How do we have hope when all around us seems so hopeless?
I am really wrestling with this sense of hopelessness. It’s mainly to do with my disappointment in myself and other Christians.
In knowing the power of Christ and his transforming grace, we naturally assume Christians will change to be more like the Lord they follow. We know we have been renewed. But what happens when we discover that Christians are the same as ‘everyone else’? Or we find we have not escaped the sins that bind us, we are those whose lives are scarred by sin and the transformation Christ has begun has stagnated. How can we tell the gospel to those who don’t know it when we find it hasn’t changed us at all?
I sound so fatalistic!
We are in the wilderness right now. It is easier to stumble and fall than to walk the narrow way. My guess is that holding faith and failure in tension is key. Let us acknowledge that human sinfulness will ever be present until the kingdom comes but let us believe too that God’s graceful redemption will overcome. We may not see it in our lifetime but faith in that redemption is truth and life to us. Hope comes from having the bigger picture, the wider perspective, the God-lense. No matter what, He is faithful and He calls us to remain steadfast in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
“Jesus, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
