A Place Of One Last Hope

A Place of One Last Hope

Read: Luke 18:18-27

“What is impossible with men is possible with God.”

Luke 18:27

“We need more Christians for whom prayer is the first resort, not the last.”

—John Blanchard

IN WORD When God leads us to the place of insufficiency, we are compelled to cry out to Him. It is the cry of desperation. We have no hope but Him, and we know it. We are deeply, excruciatingly aware of it. We had hoped to have our stressful situation resolved by now, but we are at the end of our rope. Only God can fix things now. Or, as is often said, “All we can do now is pray.”

The Israelites fleeing from Egypt found themselves in a similar situation. They stood at a precarious position at the edge of the Red Sea. There was no way out. Deep waters lay ahead, a hostile army behind. It was impossible. And that’s exactly what God had planned all along—their impossibility.

Over and over again, the Bible stresses the importance of faith. It’s a strange commodity, isn’t it? Why didn’t God choose works as the currency of His kingdom? Why didn’t He choose our flawless understanding as His condition for acting on our behalf? Because those things don’t set Him up to display His glory. They would display ours, such as it is. Only faith is the helpless place that sets the stage for His greatness. Only trust declares our own futility, creates a vacuum He can fill, and acknowledges Him afterward.

IN DEED Our place of one last hope was the place where God would have had us all along. Everything else we tried before we arrived there wasn’t a legitimate hope anyway. We should have said at the start, “All we can do now is pray.” It was God’s preference all along to be our only hope, our only source of strength, our all-sufficient Savior. While we were trying everything we could before we got to the end of our rope, we were dreading the day we would reach it. But God was excitedly anticipating it. He stands ready to be the strength in our weakness, the wealth in our poverty, the health in our sickness, the deliverance out of our captivity, and the comfort in our despair. From beginning to end, He is our hope.