Our only hope …

Today, a Facebook friend of mine posted the meme to the right, and it reminded me how, over the last three decades, people would come in for counseling, many having an attitude that their seeking my help for effective clinical therapy was their last hope.

Many of these people had already seen more than one counselor, without any positive results or effective help to change their lives. They were about out of hope and feeling desperate. But the counseling I, or the churches I was working with at the time, wasn’t their hope for transformation, God was!

And God is not our last hope, He is our only hope!

That truth is represented in the picture shown in the meme. It reminds me of a story we read in the Bible as recorded in Mark 5:24-34 …

“Jesus went with him, and all the people followed, crowding around him. A woman in the crowd had suffered for twelve years with constant bleeding. She had suffered a great deal from many doctors, and over the years she had spent everything she had to pay them, but she had gotten no better. In fact, she had gotten worse. She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe. For she thought to herself, ‘If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.’ Immediately the bleeding stopped, and she could feel in her body that she had been healed of her terrible condition.

“Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my robe?’

“His disciples said to him, ‘Look at this crowd pressing around you. How can you ask, “Who touched me?”‘

“But he kept on looking around to see who had done it. Then the frightened woman, trembling at the realization of what had happened to her, came and fell to her knees in front of him and told him what she had done. And he said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. Your suffering is over.’”

Like so many of my past counseling clients, this woman and suffered for years and, in spite of spending all she had on an assortment of doctors, none had been able to help her, she had only gotten worse.

Desperate, in her mind, Jesus was her last hope.

She would soon discover He was her only hope.

Have you discovered that?

Have you learned the profound truth that it isn’t that God is our last hope, He’s our only hope!

It is critical we learn this lesson because it teaches us how to live. Most of us seek the counsel of other human beings before we open our Bibles for insight or go to God in prayer. We might — might — get around to one of those two things after seeking human counsel, but that only relegates God to a place of minority input, if that.

Lessons like the life of this woman can teach us that God is not our last hope, nor should we make Him such; He is our only hope, and so He should be our first counsel, our source of truth, our way of living, our foundation for life. We should start with Him, knowing that He is our great hope!

It’s true that God will often meet our various needs through people, but we approach this backwards and tend to start with hope in people, only to be disappointed, and possibly then turn to God. We need to reverse that approach and start with God, trusting that if any people will come into our lives with help from God, He will lead us to them and/or them to us.

God, not people, is our only hope!

Have you made that the reality of your life? Or have you started and stayed with a hope in people and still have not turned to God?

Scotty