by Jim Hughes
Jonah 2:7 “When I had lost all hope, I turned my thoughts once more to the LORD. And my earnest prayer went out to you in your holy Temple.”
Sadly, we are often just like Jonah was. We keep on trying to do things our way until there is just no hope left for it to work. We run from God as far as we can. We try to fill up our lives with those things which can never satisfy or bring us peace. We try to follow the advice of the world only to discover how foolish it really is. We keep busy so that we don’t have to deal with the gnawing feeling of emptiness in our souls. We stubbornly try to live our lives without God in it, only to discover how miserable of a life we really have.
Jonah had to get down to the lowest possible level he could possibly be in before he acknowledged it wasn’t working and he turned to the Lord. He once knew what it was like to live in fellowship with God, but he ran away from Him. He got himself in a mess that he could not get out of. He was facing certain death at the bottom of the sea in the belly of a fish. He was covered with seaweed and he was in the middle of water everywhere. It was dark and there was no way out. He had a choice to make; he could die in his misery or he could cry out to the Lord for help.
Just like Jonah, we too can discover that God is our only hope. The Lord will not rescue us without our willingness to let Him help us. He will not help us without our acknowledging that He is our only way, truth and life. He will not help us until we acknowledge that we are guilty of sin and seek His forgiveness. God will never turn away a sincere and humbled heart. He is more than willing to help us out of our messes if we will but turn to Him and let Him. Granted, not all of the messes we find ourselves in are our fault. Sometimes it’s the sin of others that creates our messes. Sometimes messes are the result of living in a fallen world.
Sometimes the Lord does not lift us out of our messes, but instead stays with us in our messes to help us. What we do need to know is that the Lord is willing and able to help us regardless of how hopeless our situation may be or how helpless we may feel.
About the Author:
Spending his formative years in Ft. Wayne, IN, Jim followed the love of his life to southeast Iowa where they married and have spent the majority of their lives. Jim has pastored several churches throughout his life and has worked many years in local factories to help support his family. The father of two married adult children and one son still at home, Jim is a first-time author.
C Through Marriage came into being through many years of pastoral and life experiences. The book first took on a life of its own over 20 years ago when I sought to address the much publicized moral failures of prominent leaders in the church. In the chaper on Chasity, I include the guideliness that I developed then to protect one's self from such failures.
I am a firm believer in order to make sense out of life you have to use much common sense. We need to get back to the basics of what has worked for many, many generations. If is isn't broke, why try to fix it? I strive to return to the basics of what really works in all my writings.
