Hope In God
If you feel like you’re lacking hope, we’d like to pray with you and encourage you to reconnect with God. Please contact us.
We will always experience suffering during our lives here on our fallen Earth. When we experience pain, especially the death of a loved one, our natural response is to question, to ask why, and perhaps even to doubt God. Because it hurts.
Some people will respond to evil they see by denying that evil exists. But what is perhaps easy to say is quite difficult to live, or as C S Lewis put it: “Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.” There is a name for the person who denies good and evil: a sociopath. Clearly the proper response to evil is not denial.
Other people will respond to evil by removing God from the equation. But removing God does not make evil less evil, nor pain less painful. In fact, removing God also removes ultimate hope. Without God, our world seems permanently and irredeemably evil. Without God, there is no ultimate relief from pain, only pain.
With God we cry out to a loving Father who remains with us and comforts us as we hurt and Himself came to Earth as a human being to suffer and die for us. But without God we cry out into the empty void of nothingness that neither hears our cry nor cares for our pain. Removing God results in no gain and much loss.
When we have God in our lives and hearts, we have hope during difficult times and comfort in the midst of tragedy. We have hope grounded in the fact of God’s mighty power, His limitless mercy, and everlasting love. No matter what happens, God loves us because God is love. And nothing can separate us from Him.
“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39
Question: What do you need to say to God today in prayer? What questions do you have to ask God?
About this Author: Darren Hewer
Tags: darren hewer, death, Devotional, encouragement, evil, God, hope, LIFE, Men, pain, problem of evil, suffering
Darren – Thanks for the blog – I always take note when C.S. Lewis is quoted. He must be the most often cited contemporary Christian author in literature today, (I didn’t count but I think Randy Alcorn probably cites him at least a dozen times in “Heaven” alone, and cites him a handful of times in “Money, Possessions and Eternity” as well. – Alcorn just as an example etc.
Though he had authored many books and essays, I recently read “A Grief Observed”, which is a truly sad, and in my case extrodinarily “close to home” essay which he wrote following the death of his wife after a nine year battle with bone cancer.
I wish someone could find a way to place these words into a helpful perspective in understanding God and was wondering if it was something you might be interested in tackling. (I know it wouldn’t be easy, which is probably why I have never seen it done before that I am aware of). But it would seem that in order to fully appreciate Lewis, this Essay should be examined and discussed rather than what almost seems like being swept under the rug.
Thanks again,
Scott