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Can I Still Have Hope?

Have you ever lost hope?  If so, what you experienced is commonly known as despair!

Despair, according to the dictionary, is the complete loss of or absence of hope.  And if that isn’t bad enough, a sense of helplessness, kind of like feeling that you are caught up in a current with no way of escape, often comes with despair.   

The temptation to despair is actually fairly common.  We live in a fallen world deeply impacted by sin and there is no shortage of things that can crush our hope.

In one particular Psalm, we find the writer referencing some things he was experiencing that could have led to despair.  He was facing evildoers, adversaries, foes, false witnesses, an army encamping against him and war rising against him. 

Other translations bring out different aspects of what the word “despair” might have meant to that writer of the Psalm, such as “I would have lost heart” and “I would have been without hope”.

Lost heart, without hope, not a pretty picture, in fact, a rather despairing one!  Yet in the midst of all that, the Psalmist was able to write:  “I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  (Ps. 27:13)

What the Psalmist provided for us, in that verse, is an antidote to despair.  The antidote is believing that we will see the goodness of God!  That belief is fundamentally shaped by viewing the future through the lens of who God is and what He promises that He will do.

In the book of Lamentations, we find a similar antidote:  “This I recall to my mind, therefore I have hope.  The Lord’s loving-kindnesses indeed never cease, for His compassions never fail.  They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.  “’The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I have hope in Him.’”  (Lam 3:21-24)

The antidote is making a conscious and deliberate effort to call to mind the Lord’s loving-kindnesses, compassion and faithfulness.  Because He has demonstrated them in the past, we can believe that they can be for us today.  That belief is fundamentally shaped by viewing the past through the lens of who God is and what He has done.

As we look to the past through the lens of who God is and what He has done and as we look to the future through the lens of who God is and what He has promised that He will do, we can move from despair to hope.

And hope is an anchor for the soul (Heb 6:19).  That anchor holds firm and secure and it helps to keep us from being caught up in the current of despair!

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