Bible Study: Hope for our now

Romans 15:13
Lamentations 3:19-26

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The circumstances of our lives might be awful. We might wish they were different. Yet our hope is in the Lord both for our eternity and for our now. While it's comparatively easy to hope in the Lord for eternity, to trust His word that someday when this life is over we will be with Him, the real struggle is to hope in Him today, for our present lives.
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Life can be very discouraging. I know that I give in far too easily to the feeling that all is lost. Yet it is when our circumstances are the most difficult that our faith moves beyond lip-service to reality. It is when we struggle to hope that our success in doing so becomes believable. We hope in the Lord that someday He will return and show Himself the victor over the enemy. We hope in the Lord that He will fulfill His word to bring us to Himself at the end of our lives. But we also hope in the Lord to bring good out of the terrible conditions we live in. We hope in the Lord that He knows what He is doing despite our incomplete perspective seeming to contradict His word. We hope in the Lord to bring us through, clinging to Him when we cannot carry ourselves. We hope in the Lord because we realize that our circumstances would carry us to places we don't want to go so we hold fast to the One who will keep us exactly where we need to be despite every attack against us.