HOPE FOR A NEW BEGINNING (2)
How to stir up hope: “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ: By whom also we have access by faith into this grace when we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God” (Romans 5:1-2). Basically, every believer has a deposit of hope in his heart and that hope can be stirred up. You can come out of hopelessness and become hopeful by taking the following steps. Look ahead! In Hebrew 12:2, the Bible talking of Jesus says: “. . . Who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God”.
Continuing Bishop David Abioye in his book entitled: “Creating a New Beginning” wrote: Jesus came to terminate hopelessness in our lives, showing us how to look away from the past and look ahead with hope, so that we can keep moving ahead. To deliver humanity from sin and evil, Jesus had to carry the sins of the whole world and bear the punishment of it, which is death by hanging on the cross. That is a hard and shameful thing for anybody to go through, but He overlooked all the sufferings and the shame. While He was being beaten and battered, He told the people not to sympathize with Him because He had hope. He knew that the cross was not His end. His eyes were focused on the joy and the glory that was set ahead of Him, He was able to endure and go through the pressures. At the end He became the author of eternal salvation.
The way out of hopelessness is to see a tomorrow, see a great future set before you and then stir up your hope for it by putting the past behind you. Start up again in a new dimension with new vigor. Remember that where there is no hope, there is no life and where there is no life, there is no progress. Stir up your hope again and begin to enjoy life in its fullness. Start looking forward because your tomorrow is brighter than your today. In the course of his walk with God, Abraham asked God,”. . .Lord what wilt thou give me, seeing l go childless. . .”(Genesis 15:2). Until when God helped him to be hopeful, he did not become fruitful. While he waited for the promised child, Romans 4:19 say that he: “… Against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, so shall they seed be. And being not weak in faith, he consider not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb. . . but was strong in faith, giving glory to God” (Romans 4:18-19). All over the place, you hear people expressing hopelessness in their speech and you see it in their looks; but the truth is that hopelessness is not a function of what happened to you but your attitude to what happened. Abraham hoped against all natural laws of hope that he would become the father of all nations and it came to pass.
Life is full of challenges, this is why you must remain continuously hopeful, to win continuously. The Psalmist said: “Why art thou cast down, O my soul; and why art thou disquieted in me! Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance” (Psalms 42:5). You can sense depression before it sets in and like David did in this verse, encourage your heart to hope in God because when you hope in Him with joy, He becomes the help of your countenance. Remember you are not a conditional creature; you are a creature in the state of God. You have the nature of God; you have a heart that can subdue circumstance. Even if medical petitioners say that there is no hope for you, consider it as an expression of their own limitations. God has no limitations. He is older than medical science and all things are possible with Him so you can begin to hope again. Fight hopelessness with everything in your power, remain hopeful and you will see your great future begin to unfold for all to see.
Let the past pass! Every man charts his next step in life by virtue of the direction in which he is looking, because whatever direction you are looking is the way you naturally go. You can’t look in two directions at the same time, you are either looking backward or looking forward and the direction in which you look determines the direction of your motion. If you want to remain hopeful, you must regard the past as past and refuse to look backward. Free you from the thoughts of how things used to be or what is popularly called, ‘the good old days.’ The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 7:10 “Do not say, why where the old days better than these! For it is not wise. . .” (Amp). If your past was not so good, you need to erase the negative experiences and all the things you have suffered from your mind, otherwise your attention will be divided; you will be unable to maintain focus. And without focus, there is no attainment in life.
Stop referring to ‘the good old days’ rather picture the bright days ahead. As the name rightly implies, they are ‘old days’, so forget them, because what is old can not be relevant to now! Don’t destroy your future with the past! Look, you need creativity to break through the higher realms in life. That is why you must free your mind from the strongholds of past failure in order to be creative. If you keep observing the things that have been ruined, your life may become ruined eventually. Look at Isaac’s story in Genesis chapter 26, every time he dug a well, the philistines covered it, but he never looked backward once. As soon as one covered, he went forward to dig another one without a reference to the previous. No wonder the Bible says, “. . . The man…went forward, and grew until he became great” (Genesis 26:13). Isaac went forward because he was ever looking ahead not backwards. People who keep making reference to the past always go behind.
We can only pick lessons from our past to enhance our present position and prepare ourselves for the future, but never settle down for with the sorrow of failures of the past. This is the trap that so many people have fallen into in life and they have remained on the same spot. Maybe you have missed some opportunities, or some targets you couldn’t meet as you thought you should, leave them behind and reach out for what is ahead of you. Pick lessons from your past mistakes and do your best to be sure that you avoid such pitfalls in the future, but move forward from there to achieve greater thing in your life. Keep looking ahead and you will naturally move forward into your next phase in life. You must fight everything that strives to keep you in failure. If you will refuse to celebrate failure, nothing will be strong enough to keep you from moving forward. Don’t announce, think, discuss or even look a failure, because it is not an event itself that makes one hopeless, but reflecting on the event and bemoaning the situation.
That is why you must keep your heart from such pollutions with diligence! Anything that reminds you of past failure and disappointments must be kept out of sight as much as possible, because they are traps of the enemy to keep you in stagnation. Sometimes, you will find people keeping the remains of a car that has been wrecked in an accident in front of their houses. Such continuous reminders of sad events will naturally keep a man constantly depressed. My view is this, whatever breaks down around you that can not be repaired or replaced immediately, should be disposed of, because the longer it stays the more it deteriorates. So, why not let it go so that you can reorganize our life for something better! Stop reflecting on past failures and disappointments! Stop reflecting on the things that somebody said about you! There is no level that you will ever get in life that Satan will not attempt to remind you of the past, but as he is saying it, keep looking forward because those who reflect on their past will be held back in failure, but those who look ahead will keep going ahead.
Refuse sympathy! Sympathy is an evil cloud that the devil casts over people who have experienced set back in abide to move them to tears. You will notice that often times, when a child falls down and nobody makes a comment, he gets back on his feet and continues playing, but if somebody screams and rushes to help him up, that is when he begins to cry, in reaction to the sympathy’ not the fall. If you want to rise on a fall, don’t let anybody to sympathize with you, don’t even talk like a man who needs sympathy your pity, and don’t pity yourself. You should rather look forward to when you will share the testimony, because that situation will turn to you for a testimony (Luke21:13).
The natural thing that most people do when something happens to them is to look for sympathizers who rally around to listen to their tales of woe and make promises to help that are never kept. Sympathy and self-pity go hand in hand and I have never seen any man that was helped by engaging in either of them. It paralyses your thinking, since your sympathizers tend to think for you and offer all manner of suggestions because they see you as a second rate citizen and an object of concern. When you are in a tight corner that is the time to put your mind to work and think for yourself, because it is only what you create through your own mind that will stay with and help you. Of course the counsel of experienced and matured saints remain valuable to stirring up your hope but you must not allow your mind to become suspended in the process of relying on people to think for you.
Stop looking for who will pity you, start looking for those who will inspire you. It may be painful, but keeping company with people who will inspire you will motivate you to take daring steps. If Job in the Bible had settled down with his friends, they would have destroyed him. After he lost all that he had, they came and sat with him, building up his sorrow and killing him silently but Job refuse to rely on their words, rather he kept his hope alive till his change came. God will use people to help you, but any man who genuinely wants to help you will not sympathizer with you. So, react to sympathy, face life as it is. Accept your pitfall if any, make amends and move on. There is always another opportunity for you and as you open up for it, you will surely rise again. Despise scorners! Another group of people you must also beware of are scorners. Satan will try to use men sometimes to break your heart and make you hopeless, but you must learn how to despise those who laugh at you. Ignore them as though they are non-existent. Pay no attention to them.
No matter who is laughing at you, despise them. Let it show on your face that you are not moved by what they say. That was what Jesus did when He despised the shame and endured the cross. He seems to say, “I can not be moved by what is happening now because I see a crown ahead.” The people laughed and scorned Him, calling Him “the King of Jews” in mockery. They put a crown of thorns in His head, yet His eyes were fixed on the crown ahead and now He is seated in glory. “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrew 12:2).
Some mockers may be saying to you, “what do you think you can become? People are submitting profiles and you are submitting too, who do you think you are?” This was the attitude of Sanballat and Tobiah towards Nehemiah and the people of God when they were rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. They laugh them to scorn and despised them. They said, “What is this thing that ye do? Will ye rebel against the king?” But Nehemiah’s response to them was, “…The God of heaven will prosper us therefore will we rise and build…” (Nehemiah 2:19-20). And when Sanballat and Tobias saw that they were making progress, to discourage them they said, “…Even that which they build, if a fox go up, he shall even break down their stone wall” (Nehemiah 4:3). The Israelites refused to be distracted but kept building till the work was completed.
People will naturally scorn every small thing that you start, but you must make up your mind to despise them. Nehemiah was out to accomplish a seemingly impossible task. You may be faced with what looks like an impossible dream to attain, which will attract men of scorn; men who regard themselves as pillars or experts in that field may laugh at you in a bid to discourage you but let your forehead be strong against theirs, refuse to be intimidated! Rather, be proud of the little you are doing, being confident of the fact that though your beginning is small, your later end shall greatly increase(Job 8:7). Not done read next issue part 3.
Written By Dr. Lewis Akpogena
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