Keep Pressing Onward My Friends
“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.” I Corinthians 15:19
We all like to have something to look forward to. For some, it’s a vacation. We spend hours planning, packing, and so forth and then set out on our journey to our destination expecting to relax and have an enjoyable trip. However a vacation is only a temporary respite from the daily grind, and we soon return to our ordinary life and deal with the daily problems, schedules, and tasks, resuming our place in the rat race.
Sometimes life’s situations and burdens can get the best of us. My Mama had a saying for times of worry and stress: “Life gets tedious, doesn’t it?” Indeed life does get weary and tiresome. For those of us who have hope in Christ, we have the help and comfort of the Holy Spirit as we traverse the challenges of life and that’s a good thing. The bad thing is that the road of life is not smooth. It is full of potholes and detours. Some days it seems like every time you turn around, there’s some new problem or challenge or disappointment. We press on because, as believers, we know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, a heavenly light that will lead us into our eternal home with Christ and our loved ones who have gone before us.
Every time I turn on the news, there are so many depressing events taking place here and around the world. In Venezuela, people are hungry and rioting because their government leaders won’t allow food and supplies that are being sent by other countries across their borders. What kind of a person can see the people starving yet deny them aid? More and more states are sanctioning infanticide. What kind of people must they be to cheer a baby’s murder? And then there are those politicians who want to make everything free, but we know that there’s no “free lunch”. Someone somewhere must pay for all the “freebies”. It seems that there is a multitude of high profile folks caught in various sexual sins, but just about everyone who is caught has absolutely no shame about their actions. This is the kind of world we are living in today. I could go on, but none of this is new to any of you. If you are like me, you just shake your head and wonder how much longer God will delay sending Jesus Christ back to earth.
If Jesus did not rise again on the third day, then we would have no hope of a better day. All of our hope would be limited to a world that I just described briefly in the above paragraph. We can hope and pray for a real revival among God’s people which could turn things around, but it would only be short lived. It seems that our world and our nation have gone so far over into the “dark side” that I am not very optimistic about a return to truth, justice, and the godly way. Even so, I desire to stand and keep standing for righteousness and the truth of God’s word.
If there was no resurrection, The power to forgive not His; How miserable to believe, That this life is all there is. Thank God for the resurrection.