Make Every Moment Count

Giving Others Hope from Essentials Church on Vimeo.

This is the final message in our five part series Comfortable: Following Jesus Means Getting Off the Couch and Getting Dirty.

We finish up our series with a message on Giving Others Hope.

If you’ve ever been down to your last dime; if you’re ever been out of ideas about what to do; if you have ever experienced loneness, loss or lack of direction; then you know what it is like to desperately need hope.

The Aug. 6 collapse of a main shaft of a gold and silver mine that runs like a corkscrew for miles under a northern Chilean mountain trapped 33 miners.

They lived on two spoonfuls of tuna per person every other day. Their fate was unknown for 17 days until rescuers drilled a small bore-hole that allows those on the ground to send emergency supplies and communicate with the trapped people.

Thirteen years ago, astronaut Jerry Linenger was only a month into his four-month expedition on an aging Russian Mir space station when a near-deadly fire broke out.

That was the beginning of harrowing experiences that included a near-crash and an oxygen system that kept breaking down. A return was months away. It was the space equivalent of what the miners may have to face.

“If the hope is out there, hope can get you through that ordeal,” said Linenger, a medical doctor who had two Russian crewmates.
The key is giving the miners a sense of control of their own destiny, said University of Pennsylvania psychiatry professor David Dinges. He has studied astronauts and others and their response to isolation and stress.

“Hope is a resource in this environment,” Dinges said, especially if the miners are trying to help their own rescue. “If they can be an agent of their own rescue, that helps enormously.”

We all need hope, and when you find it in Jesus Christ, then you are to share it with those who have no hope.

“Endure hardship as discipline. … No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:7,11).

– Greg Asimakoupoulos, Leadership, Vol. 17, no. 3.

I want to talk to you this morning about giving others hope through suffering.

Sometimes our suffering is brought on by our own actions and decisions…

Sometimes our suffering is brought on by the actions and decisions of others’…

Either way the Lord can show us how to find hope through suffering.

Here’s the big idea for today:

► Where there is faith in the future, there is power in the present.