Heavenly Father, we worship You; King of kings, we honor You; our Redeemer, we lift Your holy name this morning, because we know that You are Sovereign over all things and what You cannot do does not exist; there is nothing broken that You cannot fix, blessed be Your name Father in Jesus name.
Lord, we have come this morning, first and foremost to thank You for Your preservation, thank You for all that You have done, thank You for what You are still going to do in our lives in the name of Jesus.
Father, we have brought our brokenness unto You this morning, in every sphere of life that we are broken that we need to be refixed, You are the great Fixer, the heavenly Fixer, Father fix us this morning in the name of Jesus.
Whatever may be the challenge or the trouble or the worry that came with us here this morning, we shall release them and dump them at Your feet and we shall go back with joy in the name of Jesus.
Father, this morning we ask that You will speak to us Yourself, You will give strength to the weak, You will make the hopeless to become hopeful, You’ll give us courage and strength on every side and Your name alone shall be glorified, thank You everlasting Father, in Jesus mighty name we prayed.
Good morning church; daddy, good morning, sir, thank you so much for the privilege once again, sir, may the grace of God in you increase in Jesus name, praise the living Jesus!
Our text this morning is taken from the Book of Ruth 1: 1 – 6, “Now it came to pass in the days when the judges ruled, that there was a famine in the land. And a certain man of Bethlehemjudah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he, and his wife, and his two sons. 2 And the name of the man was Elimelech, and the name of his wife Naomi, and the name of his two sons Mahlon and Chilion, Ephrathites of Bethlehemjudah. And they came into the country of Moab, and continued there.
3 And Elimelech Naomi’s husband died; and she was left, and her two sons. 4 And they took them wives of the women of Moab; the name of the one was Orpah, and the name of the other Ruth: and they dwelled there about ten years.
5 And Mahlon and Chilion died also both of them; and the woman was left of her two sons and her husband. 6 Then she arose with her daughters in law, that she might return from the country of Moab: for she had heard in the country of Moab how that the Lord had visited his people in giving them bread”. Praise the living Jesus!
The title this morning is Hope in Difficult Times; I don’t know what difficulty you are facing now, I don’t know what challenge troubles you, I don’t know what gives you anxiety, but I stand here to assure you in the name of the Lord that this morning, your fear will turn to joy, because God will give you hope that will enable you to overcome them in the name of Jesus.
God works in a way that only He is the Director of our lives and the Author of all things, He’s a super Arranger. This morning at the workers’ meeting, we discussed about the cost of living and we said so many things about the challenge that we face now in the country and how to survive, and as the Lord will have it, now we are talking about the hope in difficult times, somebody will receive hope this morning in the name of Jesus.
Hope is a feeling of expectation and desire that something good will happen. It means to be optimistic or have a positive mind that that which you are looking forward to will happen, and if you have a negative experience, hope is expectation that that negative experience will turn to a good one, praise the living Jesus!
There is no time that you need hope more than in times of difficulties, challenges, we need hope throughout our lives, indeed, hope is the oxygen for life for believers. Just as faith is the currency of believers, faith is the currency we spend in the kingdom of God because the Bible says the just shall live by faith, Romans 1: 17. Hope is the oxygen, it’s what we breathe, what gives us life as believers, that’s why Ecclesiastes 9: 4 says that as long as there is life, there is hope; there is hope for a dog that is alive than for a lion that is dead.
A man can lose all things but when he loses hope, he’s lost everything; a hopeless man is as good as a dead man, and so it’s important for us to appreciate the essence of hope in a time like this when we have problems, challenges all over; we have difficulty in our society that affects everyone; we have personal difficulties that come in various shapes, it could be health challenges, it could be marital, it could be about our careers, it could be about our academics, finances, businesses failing, disappointments, betrayals, all manner of disloyalties, all manner of things that will challenge even the most righteous person; no matter how well you are doing, no matter what you put into life, one thing we do not have is that nobody has immunity against trouble, what God has promised us is not immunity against trouble, but victory over trouble.
Jesus said in John 16: 33, “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.” In other words, troubles will come; if you live long enough, troubles will come, challenges will come, we have no control over what life will throw at us but we have control over our own response. You can’t determine what life will throw at you; you wake up on a beautiful morning with high expectations of a brilliant day, suddenly, life begins to throw you all manner of lemons, so it depends on what you make with the lemons that life throws at you – you can kick it away, you can make it into a lemonade, you can do whatever you want with it.
So what matters really is our response to what life throws at us, and most times it’s our response that makes the difference. A lot of people are destroyed, not by the problems they face but by their own response to the problems.
That’s why it is important for us in a time like this to watch our response, and in our text that we have read this morning, there are so many lessons that we can learn from the story of the family of Naomi, but we just want to take one aspect of it this morning, to learn lessons about how we can respond with hope in troubling times, in difficult times, and God will help us in the name of Jesus.
Psalm 34: 19 says that “Many are the afflictions of the righteous; but the Lord delivereth him out of them all”, in other words, when trouble comes, nobody is immune, even the righteous, even the saints, it’s not always about sin, hallelujah! In the Bible you’ll find people like Abraham, Joseph, who had challenges, even Apostle Paul, the Apostles of Jesus Christ, challenges will always come, but the question is how do you respond to challenges?
Now let’s quickly look at this story and see what we can learn from the trouble – this was a time when there was trouble in Israel, difficulties, economic challenges, famine, just as we have now in our generation, what is happening today in this nation is not peculiar, every generation has its challenges.
Famine at this time when Ruth lived was an economic challenge, was an economic difficulty, and then look at the way they responded: Elimelech was the head of the family, what did he do? Immediately the problem came, he packed up together his family and he ran away from Israel to Moab, hallelujah! And let’s see what Moab represents, he ran to Moab which was an accursed land; the ancestor of the nation of Moab was Moab, the son that Lot had through incest with his first daughter.
In Genesis 37: 7 – 11, after Lot had ran away from Sodom and Gomorrah and his daughters made him drunk and then they made him to sleep with his first daughter, Moab was the fruit of the incestuous relationship, so that son (Moab) was the founder of the nation of Moab, and Moab was reputed and notorious to be the enemies of Israel. If you look at Numbers 22 – 23, it was the king if Moab, Balak, who tried to use Balaam to curse the Israelites, and God helped them and He ended up cursing Balak and his people, so it was an accursed nation and that was where Mr. Elimelech ran to when there was trouble – from frying pan to fire as they say.
You will recall that Lot himself, the father of Moab, when there was trouble, there was a challenge, difficulty between him and his uncle, Abraham, that out of greed, he chose the land that became Sodom and Gomorrah and what happened to him there, he lost everything that he took to Sodom and Gomorrah except his own life and his daughters, everything he took to the land that was accursed was destroyed.
The same thing that Elimelech did here; because trouble came, he ran away to a land that was accursed, God did not lead him, he did what other people were doing and then he met with destruction, everything he took to that land, he lost; he lost his own life, he lost his two sons and everything that he had because God did not lead him.
Compare the case of Elimelech to that of Isaac in Genesis 26; when there was also economic trouble in the land and Isaac also wanted to run away because initially, the first thing that comes to our mind when there is trouble is either we run away out of hopelessness – you run away because even if you have faith in God, you do not see hope in that place anymore, and that place may not just be your nation, it may be your marriage, it may be your career, it may be your business, it may be your relationship, it may be just anything, whatever gives you trouble or challenges is your own Israel, and then when challenges come, you have a choice of either running away as Elimelech did, running away in hopelessness because you believe that it cannot get better or you stay and let God lead you and be part of the solution, and that was what Isaac did.
Isaac was going to obey his natural instinct also and to run away to Egypt as his father did but he heard from God; God speaks to His children during difficult times, God never forsakes His children, in fact, it is in difficulties like these that God always speaks, but it depends on whether you hear Him or not, it depends on whether you take your challenges to Him and you ask Him or not, because in difficult times, the devil is also at alert trying to divert people from the trouble they think they have into worse problems.
So you have two choices to make in a time of trouble; it could be in your marriage, it could be in your business, either of two responses, how do you respond? It could be a medical situation, how do you respond? And doctors just tell you, oh there’s nothing we can do anymore, how do you respond? You can either respond in hope in God that it will get better.
Hope is the mother of faith; faith is to believe that God will do what He will do, but hope is to expect that God will do what He will do. When hope is lost, when you have no expectation, faith is dead. Like in the nation today, we have believers who have faith in God but we have lost hope in our nation, so we are living in hopelessness and so we are looking for situations, whatever happens we just get out or whatever we need to do in whatever comes our way, but we look at the example of this man who had a challenge, who did not hear from God, who just wanted to get the next bus to get out of the place; he may be a believer, he may believe in God but the man had no hope that things were going to change, but I pray for you this morning that whatever you are facing in your personal life, in your career, in your business, whatever it is where you have challenges, that God will restore hope in you in the name of Jesus.
The hope that would enable you to stay, Romans 15: 13, it tells us that God is the source of hope, hallelujah! “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost”. What we need more, we need faith but we also need hope; faith enables you to stand but hope keeps you standing even when faith becomes weak.
In John 11, when he was sick and they came to call Jesus and He was going to their house and suddenly He had something to do and then Lazarus died, when He got to the home of Mary and Martha, Martha said to Him, Lord, if You had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died, but in any case, I know that God will do whatever I ask.
Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. Martha believed Jesus but she had lost hope, she said yes, I know, but on the resurrection. So she had no hope, at that point she still had faith in Christ but she had no hope, she had lost hope of her brother rising physically, she thought oh yes, he’s going to rise on the resurrection.
So you can still have faith – be a man of faith, be a woman of faith, but if you allow hope to die, then the faith becomes nothing else, thank God for Christ that He is Christ, that Christ can do anything, that His mercy can overcome even our faith and our hopelessness. And I pray that this morning, wherever your faith is weak or your hope is dwindling, the mercy of God will overcome and prevail in the mighty name of Jesus.
Now let’s look at the case of this man, Elimelech, again in a deeper way and see how it reflects, how it affects us in the challenges we face today in our own personal lives because I know we are going through a lot of things; a few months ago, I woke up on a beautiful morning with my wife and I was at work when I got a call that was totally devastating, so it’s possible for something to just happen but how do you respond – do you respond in despair?
A sudden loss of job, the loss of a loved one, these things will happen; you just went for a walk into a hospital casually for a normal routine check and you have a terrible result from the lab, what do you do? If you give up on your marriage easily rather than staying there in hope looking for a dilution, you are following Elimelech‘s example.
If you give up in the challenge that faces you in your business or your career, because there is problem in that business, in your career, whatever it is, you are being victimized, things are not working the way you expect them to work and you give up, and because you are saying to yourself that I have no hope here, I still believe in God, I have faith in God, but I don’t think there’s going to be a change, because once you continue to have hope, hope (as I said) is the oxygen that keeps us alive.
For as long as you see hope in that marriage, something will keep you there; for as long as you see hope in that career, something will keep you there; for as long as you see hope in that relationship, something will keep you there; for as long as you see hope in that business, you will keep trying but the moment you lose hope and you didn’t ask God, you just look for a way to just escape immediately, then you are following Elimelech‘s example. Praise the living Jesus!
If you give up hope on that child who is proving difficult, who is challenged, oh I’ve tried my best, I can’t kill myself, you give up hope, you are following Elimelech‘s example. Whatever you give up hope on, you give up hope upon your nation, today, most of us have given up hope and we are looking for all manners of escapes, we are following Elimelech‘s example.
We need to believe God, the only thing that we have is hope in this world, as Apostle Paul said, he said we have all men miserable. As believers, coupled with faith in Christ, we must never allow hope to die, when hope dies, a man will enter into any bus; when hope dies, a man will take any kind of action; when hope dies, everything else dies in a man.
If you have a terrifying health challenge, rather than turn to God no matter what the doctors have said… there’s a recent case of somebody very close to us, you could see her looking very healthy, she just went to the hospital and came out with the result that she had stage 4 cancer. She went to one of the doctors abroad, he said look, we can’t do anything for you, she said I have hope in my God. Today, she’s alive and kicking, several months, over a year after, hallelujah!
God never disappoints the hope of His children, just like a parent, no matter what happens, a little child always has hope that my father will show up, my mother will show up; he doesn’t know how they are going to do it but that they are going to do something. As long as you have hope, no matter how little it is, you remain a candidate of God’s miracles, but when you lose hope, you are far from the miracle of God, and as a matter of fact, it is in challenging times like these that God is looking for people that have hope.
When Jesus was approached by the Samarian woman, you know that normally Jews do not have relationship with them, she said oh, my daughter is sick, come and heal her. Jesus said I have nothing to do with you; He said well, you can’t give the meat of the child to the dog and the woman said, even dogs eat from the crumbs, and Jesus Christ said wow, not even in Israel did I find such faith. The woman not only showed faith, she showed hope, she refused to go, because when Jesus abused them, even though she had faith in Him, she could have walked on and say look, there’s no room there.
So faith must be coupled with hope; for an unbeliever who doesn’t trust God, he doesn’t have faith in God, his hope is only upon the things of this world which can disappear, and so when those things are removed, he goes with them; but for us as believers, knowing that we are only in this world and we are not of this world, and that in spite of what we see or what we have here, we still have the hope of a better tomorrow, nothing should make us hopeless, not what we see, not what we expect, not what is around us; if what is around us, the physical evidence of what we see is what we have hope in, they can be taken away from us anytime.
If your hope is in your properties, your accumulation, that’s why those whose strength lie in their accumulations, they are to be pitied. If your strength, your hope is oh, let me accumulate everything, what belongs to a whole city, a whole nation, you grabbed it alone out of greed, and you look at your property like the rich man in the Bible who looked at his full barn and said oh, I did this, okay so my future is secure, let me bring it down and build it again.
His hope was in his own ability, his hope was in the things he saw, the things he could do but if your hope is beyond all that, it doesn’t matter what goes on around you, it doesn’t matter what you experience in that marriage, it doesn’t matter what you are experiencing in your business, it doesn’t matter what you are experiencing in your career, unless God speaks to you, as long as you believe you were there originally not by your own leading but by the leading that God put you there and troubles come, the fact that God puts you does not mean that problems will not come.
Oh, but I prayed before I got into this marriage; oh, I prayed before I got this job, the fact that you prayed and God led you to it does not mean that challenges will not come, but He has promised you that He will enable you to prevail, just as we heard in that song, there is no situation that God cannot fix; there is no marriage that God cannot fix, there’s no business God cannot fix, there is nothing that is taken away from you that God cannot restore.
People can gang up against you, they can delay your promotion, they can do all manner of things and bypass you, it is just because your due season has not come, when your due season comes, no man can stop you. But if you run away and say oh, they are blocking me here, oh, they are delaying me here and you just take your own decision on your own and you move out, the result may not be palatable. Praise the living Jesus!
By going to Moab, Elimelech missed the chance of experiencing God’s miraculous turnaround. Apart from losing all that he took to Moab, because he acted out of instinct, because he allowed his flesh to lead him, because he allowed his difficulty that he saw to speak to him and to motivate him to action, he lost all that he took to the wrong place, number one; secondly, he missed the opportunity to experience God’s miracle, hallelujah!
Every time you run away from trouble and challenge, you miss the opportunity to have a testimony. The mountain that God wants to remove so you can have a testimony; other people are giving testimonies and you don’t know when your own will come, when will your testimony come, because the mountain God wants to remove to give you a testimony, you have managed to evade it; the Red Sea that God wants to open for you to pass so that you can have a testimony, you have managed to go another route. The Goliath God wants you to confront so that you can beat him down, overcome and have a testimony, you have run away from the Goliath.
Those who run away from challenges because of hopelessness never have testimonies, hallelujah! You need to stand and face your Goliath with the help of God, with God leading you. You need to stand and confront your Red Sea with God leading you.
And if you look at all these examples, each time the people that did this miracle didn’t do it by their own power, it was God that showed Moses because he knew that by his own power he could do nothing. They could have said oh look at this Red Sea, let’s run away to another place, because the Bible tells us there was actually another route they could have taken to the Promised Land but God knew why He led them that path.
God knows why He has allowed that challenge in your life, and when it’s the due season when He has done His miracle, He will make you a conqueror, hallelujah! In God’s kingdom if you look at the lives of all the men of God that we refer to in the scriptures, they all were promoted through challenges, they all rose to the position of prominence by overcoming challenges, they didn’t run away from troubles, they didn’t look for the easiest way out but they were led.
Moses was led to part the Red Sea; David was led to kill Goliath; Joseph was led in remaining righteous despite all the troubles he had, and because he saw the hand of God in the trouble he was going through and when eventually he met with his brothers, rather than revenging, he said no, I don’t have to revenge, you thought you were doing evil but I knew what God was doing, hallelujah!
Eventually a turnaround came to the land of Judah after many years that this man who ran away rather than face the situation with hope in God, with God leading him to survive, because not everybody ran away, other people stayed there in that same trouble.
After a few years, he had lost everything, Naomi now came back; now look at Naomi, the wife, after she had lost her husband and her two sons and she heard that things were turning around in Israel, you know she could have said I can’t go back out of shame, because everything that she took to Moab she had lost; some of us would say I would rather die than go back in shame, people will laugh at me, all manner of things.
Look, no matter how far you travel in a wrong vehicle, unless you disembark and turn round, you won’t get to your destination. Many of us are traveling in vehicles today that are wrong and we need to get out of. So she said look, I will rather face the shame than continuing here in this suffering; I hear that things have changed in my land, so she responded by discarding shame and then she went back.
Her husband missed that testimony, when she went back, things became better, eventually, a woman who had no more children, no more grandchildren, at the end of the day, when she went back, because God was actually doing something in that land in spite of that famine, God turned that land that was in famine (that was the land of Israel) into a land that became prosperous.
And when they got back, if you read the rest of the story, Ruth, who went with her met with a kinsman called Boaz and then had a child called Obed. Obed became the father of Jesse, the father of David, and then Ruth became an ancestor to our Lord Jesus Christ, and Naomi who had lost everything when she went to Moab was fully restored and also became a great-great-grandmother of our Lord Jesus Christ.
You can see how God can turn things around depending on how you respond to difficulties, you must always respond with hope alive, when we lose hope we lose everything.
So what can we do when we face difficulties?
- Let us surrender to God in that difficult situation in your marriage, in your
career, in your health, in your business, in your finances, even in the economy situation in the country today, even with all the policies that government is bringing out every day, it looks like the more policies that are being brought out, the worst the problems are. That shows you that is when God is in control that He can fix it, and God will fix our nation in the mighty name of Jesus.
Surrender your life, first and foremost, because it’s about relationship, and times like this when there are problems in the nation, God picks His own; He picked Isaac and transformed his life in famine; when there was famine also in Zarephath, God located the widow of Zarephath.
In times of troubles and challenges, God makes poster boys and girls of His own children, but it depends on the faith that you show and the hope that you have. If you have no hope, that is the greatest act of vote of no confidence in God, because you are saying that you don’t expect anything from God. Even when your faith is dwindling, God can help you with your faith, You can help my unbelief, but when you say I’ve lost hope, there’s nothing to fuel your faith, hope is what fuels faith, and without faith, God can hardly act. Faith is what moves the hand of God but hope is the mother of faith.
What am I saying? No matter how tough the situation is, hand it over to God and have hope, you don’t know how it’s going to happen, it is God who is the source of hope, knowing that in spite of everything, you can imagine like a child who is in trouble and then maybe some people want to take him and he says don’t worry, my daddy will come, and then the father knows that my son is out there and then people will say we saw your son, he said we should leave him that his daddy will come. Even if there’s trouble, you think the man will stay at home? He will go out and take him because he’s heard that his son is saying you people can go, my daddy will come and pick me.
When we keep up hope alive in God no matter what we see, God will go out of His way to rescue us. No matter how far deep you have gone in trouble today, with your hope restored, God will lift you out of that miry clay in the name of the Lord Jesus.
That was why, when the three Hebrew boys – Shedrach, Meschach and Abednego were going into the fiery furnace of fire, it wasn’t just faith, it was also hope. They had faith in God and then they said you can throw us in, our God will help us out and if not…but they had expectation. The Bible says in Proverbs that the expectations of the righteous shall never be cut off; expectation means hope, as long as you have hope in God no matter how tiny that hope is, it will not be cut off because the Bible says that God never forsakes His own, He never forsakes the righteous.
No matter what you go through, even in the thick of sickness, no matter the result you receive, have hope, expect that God will do something. In your marital travail, have hope; in your business, have hope, and God will not disappoint your hope in the name of Jesus.
- So no matter the gravity of the situation, make sure you receive the leading
of God before you take a step. If God will actually ask you to leave or to have a change to have this solution, of course no problem, when God is the One behind you, He will take care of you.
So apart from giving your hope alive and having a relationship and that’s why you are here this morning you haven’t given your life to Jesus, that’s your first solution, your first pathway out of trouble; after that, ensure that before you take a step in that your difficulty, don’t just copy other people, don’t do what others are doing, don’t listen to all manner of advise, listen to God first, do what God asks you to do which was what Isaac did, which was made a difference between him and Elimelech, God will honor your faith in the name of Jesus.
- Finally, never give up hope. The Bible says in Ecclesiastes 9:4 (as we said
before) that a living dog, you know how weak a dog is compared to a lion, how powerless it is but it says as long as there is life and there is hope, God will do something, hallelujah!
Let’s rise to our feet this morning; the greatest hope that we have as believers, our greatest blessing as believers apart from salvation is that we have the hope that is beyond this world, all the things that we are going through now are temporary and they will end one day, hallelujah!
No matter the challenges, no matter the trouble, everybody will one day, whether rich or poor leave everything here, and those whose hope is only in this world will have been losers, but as believers in Christ, in spite of what we go through, we have an eternal hope of heaven, hallelujah!
So our journey here is temporary, our challenges are temporary, our losses are temporary, but for those who don’t have hope in God, whose hope is only in this world, their loss is permanent, but I pray this morning that your loss will not be permanent, as a matter of fact, your loss shall be restored into profit in the name of Jesus.
Let’s bow our heads for a minute and as you bow your heads I want you to talk to God, no matter what you are going through, just talk to God, Father help me this morning, help my faith help my hope, I surrender everything to You Lord, Father help me this morning.
[Altar call]
Commit that challenge that is tasking your faith and hope into the hands of God, say Lord help me, I cannot do it alone, my hope is ebbing out, Lord help me, strengthen me, never let hope go.
Beloved, the man is as good as dead in whom hope is lost; the man/woman is as good as dead in whom hope is no more. It doesn’t matter how long you have waited, don’t give up hope, when you give up hope, you forsake the opportunity for a testimony for a miracle.
The man is as good as dead in whom hope is lost; no matter how small that hope is, is what draws the attention of God to you, God wants to see your hope this morning, (raise up your right hand) say Father, I raise my hand to You this morning signifying my hope in You, Father please, let my hope not be disappointed in the name of Jesus.
Lord I raise my hand to signify my hope in spite of my troubles in my health, in my marriage, in my career, in my business, this is the hand of hope saying You can do it, I know You will do it, Father honor my hope this morning, honor my hope oh God, honor my expectation according to Your word, You said my hope will never be cut off, honor my hope of God, thank You precious Father, in Jesus name we prayed.
Heavenly Father we thank You, You are the source of our hope, that’s why no matter what we face here we will still stand, looking only unto You the Author and Finisher of our faith, because men may fail us, government may fail us, family may fail us but You will never fail us, thank You Father for being the Father of our hope, King of glory we worship You, we honor You, we adore You, in Jesus mighty name we prayed.
