it has never been better said, than by Bill and Gloria Gaither when they wrote those words: “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow; Because He lives, all fear is gone; Because I know, He holds the future; And life is worth the living just because He lives.”
Summed up? Because He lives, there’s hope. May we each ask for God to help us hold on to that hope.
