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webstix.com Tony Herman - the coolest cat on the net
What is the greatest gift you can give someone?
Money?
A longer life?
An organ such as a liver, heart, kidney?
Or maybe just maybe it is something we can all give to anyone and in fact is truly the greatest gift…. here’s a hint, I am not talking about salvation- thats only a gift Jesus can give.
Hope
If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
it doesn’t take much to give hope. A kind word, give them a new outlook, give them a scripture, a prayer or even a hug or pat on the back. Help them see other possibilities that they are blind too… or give them your own story of how you made it through a difficult time.
When I was first married and attending CFNI… my marriage was a train wreck. Completely out of control and headed for either murder or divorce…
I went out to coffee with a friend Tim Grindstaff… Hey Tim if you are listening. He shared with me how he was the same way when he married his wife… he spoke hope into me. He didn’t give me answers… just simply hope.
Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.
So that is your job…Keep hope alive in other people. You say “I need hope” here is the little secret that is important to understand. As you plant seeds of hope in others they also germinate in your life. You find yourself feeling hopeful by speaking life and hope into others it spills into your life as well.
HOPE
Exchanging Our Eschatological Heritage
Neill Hamilton, who taught at Drew University for many years, once
observed how people in our time lose hope for the future. It happens
whenever we let our culture call the shots on how the world is going to
end.
Is your hope meter based on circumstances? The media?
Words spoken over your situation?
Based on your past experiences?
At this stage of technological advancement, the only way the
culture can make sense of the future is through the picture of
everything blowing up in a nuclear holocaust. The world cannot know
what we know, that everything has changed in the death and resurrection
of Jesus, that the same Christ is coming to judge the world and give
birth to a new creation. And so, people lose hope. As Hamilton puts it:
This substitution of an image of nuclear holocaust for the coming of >Christ is a parable of what happens to Christians when they cease to >believe in their own eschatological heritage. The culture supplies its >own images for the end when we default by ceasing to believe in >biblical images of God’s triumph at the end.
The good news of the gospel is this: when all is said and done, God is >going >to win. No Box Seats In The Kingdom, William G. Carter, CSS Publishing, Lima, >Ohio, 1996.
Martin Luther once spent three days in a black depression over something
that had gone wrong. On the third day his wife came downstairs dressed in
mourning clothes. "Who's dead?" he asked her. "God," she replied. Luther
rebuked her, saying, "What do you mean, God is dead? God cannot die."
"Well," she replied, "the way you've been acting I was sure He had!"
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