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Blog
Hopeless
May 17, 2025
Hopeless
Faith, love and hope are to be consistent features of the Christian’s stability, the three-legged stool on which we sit. The funny thing about a three-legged stool is that if you remove but one of its legs, stability evaporates.
So how many Christians have lost hope? How many have become hopeless? Let’s think how this might happen:
The Christian life is to be one of progressive sanctification. We are to become more holy in our practice. We are to become more Christ-like. This involves some rather sticky areas, not necessarily tied to the most notorious sins. One would be the practice of prayer in such a way that it is a primary practice and response in our lives that can easily lay claim to large swaths of time. But in our culture, time is tracked and allotted in very secular ways, often pushing prayer to the edges. Few of us are aligned with Martin Luther who said that he had so much to do in a day, he must get up earlier to pray. Have you become hopeless about ever becoming a prayer warrior? If so, your stool is listing heavily to one side.
There is also the problem of our guilty conscience concerning witness. The solution is not to get rid of the guilty conscience. The solution is that we should actually delight in speaking of Jesus to those who do not now know Him. But we don’t want to offend people. We are afraid. We lack confidence. And the excuses go on. Have you resigned yourself to living for the rest of your life with a guilty conscience regarding boldness for Jesus? That would be an example of living a hopeless life.
And then there is the problem of continued struggle with sin. We know those things that are outside the will of God, unless we are in full delusion. But somehow, we fall back into the same patterns again and again. There is a part of our souls that loves to wallow in that stuff, whether it is an attitude or an action. In the prophet Jeremiah, he informs that people that God is planning calamity on them for their continued sin unless they repent and forsake. This is what they reply: Jer. 18:12 “But they will say, ‘It’s hopeless! For we are going to follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart.’” Does that fit your condition? Let’s do something about that!
Brothers and sisters in Christ, we cannot lose hope. Faith, love and hope go together. Even isolated hopelessness, whether in lack of Christian virtues or in the lingering presence of sin, is not an option. Ceasing to struggle in these areas, and others, is a crisis of faith. And so I take heart in Isaiah’s words (the happy prophet, as opposed to anguished Jeremiah). He also faced sin and sinners, but gives this word of hope:Is. 57:10 “You were tired out by the length of your road,
Yet you did not say, ‘It is hopeless.’
You found renewed strength,
Therefore you did not faint.” - “Prayer is a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart and soul to God, through Christ, with the strength and assistance of the Holy Spirit, for such things as God has promised, or according to the Word, for the good of the church, with submission, in faith, to the will of God.” - John Bunyan
