Hello, and welcome to Enbolden, living a bold Christian life. I'm Chris Shutter, an ordinary Christian living with and learning about an extraordinary God. Thank you for joining me on spending 30 days of praising God. Hi friends, today's praise was inspired by Hebrews 11-1.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. When you hear people argue about God being a man-made construct, I always wonder what they think about the concept of hope. Hope in general is experienced by other animals in its most simplistic forms. For example, my dog hopes that a piece of my dinner will fall off my plate into his mouth.
And given his level of whining and drooling, his hopefulness can get pretty intense. But if my dog were to say get cancer, would he understand the hopefulness of being cured? When my previous dog, my sweet little Molly, was old, and ill, we called him a woman who does home euthanasia. And as the drugs were slowly administered into Molly's body, we gave her a feast of her favorite treats.
It's interesting she resisted succumbing only in her desire for one more treat. But was she able to hope to not die? To hope that something better awaited her after death? It seems about God's animal kingdom, creatures were gifted with just enough mental capacity to meet their basic needs.
I don't know, I think it's obvious, or else we'd see them building supercomputers and skyscrapers. The animal kingdom doesn't concern themselves, say, with their fellow animals living conditions in far-off lands, much less those in the house next door. As humans, God instills in us something that no man can truly explain. A sense of the past, the present, and a hope for the future.
It's that hope that looking forward to God's good work in our situation that is so uniquely human, and I praise God for it. You know, like love, hope is found in many forms. We can hope it doesn't rain out the baseball game. We hope we get that job.
We hope our vacation turns out the way we dream. We can hope for a better life, hope for a cure, hope for a child. But that hope God really wants us to rely on is the hope based on trusting that what he has in store for you and I is for good. We can have hope that the trials we currently are going through will teach us something important and will leave us with something good.
We can have hope that God has a good plan for not only ourselves but our families who believe in Him. We can place our hope in a future beyond this place more glorious than we can imagine. I'm so thankful God gifted us with this unique brand of hope. Without it, we'd have hopelessness and despair.
We would be left only with anger and disappointment and confusion. And when I look around these days, I can see the destructiveness from lacking in God's hope, the aching and yearning for answers. It can lead people to depression, violence, and self-harm. I believe that's because deep in each of us is the knowledge that brokenness is not the state God wants for us.
It's foreign in our bodies and therefore makes us uncomfortable and unhappy with our lives. We naturally desire to be hopeful. Some of us just haven't accepted the prescribed method. God.
Have an awesome day friends. I'd love to hear from you and find out more about how you are living out your old Christian life. You can find me on Instagram at embolden-the-o or at my blog at embolden.net.