Sermon Central
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Where Do I Find Hope When I’m Struggling? Series
Contributed by Jim Butcher on Aug 27, 2018 (message contributor)
Summary: Encouragement for when we are in the midst of struggles.
Where Do I Find Hope When I’m Struggling?
1. Hardships are not unusual.
- There can be resentment in our relationship with God when hard times come. “Doesn’t God love me?” “Why is God allowing this?” It can lead us to question God.
- This is particularly true if we’ve been led to believe by shallow preachers or our shallow desires that God desires to make our lives easy. Too many believe that God’s job is that of a helicopter parent – ever attentive to remove the obstacles and nuisances. It’s not.
- Hardships are part and parcel of the human experience. Becoming a Christian does not exempt us from that, although it does provide us with additional resources with which to face them.
- So don’t give into that thought that God has somehow let you down or disappointed you just because you have a struggle to deal with.
2. God grows us in the struggles.
- This is a crucial point. There are a number of ways that God can grow us through struggles, but let’s focus on the one that’s mentioned in this passage. Paul tells the Corinthians that the substantial struggles that he went through served to “not rely on ourselves but on God.”
- How does that happen? Well, for too many of us, we are often relying on ourselves to handle the obstacles of life. We look first and primarily to our ideas, our resources, our answers. Sometimes it’s only when we get to the absolute end of our rope, when we have nowhere else to look to, that we reluctantly cry out to God and His answers. Of course, it shouldn’t be this way, but it is, even for many Christians.
- How exactly does He grow us?
a. It might be through realizing our need for Him.
b. It might be through learning to depend on prayer.
c. It might be practicing how to wait on Him.
d. It might be expecting Him to do things bigger than we can.
- He wants us to become people with great spiritual power. Prayer warriors, believers of incredible faith, spiritual victors. So often victory comes by faith. And for us to have that kind of faith, it has to be built. That requires us to have to go through struggles and trust God to come through for us in those struggles.
3. We serve a God of impossibilities.
- Paul mentions an essential fact about this God we are to rely on: He “raises the dead.”
- There was no doubt to the people who saw Jesus die that it was game over. He didn’t just die – He was tortured and pierced. As the disciples mourned the loss of their teacher, there were a thousand things going through their minds. “What do we do now?” “Are the religious authorities going to arrest us too?” “How did Jesus do those miracles if He wasn’t the Messiah?” One question that didn’t go through their minds, though, was “Do you think His death might just be temporary?” Why didn’t they think that? They didn’t understand the teaching about the resurrection that Jesus had given to them and death is something that you know is permanent. Dead people stay dead.
- But God’s power was greater than they expected or dreamed. God the Father raised the dead!
- When you know you serve a heavenly Father who can raise the dead, it makes our problems look pretty ordinary by comparison. We serve a God who can do what we consider impossible, so that should give us great hope when we take our struggles to Him.
4. God has promised to stick with us.
- Paul tells us that God has been faithful in the past to deliver. That gives him confidence that God will deliver in the future.
- One of the most powerful tools we have to increasing our confidence in God’s faithfulness to deliver us is the knowledge we have of the ways that God has delivered us in the past. Have we “found Him faithful”? Because we can answer with a resounding “yes,” that gives us confidence for the uncertain future.
- This is why we can “set our hope” on God. Our hope is not in our resources, our intelligence, our friends, our church, our resourcefulness, or our family. Our hope is in God.
- Many things fail us.
- Our friends can be there for a season but then get distracted by their own lives. They’re not there when we need them most.
- Our family can disappoint us.
- Our money can fail us.
- Our church can underwhelm.
- But God will never leave us or forsake us.
