Hey, I’m Pastor Buford from Liberty Church in Pensacola, FLorida. Welcome to God Today. It’s great to be with you. I have a quick word today that I want to share briefly with you that I believe is relevant to some. As I prayed about this – particularly important for a few of you as you listen to this message today. I want to talk to you about what to remember when you find yourself without hope.
Hopelessness. Today I am around so many people that, for whatever reason or reasons, have lost their way. They’ve lost their sense of hope. I want to share 5 important things real quick to remember when you find yourself in such a place.
Several years ago, I was a pastor working with a lot of people in a big church. I found myself really discouraged. I just started reading through the book of Psalms and underlining and writing things about encouragement and hope. These thoughts just kind of come out of me. I promise you, if you will memorize these, and pray there everyday, you won’t wrestle with depression and discouragement anymore. They are basic, easy to remember, and I want to share these with you, in particular for a few of you that are watching this today.
The first thing is, I must always remember that God is with me. God is with me. In fact, he told His disciples, “Lo, I will be with you always, even to the end.” Even in those low points, God is there with us. This is the first reason, I think, that we find ourselves without hope. That is that we simply forget God. We think it is up to us, up to our intelligence, our ability to handle it ourselves. The Bible says in Job 8, “Those who forget God have no hope.” This first thing is that we must remember that God is with us.
One of my favorite writers, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a dissident writer during the Soviet years, wrote after being freed in National Magazine. He said, “If you want to summarize the problems of the 20th century and all the bad things that have happened in the last 100 years, you could sum it up with one phrase.” It was the title of his article: Men Have Forgotten God. “When we forget God, we tend to live like animals. When we forget God, he writes, we tend to be selfish. Most of all, when we forget God, we tend to lose hope.” Today people are losing hope because they are forgetting God.
First of all, when you find yourself – some of you are there right now. I’ve been there. First of all, you need to remember that God is with you. Secondly, we need to remember not only that God is with me, but that God cares about me. He really, really does. That He loves me and that I really matter to God. For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son. The Bible is very, very clear on this. Lamentations 3 says, “I have hope when I think of this. The Lord’s love never ends. His mercies never stop. They are new every morning.” His love never ends. A human’s love ends. People fall in love, they fall out of love. Their love is strong; it grows weak. The love of God is unconditional love. It is not based on a condition, it is not based on what we can or cannot do for God. He loves us.
Psalm 103 says, “He is like a Father to us. Tender and sympathetic for He knows what we are made of – dust.” We are just particles put together by God. God says, “I want to be a Father to you.” Not the kind of father, maybe, that you grew up with. But, the kind of Father we need.
Thirdly, He knows our situation. God is with us, He cares for us, and He really knows my situation. He knows about my problems. He knows about your pain, He knows about your past, He knows about your past. He knows about those habits. Psalm 56:6 says, “You know how troubled I am. You have kept a record of my tears.” We need to remember always that when we find ourselves without hope, that God is with us. He cares. Thirdly, He knows about our situation.
Fourthly, when we found ourselves in these places, we need to remember He has a power we don’t have. Luke 18 says, “What is impossible for man is possible with God.” Luke 4:18, I love his paraphrase in The Message version. “When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he couldn’t do, but on what God said he would do.”
And then finally, He has promised to help us. He has promised to help us. We need to remember that God is with us. He cares about us, He knows even our situation, where we are. He has the power to change us and He will help us.
I’d like to pray for you right now, especially if you are at a pla in your life where you feel like there is no tomorrow, like there is no hope. Jesus is our hope. Father, I pray right now, for this viewer and all the viewers that find themselves for whatever reason today, at a place in the depths of despair and depression. Whether it is a family matter, it is an addiction issue, it is a physical health issues, whatever it is God. You are the answer to everyone. We thank you Lord, that you are there for that person right now. Lord, help them to reach out, even to the voice of this television program, God, and find you right where you are today. You are with them, you care, and you have the power to help them, God. We pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.