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It’s easy to stop believing when all hope looks gone. But when hope vanishes is when you ought to look for Jesus more than ever because He could be right beside you. You just can’t see Him. When hopelessness overrides your faith, your eyes become blinded to what is really going on. Some of your greatest answers to some of your greatest problems come during times of your greatest discouragement.

In Lamentations 3, Jeremiah was nothing short of depressed. But instead of wallowing in it, he remembered God. When he began to turn his thoughts toward the goodness of God – in spite of the fact that he couldn’t see God’s goodness at the moment – he started to feel differently about the mess he was in. In fact in verse 18 of Lamentation 3, Jeremiah lets us know that he has lost all hope. And yet we see his hope return when he returns his thoughts toward God. We read,

Whenever I counsel someone who is struggling with emotional strongholds, I always want to check their hope-meter because when you have lost your hope, you have lost everything. Simply defined, hope is the belief that my tomorrow will be better than my today. David knew about the power of hope when life looks hopeless.

There is a myth in Christianity that I often hear people say. Maybe you have even said it yourself— “God will not put more on me than I can bear.” Maybe you’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve even said it. Some people even think it’s in the Bible. But let me debunk that myth right now with a look at the life of Paul. In 2 Corinthians, Paul wrote, “For we do not want you to be unaware, brethren, of our affliction… that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life” (2 Corinthians 1:8).

We live in a world that is not the way God intended it to be when He created it. When sin entered His perfect creation, all of it was subject to its fruit. Let’s face it, discouragement is not from God, but it is one of Satan’s tools that gives us a feeling of hopelessness.