December 1

You have seen God bare His arm to help you. So unless you think He has lost the strength or use of it, hope still has an object to act upon, to lift your head above the water. No person ever drowns in despair unless he loses his hold on the power of God.

Another way to let God rescue you from despair is to remember how often He has proven your unbelief to be a false prophet. Has He not knocked at your door with inward comfort and outward deliverance after you had already put out the candle of hope and given up looking for Him? He came to Hezekiah after he had concluded that his case was beyond hope and help (Isaiah 38:10-11). Have you ever been left alone with fear as if an everlasting night had come and there would never be another morning? Yet even then God proved those despairing thoughts all liars by an unlooked-for surprise of sweet mercy which He crept in and gently brought to you. Why then are you frightened again and again by your distrustful thoughts, which God has so often proved liars? Stop feeding your hopes on the corpses of slain fears!

Remember too how even when you have been impatient and despairing in your afflictions, nevertheless God's mercy has been at work all the while to deliver you from them. David is an instance of this: "I said in my haste, All men are liars. What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits toward me?" (Psalm 116:11-12); "I said in my haste, I am cut off from before thine eyes: nevertheless thou heardest the voice of my supplications when I cried unto thee" (Psalm 31:22). He was saying, "I prayed with so little faith that I unprayed my own prayer! I assumed my dilemma was hopeless but God forgave my hasty spirit and gave me the mercy which I had hardly any faith to expect." And with his experience, David raises every saint's troubled hope: "Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart, all ye that hope in the Lord" (v.24).

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