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Keep Hope Alive
Hopelessness begins with a thought that manifests in a feeling that can infiltrate and destroy your spirit. Once hopelessness has found a home in your spirit it will impact everything you see and do. Unfortunately, when your hope is shaken your faith is impacted. And without faith you cannot advance any further in the kingdom of God. So fight to keep your hope.
Many of you are simply going through the motions of life. The initial drive and determination you once had to believe God and to stand on His Word are gone. Yes, you are getting up in the morning, going to work and coming home; but that is it. You are only doing the things you need to do to make it, but you are not going beyond that. You don’t have the energy or the spiritual strength you once had. When you hear or read a scripture that tells you “you can make it” or “God will make a way,” you are not excited because you feel as if you heard it before and that the word does not work. But you must pick yourself up and believe again. You can not stop believing and trusting in God and his Word. Your season and your time is coming.
Stay In The Battle
Stay In The Battle
Background:
When soldiers are engaged in a battle, they often become tired, hungry, cold, and aching. However, because of the task at hand, these soldiers continue despite their feelings. They know they have been entrusted with a mission and that lives are depending on them.
As Christians, we have a more excellent ministry. We have the ministry of reconciliation. We are here to reconcile our neighborhoods, families, and society back to God through the power of Jesus Christ. So we must not allow anything to stop us from “moving.” To “move” means to continue to trust God despite how it looks. To “move” means to remain committed to the purposes of Jesus Christ despite our feelings. To “move” means to allow God’s will to be done in our lives despite our insufficiencies. We keep “moving” because we know that God is in control.
As Christians, we are in a battle for our minds, for our destiny and peace. Many of us are dealing with situations that limit our ability to obtain all that God has for us. And at times, these challenges have us feeling overwhelmed, sad, upset, and just tired.
But like soldiers in a battle, we have to keep moving. We have to learn to move wounded if you will. What does moving wounded mean? Moving wounded implies that we are determined not to let our wounds stop us.
Either intentionally or unintentionally, we all have been wounded. The wounds make us vulnerable to specific thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. But despite our weaknesses, we have to keep moving. Moving means that we acknowledge our wounds, not cover them up, because we serve a God who can heal us while we are moving.
Life is not always going to go the way we want it to go. Challenges will occur, but we can’t stop. The biggest enemy of our destiny is our ability to control our thoughts, feelings, and emotions contrary to God’s will. We will go through periods in which we believe God and periods when we don’t. We will be determined and ready to stand one moment and ready to give up the next.
There will come a time in our life when we will have to grow up into the things of God. We will have to accept that challenges will occur and be determined to move despite those challenges.
When we can keep moving by faith, God will strengthen us. He will meet us at the point of our weakness. He will be there to encourage us to go a little further.
Sometimes we can become so overwhelmed that we feel depressed. We can feel as if God is not helping or that something is wrong with us. But sometimes, God appears not to be helping us because He has a greater purpose.
The God in us is stronger than we think, and He is setting us up for something good. If our weakness or hindrance were a problem, God would move it.
Let’s take a minute and look at Hebrews 11 1-3 and 35-38. (read). Some of you will have a similar experience found in Hebrews 11. But the verse would read like this:
Many believed God for healing; still, they did not receive it; many were falsely accused, many had to go to bed hungry and afraid, not knowing where their next meal was coming from, many had to walk through neighborhoods riddled with gunfire, some have lost their marriages, saw their only child killed or imprisoned for life, some had to deal with sickness and illnesses that were painful, while others had to live with homelessness, fear and the residue of drug abuse. Yet, they, like those in Hebrews, obtained a good testimony because they believed God.
Believing God is not the same thing as feeling God or seeing God. Believing God speaks to maturity, it speaks to trust, it speaks to a knowing inside of you, even when it doesn’t feel like anything is happening.
Keep moving. No matter how many times you have tried to get off of drugs and failed, no matter how unkind life has been to you, and no matter how many times, it did not work out before. Keep moving. Keep trusting God. Keep believing that He can, even if it does not like it. Keep getting up and going to bed. Keep putting faith to your words. It takes faith to trust God enough to try again.
How to keep moving when you don’t feel like it?
- Trust God (IS 40:28-36)
- Depend on God (11 Corn 12:9)
- Rest in God: don’t’ hide your problems; talk to God.
- Read the Word of God even when it doesn’t seem like it’s getting into your spirits.
- Know that you are not always going to feel like it. Don’t let your feelings dictate to you your love for God.
Strength For the Journey
Strength For The Journey (2021 All Rights Reserved IGBATT)
If allowed to control your thoughts, feelings of hopelessness can prevent you from living the kind of life that God intended. Feelings of hopelessness can cause us to act as if things in our lives will never change and give up on our dreams and desires.
Many of you are just going through the motions in life. The drive and determination that you once had to believe God is gone. Hopeless feelings have caused you to feel as if your life is worthless.
You are just drifting through life. You are getting up in the morning, going to work, and coming home. You are doing the things that you need to do, but you are not going beyond that. When you hear scriptures or messages that tell you “God will do it,” you don’t have the strength to believe. Your life circumstance and situations have left you feeling dead inside and feeling “nothing.” Hopelessness has invaded your spirit and is threatening to shake your faith.
Hopelessness is not just a thought, but it’s a feeling that can get into your spirit. And once it gets into you, it controls your entire life. Feelings of hopelessness do not just cause people to say “I feel hopeless” and sit home and do nothing. You see, many people feel hopeless on the inside but are busy on the outside. They are quoting scriptures, encouraging everyone else, but they are empty inside. These people are busy, but their spirits are “down,” and they are not in the same place they once were spiritually.
Feelings of hopelessness can keep us from believing in God at the level that He desires for us. Not every believer is living at the optimal level of his or her faith. Everyone is not walking in all that God has for them because their hope has been shaken. Once your confidence becomes “shaky,” you are vulnerable to being overwhelmed by hopelessness. It becomes difficult for you to believe in God.
We should be increasing in our faith, not digressing or staying still. What happened to what you once believed about God and His Word? Like a bucket with a small hole in it that is leaking water slowly, some of us have been leaking out strength and faith for so long that we don’t know when it started. Thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are connected. Your behavior is an indicator of what you are thinking and feeling. Why are you so tired? Why are you just “blah” when it comes to the promise of God for life? You smile, nod, and feel nothing. Listen, you ran well, but what is hindering you?
When your hope is shaken, your faith is impacted. And without faith, you can not advance any further than you are now. Without hope, you don’t have the spiritual energy that you need.
It is one thing to pray about a situation for one week or two days. It’s another thing to have to believe for a month or years. It is in the waiting that our hope can fade. Can your hope sustain the journey? If not, lose yourself in Jesus Christ.
Losing your hope can work out for your good. How? When we lose our hope, what we are losing is our confidence in ourselves. When what God said to you does not come to pass, many of us become depressed, angry, and hopeless.
But, if we can keep holding on, God will give us a revelation of Him in our lives. You may feel depressed or sad about how things are going in your life now. You may have quoted scriptures, and nothing has happened. But are you repeating the right scripture for the right season you are in? If the Lord has ordained a season of drought for your life now and you are expecting rain, of course, you are going to feel overwhelmed. Ask the Lord to show you how He is feeling, what He is thinking and what season He has you in. Then align yourself with Him. Yes, you want instant healing, but He may choose to do it a different way. Yes, you wanted to have children, not to be a widower, to live in a mansion, but that is not where you are. Accept where you are now. Acceptance does not mean giving up; it means aligning yourself with what God is doing in your life and trusting Him in the now. Ask Him for a strategy for a plan.
The problem is not the illness, symptom, or circumstances. The Lord has taken into account what is going on. If you have a persistent mental illness or illness like diabetes, you will have symptoms. The symptoms do not have to hold you back.
Have you stopped to ask God to reveal His plans for your life? Maybe it’s not God’s will for you to be healed instantly. Maybe God has a greater purpose in mind. Maybe He wants to bless you with the sufficiency of His Grace.
God has a purpose for you being here. God said to Jeremiah, and He is saying to you, “I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end. But before you get to the expected end, you may have to go through a process of “nothingness” or change.
When we are moving into something new, there is sometimes a process of change that must occur. In this process of change, there are at least three phases: the death phase. It is not uncommon during the death process to feel disenchanted or discouraged by what we see or don’t see. The key here is not to allow your feelings to push you away from God. The key is to keep going.
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