Hope With No Shame

Recently, I've had to completely stop listening to some of the news podcasts I listen to. The message is the same.

"America is going to crap unless Americans wake up and do something about it."
"American's are stupid. So, therefore, we are all doomed."

And that's the basic "jist"
of hours of talk radio. So if you don't listen to talk radio, you aren't missing much.

The whole thing sounds very similar to a Psalm I just read:

Psalm 12:1-4

Deliver, Lord!
For the godly have disappeared; 
people of integrity have vanished. 
People lie to one another;
they flatter and deceive. 
May the Lord cut off all flattering lips,
and the tongue that boasts!
They say, “We speak persuasively; 
we know how to flatter and boast. 
Who is our master?”

In fact, we sound a ton like the Romans as Paul describes them in chapter 1:28-32

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what should not be done. They are filled with every kind of unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, malice. They are rife with envy, murder, strife, deceit, hostility. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, contrivers of all sorts of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, covenant-breakers, heartless, ruthless. Although they fully know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but also approve of those who practice them.

So then why should I have hope in the future? People that I talk to about human trafficking, abortion or any other major issue in our society don't seem to want to respond and take action against all that is going on.

Well, thankfully, Paul gives us an example of what we can do through Abraham in Romans chapter 4.

Abraham was asked to leave his home and go somewhere were he was a stranger. I identify with this because sometimes I feel like a stranger to my generation. Then God made him a promise that he was going to have a son, despite that biologically, it made no sense to him or his wife. Yet Paul says that Abraham "In hope, he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, 'So shall your offspring be.'" We see that Abraham was "fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised."

So the question for myself is, when I feel like a stranger in my own generation with a promise that God has given me, do I hope against all hope that when everything is stacked against me that God will provide all that is necessary for His promise to come true?

You see, I can come up with all the programs and ideas in the world and work really hard for them to work. Yet nothing is going to be able to happen if I do not have faith that God will work everything out in his timing. It's not going to be easy (just look at Abraham's life...not comfy!) but his faith was counted to him as righteousness. Not his works.

Paul continues, "More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."

Many people might think we are foolish to look at all that is happening in our world and pin all our hopes to God. He doesn't seem to be here with all of the evil that is happening in our generation. But what people don't see is all the times we have put our faith in God in our personal lives and the times he has come through for us. Every time I try to make something happen, it fails and God brings the same result around another way. EVERY TIME.

So while we live in a season of our generation where we are lost, let's continue to have the faith that God desires us to have so that we can learn to trust in him more and more. Our hope isn't in vain. It's so that God's love for us can be manifested in a way that allows us to love him more!