Put your Hope in God!

Job 4

Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Wednesday, January 11.

Where do you put your hope in times of suffering? Do you trust that you can get yourself through the situation or do you call upon God to deliver and rescue you? In Job 4:3-6, the first of Job’s three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, responded to Job’s lament with a similar question:

Behold you have admonished many, and you have strengthened weak hands. Your words have helped the tottering to stand, and you have strengthened feeble knees. But now it has come to you, and you are impatient; it touches you, and you are dismayed. Is not your fear of God your confidence, and the integrity of your ways your hope?

There is a reality that Eliphaz’s question reveals to me as a caregiver – How will I handle my own suffering and grief when it is my turn to walk through the valley of the shadow of death? Will all the counsel I offered others through their difficult times strengthen me to walk through my own challenging circumstances with faith, hope, and love, or will my words evaporate like mist under the scorching sun of a summer day?

There is only one way to guarantee that our counsel offered to help others is not like the dross that will burn away, and that way is to point people to hope in God as their sole source of confidence. My hope is not in the integrity of my ways, but in the infallibility of God’s Word (Isaiah 55:11). May all the help we give to others point them to the Lord – “My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:2).

God bless you!

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