From Mighty Rivers 

You have probably heard this phrase—“As long as there is life, there is hope”—as a way to encourage people in tough times.

We may have it backwards, for it is true that “As long as there is hope, there is life.” We are thoroughly dependent on hope to keep going on in this difficult period. Where there is no hope, there is no reason to go on.

We need hope to wake up on Monday morning and start a new week. Monday is the most dangerous day of the week, and that is where we spend 1/7^th of our life. A long term study of 4000 men who had heart attacks revealed that those attacks happened three times more often on Monday than any other day in the week.

This year especially, life has been a struggle every day for everyone. Hope is essential.

But what is hope? Human hope is vague and merely wishful. But Biblical hope is insider information, hope based on a given reality.

Hope deals with our disappointments. There are many of those in life, but hope reminds us that they will serve a purpose and things will work out. Romans 8:28

Hope overcomes discouragements by instilling the Word of God in our thinking. Look for hope anywhere else and you won’t find it.

Finally, disillusionment results when hope is absent, and hope wanes when we stop praying drop out of church, withdraw from other Christians, and allow our faith to become irrelevant.

Many people are going through all three right now—disappointment, discouragement, and disillusionment.  We really need hope for all the Mondays in our life, plus the other days as well.

We are doing some work around here because we have hope, and we want people to have hope. When others say you can’t sustain a church in a dying town, we know God can. So we place our hope in Him.

“Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”  Romans 15:13

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