Author Pam Hardy helps us hold onto reality and hope at the same time by answering the following questions: What are reasons people tend to lose hope? How is hope cultivated in a believer’s life? Should believer’s hope for things in this life, or is our hope only on eternal matters? If someone loses their balance in the area of hope, what are the symptoms they may see? If someone doesn’t have a firm grasp on reality, how might this negatively affect their life and decisions?
Welcome to the Smiling at the Future podcast. My name is Christi Rose and this is my pursuit to glean practical wisdom on femininity, homemaking, finances, relationships, and singleness from the God fearing men and women in my life. Hope you enjoy this journey with me as we learn to smile at the future.
Hey everyone, if you’ve ever waffled between trying to be realistic with the outlook on your life but also desiring to maintain a strong sense of hope and optimism, then you are not alone. In today’s episode, Pastor’s wife Pam Hardy, who also wrote a book on this topic, shows us that we can actually hold on to both reality and hope at the same time. If you want to win a free copy of Pam’s book, you can enter that giveaway on our Instagram page. Otherwise, you can purchase a copy on Amazon and the link for that will be in the show notes. So here is my conversation on maintaining our balance between hope and reality with Pam Hardy. Welcome to the show, Pam Hardy. I feel that I already know you a little after reading your book called Keeping Your Balance, Navigating Wisely Through the Challenges of life. But it is such fun to have a back and forth exchange with you over this book. And I would love for the listeners to get to know a little more about you as well. So would you give us some background on who you are, where God has you in life and ministry? And then also, what prompted you to write this book on balance?
Pam Hardy: Good morning, Christi. Thank you so much, I am so delighted to be with you today. I was born and raised in Houston, TX. I grew up there, I met my husband there and we lived there for about the 1st 15 years of our marriage. But during that time my husband felt the call to be a pastor and so we in 1990 we moved to Los Angeles for my husband to attend seminary at the Masters Seminary. We lived in California for about 16 years and during that time Carrie was a pastor on staff at Grace Community Church in Los Angeles. We raised our children there. We have 4 adult children and we really considered California home. But then in 2006 we but it was time to move on and so we moved to Winston Salem, NC for my husband to be the senior pastor at Twin City Bible Church. And so we have now been in North Carolina for the last 18 years, and we’re here, I guess, until the Lord moves us elsewhere.
My prompt to write this book came really from many years of teaching ladies, teaching Bible studies in churches, and I had developed many years ago and a lesson that was about balance. And I just saw not only in my own life, but in the lives of other ladies, that so many times we get into trouble when we get out of balance in certain areas of our lives. Something becomes perhaps too important and it takes up too much time. We invest too much in it. And many times, unfortunately, that leads us to to ignore or neglect something else that is really much more important. And you just see in many areas of life, this concept of balance, how important it is to be balanced and not to go to the extreme in certain things. And so as I was working on this lesson, I began to look for resources and books and things that other people had written about balance in the Christian life. And I was very surprised that I could find hardly anything. There were very few books written about it. And so years later, actually back in 2020, I was working on some different ideas and projects and I decided to take that lesson and I had titled it Keeping Your Balance and try to develop it into a book. And so in 2020, when we were not doing much and we were all stuck at home, I spent most of that year taking that lesson and transforming it, trying to to turn it into a book. I tell people that everyone else was wisely cleaning out their garages and their attics during 2020, but I wrote a book and you know, I still need to clean out my attic and garage. I have a lady gotten that done yet but that prompted it.
Christi Rose: Some of the areas that you cover in the book are how to stay balanced with the inner man versus the outer man, family versus ministry, self denial versus liberty, confrontation versus patience, temporal and eternal. And then the focus for today’s conversation, we’re really going to hone in on reality versus hope. And we’ll probably lean in a little bit tighter to the hope side of that equation. But but we need to understand how do we, how are we realistic in life, have a realistic outlook, but balancing that with hope and for the future, for, you know, obviously our hope is anchored in the Lord and an eternity, but even in this life, how does that look? So I would love to, with our first question here, understand what are the common areas or common reasons why people tend to lose hope.
Pam Hardy: Yes, You know, there I think are very understandable and very practical reasons in particular situations that we begin to lose hope. I think many believers start out so strong when they enter a trial. We are claiming the promises of Scripture. We’re embracing the assurance that this is for our good and it’s for God’s glory. We’re trusting God’s sovereignty. But sometimes trials and tribulations just stretch on and on, and they’re much longer than we envisioned them. And so I think the lack of resolution and just the passage of time gradually begins to wear us down, and we can get very discouraged. I don’t think we admit this sometimes, but I think deep down we think we can solve just about anything if we just study enough, pray enough, do the right things, make wise decisions, and counsel with enough people, you know, we think, OK, we’re going to figure this out one way or the other, we’re going to fix it. But as I have gotten older, I think I’ve just come to understand more and more that this is such a broken world. It’s a fallen world. And some relationships and situations are so complex, so multifaceted, that even when you know God is in control, sometimes there are simply no easy answers. And again, the trials may last a lot longer than we expected them to. And I think in that case, even the strongest believer can eventually get weary mentally, physically, emotionally, and we can begin to lose heart and lose hope.
And I think especially for the new or the immature believer, that discouragement can surface rather quickly because they haven’t had as much time to really be anchored in Christ and anchored in the Word and to have seen God’s faithfulness in their lives over a long time. And so I think, again, for the new believer may tend to get discouraged much more quickly. And also I do think the nature of the trial is very significant. I think very serious health trials that involve a lot of physical pain, a lot of suffering can again quickly begin to wear down even very strong and mature believers. Now there’s many different kinds of trials, many types of suffering. It can be relationships and financial stresses and our jobs, our living situations. There can be a lot of different situations, but I think in some of those cases we tend to hold on to hope a little bit longer because maybe we don’t really have much more control, but we feel like we do. We feel like we have more options that we can try. And so we’re a little more hopeful. But again, when you are experiencing physical pain and discomfort, and especially when it is severe and it’s completely out of your control, I think everything else can sometimes take a back seat to that. I mean, we, we are spiritual creatures, but we have bodies and those bodies can go through great suffering and we’re human beings and we sometimes react to that.
Also, there can be just other, maybe not sickness or illness, but just massive tragedies such as, I would say the unexpected death of a child or a husband or just anyone close to you. And there are definitely more severe trials than others as that we go through. So I think it also depends on the type of trials. And this is for for believers. But you know, when I think about unbelievers, sometimes I truly marvel that they have any hope at all, because again, this fallen sinful world has no answers. And those unbelievers who suffer, I mean, they can seek relief in any number of ways. I mean, they and you see it all around you. They try to escape their pain through drugs, alcohol, pleasure. You know, they can seek money, possession, success, recognition or just experiences. They can seek satisfaction. They can seek relief in things like education or again, just their jobs, their vocations. They looking for their answers. They may go to psychology, they will go to the latest fad. I always say they run to Oprah and Doctor Phil or anyone else that they think might have the answers to their unhappiness and their particular situation, but these will always be dead ends because they are ignoring their Creator, what we were created for, which is to love God and to enjoy Him forever. I love the scripture in First Corinthians 7 where it just says this world is passing away. I mean, we live in a passing away world and this world was never meant to fulfill us. And think of what Jesus told us. He said you will have tribulation in this world just like he did. And so the unregenerate man tries his best to find happiness and satisfaction and just all that would make them joyful, but they will never find it in this world. And so eventually they lose hope and again, tragically, some of the most extreme situations end with someone taking their own life, which is just tells us they have absolutely no hope and all they want is just to end their pain. There’s a a famous quote by Henry David Thoreau where he said that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. He was just saying most people live lives that are filled with unfulfilled desires and it leads to a sense of despair beneath the surface of their ordinary lives. And it’s like, what else can they do? I mean, if they don’t know the Lord and they’re desperate to find all these things, but they’re looking in the wrong place, then it really is hopeless. And so I think that’s true of countless unbelievers who do not know the Lord are the hope that we can only find in Him. And so I would say these are just some of the main reasons that people lose their hope.
Christi Rose: Yeah, I and that’s such a good motivator for believers to share the gospel with unbelievers and to recognize that they’re they’re on this desperate quest, this desperate search for for hope, for satisfaction, fulfillment, and they’ll never find it outside of Christ. We Christ is the only answer and and God has bent the universe to to not satisfy us. You know, it’s all of his good gifts will never bring what we are longing for. It’s only himself. And so we can lead them to the Savior, to the source of hope and joy. But I also, I thought it was really insightful how you talked about as believers, we can have this idea that we can fix just about any problem in our life or any challenge. And so when we can’t, we can’t figure out the solution. We can’t pray enough, do enough good to to try to resolve that. That can be discouraging, but what we can do is we can build and cultivate hope in our lives. So I would love for you to share how, how do we do this as believers? If someone is feeling just, if they’re losing heart, if they’re worn out, worn down, how can they build their hope back up?
Pam Hardy: Yes, I again, the bottom line is that hope comes from salvation, from knowing our Creator and knowing why we were created. Hope comes from knowing Jesus and understanding that he has paid the price for our sin and we are forgiven and justified because of his sacrifice. And what incredible hope lies simply in that, in knowing that we are forgiven. You know, the Bible tells us that God has written his law on the heart of every human being because we are all created in the image of God. And therefore every, every man possesses an innate sense of morality, A conscience that allows us to distinguish between right and wrong. And because we know right from wrong, when we act in a way that violates those standards, we are guilty before God. Guilt is a position. We think that guilt is only an emotion of feeling like we feel guilty, but actually guilt is a position before God. And when we sin, we are in that position. And so the only answer to our depravity and our guilt is repentance and confession and placing our trust in the salvation that is found only in Christ’s atonement for us on the cross. I mean, John said in John 14 that He is the way, the truth and the life and he is our only hope. So the the ultimate hope simply comes from knowing Christ. I love the verse in John chapter 6 when Jesus was speaking to his disciples and he many of them had left and so he turned to the 12 and he said, will you also go away? And I love what Peter says. He says, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. It’s like Peter understood there is no one else to go to. Jesus is the only way. He is the only true source of hope, and so we have to put our trust and our hope in someone who is bigger than ourselves. We can never find hope by looking inward or out of ourselves. So I would say, first of all, we find hope in simply knowing these biblical truths and believing them.
And then we can definitely continue to cultivate that hope in a number of different ways. And I would say first and foremost, that would be by the study of God’s Word. As we faithfully, diligently, persistently study the Bible, we will continually learn more about God and about his ways. We will grow in our understanding of His righteousness, His Holiness, His goodness, His mercy, His faithfulness, all the things that make him who He is. And as we ponder who He is and His character, how can we not have hope in in Romans 15:13? This is just a kind of watershed verse in the Bible on hope. And in Romans 15:13 the Bible calls him the God of hope. And that scripture says, Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace, and believing that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. So twice in that verse, he, he uses the word hope that we may know the God of hope and that we may abound in hope.
You know, I also love a verse in Proverbs, Proverbs 22, verses 17 through 19. And that is a passage that I probably have read just many, many times in my life. And you know how sometimes you’ll read a verse over and over and then all of a sudden the Lord just really. Opens your understanding of it and that this little patch passage was one that years ago I saw something I had never seen. And what it’s talking about in Proverbs 22, it says, listen, open your ears, hear the words of the wise and apply your heart to my knowledge. And what is just basically saying is study the Bible, study the words of God. And then after that it says apply your heart to knowledge so that those two little words. So that just jumped out at me. And what it says is so that your trust may be in the Lord and I don’t know. It was just again, one of those things that I went, wow, OK, that passage tells me why we studied the Bible. Why did we study the Bible? Not just to accumulate Bible knowledge, not just to be try and be smarter. The reason we study the Bible is so that we will trust God more because as we study, we will learn more about His character and we can’t help but trust Him more. So first, first of all, we have to study God’s word. God’s word is it pierces deep. It’s a sword that that pierces deep in US. It’s supernatural. It is living is the only book that’s ever been said to be alive, and it changes us. I mean, it’s literally, it’s something that the Lord uses to change our thinking, change our hearts, and it has inherent power. And so that’s why we should study God’s Word faithfully and diligently.
Second, I would say we need to also intentionally listen to good teaching, good preaching that increases again our knowledge of God. We read good books that talk about God’s character and also give testimony to his work in the lives of his children. I love to read biographies. I think it’s very important that we read biographies of Christians through the centuries who have found God to be sufficient. They have found him to be trustworthy. They have found him to be enough in the most difficult of circumstances. I think just very encouraging to us when we see how he has been faithful in the lives of other people, because that reminds us that he will also be faithful to us.
So we study God’s Word first. I think we need to make sure we’re reading good books, we’re listening to solid teaching and preaching. And lastly, I would encourage people to take time to look back on their lives and to ponder God’s sovereign goodness, His mercy to us personally as we look back to events in our lives and we can see how God protected us, how He encouraged us, and just how He was moving. You know, we see that all through the Old Testament that the children of Israel were constantly being encouraged to remember, to look back and to remember what God had done for them. So many of the things that were commanded to the children of Israel, the feast, the sacrifices, all those type of things were for the purpose of remembering what God had done for them. And so I think we can learn from that, that we should also continually look back on our lives and recognize the countless ways that the Lord has cared for us and protected us in the past. And the longer we live, this is the joy of getting older, the more opportunities we will have to understand why we can trust God because we can see it. There’s a sweet passage in Psalm 92 where it talks about older Saints. And that’s that little passage where it says they shall still bear fruit in old age. They shall be fresh and fluorescing, flourishing. To declare that the Lord is upright. He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him. And this just tells me that probably one of the most important ministries of older Saints is to encourage others by at the end of their, you know, as they’re approaching the end of their lives, they can confidently declare to younger Saints that God is their rock and their hope is in him because he has never failed them. So that’s just a little. I am one of those older Saints now. So I want encourage people with that, that one of the best things we can do is to encourage younger people that the Lord is faithful and he will take care of them and he is working in their lives. So. So these are just, I think, a few of the main ways that we can cultivate hope in our lives.
Christi Rose: Yes, I love that that you have embraced that ministry of encouragement and now that that you have lived a life and seen God’s faithfulness through all the varied trials and circumstances and and so you can you can pour that encouragement into the younger believers that God’s got you. He he won’t fail you. He hasn’t failed me just makes me think of Hebrews 11 to just the the Saints of that have seen God’s faithfulness even in Bible times and in our present, present day. But I I love how you’re saying study God’s word. And I think what’s so valuable too is when we’re we’re losing hope. Our minds can be so temporal, so focused on our circumstances, the trials, the here and now that we lose sight of the spiritual world. And so when we’re studying who God is and his purposes in our trials, that helps to, to balance us and to realize there’s more going on here than just what I can see. And one other thing that you bring out in your book that can help cultivate hope in our hearts is just the recognition that God hears our prayers. I love that. I love meditating on the fact that God is a listener. He’s listening to us, He’s hearing us, our, our prayers are reaching his ears. He’s, he’s intimately acquainted with us and the details of our lives. And so that that can help us to rest that he knows he’s involved and he’s listening to us.
But Speaking of the eternal realities of, you know, where our hope is anchored, Is it still OK for us to have hope in things of this life, you know, marriage, family, whatever it is that you’re desiring and hopeful and praying for is can we still put our hope in those types of temporal blessings?
Pam Hardy: Yes, you know, I think this in the book may be one of the most practical areas that I try to address because this involves our daily life. This involves what we’re doing everyday about all those temporal things that we have to make decisions on that we have to deal with. And, and so it’s a really important question about what is the balance between the basically the temporal and the eternal, the things that we have to deal with in this world. And yet still setting our sight, setting our sights on eternal things and keeping them a priority. You know, we have to understand, I mean, we, we are human beings, we are created in God’s image. We are spiritual beings and yet we live in these physical bodies. And because of that, He has created not only with the capacity to know Him spiritually, but also with the capacity for human desires and emotions and hopes and dreams. Now again, I want to make this clear. Our ultimate hope, as we’ve talked about, of course, is in eternal things. It is in knowing Christ. It is in the promise of heaven and of spending eternity with God. That is the ultimate hope. But in Genesis chapter 1, it also tells us that God saw the world that He had created and said it was good. Yes, it is a fallen, sinful world, but God has still given us the ability to appreciate, to experience, and to enjoy this earthly life. First Timothy 6 says that God richly provides us with everything to enjoy. So I believe that it is perfectly acceptable and normal for us as believers to have desires, goals, aspirations in this life. We need to be good stewards. We need to use the abilities and the talents that God has granted to us. And in fact, it really honors God when we appreciate those gifts that he has graciously granted to us.
So my point is that I think we need to try to live our lives to the full, enjoying God and enjoying the good things that He’s given us. It’s really a way to thank Him. I mean, if we gave a present to someone that we love, we want them to enjoy it and use it. It would probably hurt us if they took the gift and put it away in a closet and never used it, never looked at it. When you give someone a gift, you don’t want them to ignore it. And so I think it’s the same with the gifts that God has given us this year at our church. Our ladies have been going through the book of Ecclesiastes and it’s been a really thought provoking, kind of eye opening study. And one of the things that has amazed me during that study is how much Solomon counsels the reader to enjoy what God has given us. And again, it can be way out of balance. You can enjoy it too much. But you know, he talks about some almost every area of life that you can think of. And it just has made me ponder all the things that God has given us here. He has given us our family, our friends, our just the people, all the category of relationships. He knew that we needed other people. And so he has provided that. He has given us just beauty. He’s he didn’t have to make this world so beautiful. He’s given us art, he’s given us music and he didn’t have to do all that. But so we should not ignore those things. I know in in this book on Ecclesiastes, it’s it’s been almost funny. The author said something about when you study the Gospels and you think about all the times Jesus was either going to a banquet or coming from a banquet, it’s like he was always eating fellowshipping, enjoy food and drink and a meal with someone. And I just thought that was a interesting observation. And he kept going. He said, where did he do his first miracle? It was at a wedding celebration. OK, It was a feast to celebrate a, a wedding. And he said, you just see again, Jesus always eating with people, fellowshipping with people. I mean, he was accused of what, being a glutton and a drunkard just because apparently he was always at banquets, you know, fellowshipping and interacting with people. And this author of the Ecclesiastes book, he said, and what do you see at the end of Revelation when all the end times have happened? How does it all end up with the marriage supper of the Lamb? He said we’re going to have another celebration, another banquet as I just thought all that was really interesting and it just made me think of that we have really a responsibility not to make them too important, but at least to honor God by enjoying what he has given us here. And you know, at the end of Ecclesiastes, what is the conclusion? It’s to fear God to keep his command and keep his commandments and and just through the book, he’s urging us to enjoy the blessings of God.
No, on that side. That’s one side of it. But, and, and this is a huge but here, here’s the balance. We have to be on guard against allowing all these beautiful, enjoyable things to become too important in our lives. A desire to be married, a desire to have children, to have a roof over your head, to have a job that provides for your needs. But these are totally normal, acceptable, reasonable human desires. It is not wrong to desire those things and to work at having those things. But the danger, and here is the huge danger is that those desires can cross a line in our hearts and become what the Bible calls a lust. When we heard the word lust, we always, you know, think, oh, that’s talking about sexual lust. No, in the Bible, as you study that word, it basically it literally means an over desire. It means an excessive desire. And so this is something that we feel like we have to have, that we have to have this or we cannot be happy, we cannot be content without it. And so this is something that we want so badly that we are actually willing to send arch and to disobey God in order to get it. It has become more important to us than God. And what is that with the definition of an idol? It has become an idol of the heart. And so this can be 1000 different things. It could be relationships, marriage, children, money, wealth, material possessions. It can be success, it can be achievements and recognition. Any of these things can cross that line in our hearts and become idols that we are literally worshipping more than we’re worshipping God. And so we have to guard our hearts. And I think that is a constant challenge for every human being on the planet is to make sure we don’t let those desires cross that line and never forget that again. None of those things will really bring lasting satisfaction. It is God, everything we need is found in him. And if God in his kindness allows us to realize some of our goals, that’s wonderful. And he does. He’s so kind, he’s so compassionate and he gives us many blessings. But we have to to understand it’s also fine if he doesn’t. And we need to understand that in those situations where we are not getting what we think we need, we can still be content because we have, we have him. And we need to understand that our ultimate joy and happiness is always found in God and God alone. You know, as I’m getting older and again, I’m always learning, We never, we never stop learning until we die. And I am learning that the Lord does not always give us what we want. He gives us what we need and He knows what we need. He is our Creator and He alone knows what we need. Sometimes we don’t know what we need. We think we do, but we don’t. And we can trust Him to always give us what we need and we need to be satisfied with that. So I would say here’s the balance between those desires and you know, we have the spiritual, which that’s always the more important. But even those temporal desires, we just have to keep them in, I guess, in check. We have to keep them under control. So it’s OK to enjoy life, appreciate God’s blessings, but we must be careful not to idolize those things. And again, just remember, our ultimate hope is always in God.
Christi Rose: Such practical, helpful things to keep in mind. And I, I love that you’re talking about Ecclesiastes here and, you know, just the powerful example of Solomon’s life and chasing after accumulating pleasure in all areas of his life. And then him just being able to say, you know what? It’s only in fearing God and keeping his commandments. And then, you know, having that first and then enjoying his good gifts that will bring true happiness and joy in life. Just curious, what if someone is losing their balance in the area of hope? Maybe they are too realistic with life or they’re too hopeful. How would we see those symptoms come up?
Pam Hardy: I think when someone begins to lose hope, I actually go through a very predictable pattern. Probably the initial symptoms would be a growing frustration, a growing discouragement with just their life circumstances again, for perhaps they’ve done all they think they can do they’ve. Pursued a number of different approaches to solve something, but they’re not seeing results. They’ve tried practical solutions, they’ve tried spiritual solutions, they have studied the word, they’ve searched for biblical direction, they pray, they’ve gotten counsel, but nothing has changed. And so at that point, I think a sense of discouragement begins to set in. And as time passes with no resolution, they may then become negative or pessimistic or cynical. And they began to think it just doesn’t really matter what they do because nothing is working. And so I think the next symptoms you will see after this in the progression would then be a growing sense of anger and anger over time if it’s just left unchecked, that will transition over to a sense of bitterness. Many years ago, I’ve never forgotten this. I heard Elizabeth Elliott do a question and answer, and she was answering a question and someone raised their hand and said, I have a friend who is very angry at God. And she said, you know, how, how can I help her deal with this? And Elizabeth Elliott said this and it was very wise. She said, you know what, your friend’s problem is not her anger. She said that’s that’s just a symptom. She said your friend’s problem is that she does not really believe that God loves her because if she believed that God loved her and she understood how much he loves her, she would never be angry at him. And again, I just always remembered because I thought that’s so true. When we get angry at God, we’re just, even if we don’t say it out loud, we’re saying he doesn’t really love me. He’s not doing what is best for me. So anger is very significant. And the anger frustration can become pessimism, can become anger. And I think the final steps after anger are depression, which I’ve also heard that said, that’s anger turned inward. And after depression, I think the final step is really despair. It just finally descends into despair, and that’s the step where someone has just lost hope. They just have no help.
And as I studied this, and I do talk about it in the book, I could not help but think of Lamentations chapter 3. And the first half of Lamentations 3 is a really gut wrenching portrait of Jeremiah’s despair. And so, you know, many people only know the second-half of Lamentations 3, which has some great verses in it. That’s where he says your mercies are new every morning. He says your faithfulness, you know, you are always faithful. But actually the first half of chapter 3 is very, very dark. Jeremiah says he is surrounded by bitterness and by woe. He says the Lord has made him dwell in dark places. He says the the Lord has blocked his way. And I’ve always thought it was so fascinating. He attributes everything in in that first part of the chapter to God. He says he did this and he did this and he did. He’s not just saying this happened. He understood that God was sovereign, and he understood that it was God ultimately that was allowing all this. He’s crying out for help, but he says he feels that God has shut out his prayers. And he concludes with, in one of the verses with the tragic declaration that he has forgotten happiness, says I’ve forgotten what it even means to be happy. And he says very clearly his strength and his hope from the Lord had perished. So I think you can read that first half of the chapter and absolutely say Jeremiah is in despair. He’s kind of come to the end where he has no hope. So what? What would be the answer to this downward spiral? Well, again, the Word of God teaches us that the solution to this is absolutely a spiritual one. There is no hope until you go to the truth of God’s Word and the hope that we find there. I, I talk a lot in the book about the sovereignty of God, and that is because I believe the sovereignty of God is truly the game changer in the life of the believer. It changes everything when you can rest in the sovereignty of God. I mean to know that God is in control of absolutely everything. The the tiniest detail of my life. There is nothing that’s more comforting than that. That tells me that there are no accidents in the life of a believer. Every person in my life is only there because the Lord has allowed him or her to be there. Every situation that exists is only there because God has designed it for His glory and for our good. And even if we don’t understand it, and I think much of the time we don’t understand a lot of the things that are going on in our lives, we don’t understand why. But even when we don’t understand it, praise God, we know He is always, always, always working out His divine purposes in this world and in our lives personally. And when we remember that God is sovereign and we intentionally meditate on His wisdom and His great love for us, what it does is make us grateful for His blessings. And when we are grateful to God for what He is doing, then it renews our hope, it immediately rejuvenates our hope, and it protects us from that descent into bitterness and despair.
And thankfully in Lamentations we see that Jeremiah did intentionally choose to remember all of these truths about God. And so we come to the second-half of chapter 3 and you know, we see a marked change in Jeremiah’s perspective. And again in verse 23, we hear those beautiful words. The Lord’s loving kindness indeed never cease, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness. So it is clear that Jeremiah had turned his gaze back to God and he had regained His hope. And so we have to do the same thing. There’s just no other answer. We have to turn our gaze back to the Lord, focus on His sovereignty, focus on His great love for us, acknowledge His wisdom that He knows what is best and we have to learn to rest in that. And that is where we will find hope.
Christi Rose: Powerful, one of the quotes in your book that I loved, as you said, if hope were a building, the sovereignty of God would be the foundation. So understanding of sovereignty. But then you also are highlighting his love and which is so key and all of this. And if you’re doubting his care for you, remember the cross, go back to the cross. Christ died for you. It’s so to help us rise above our circumstances and to have hope. I mean, we see that in the life of Paul, like you said, we see that in Jeremiah. We see it in the Psalms with David. You know, just they may start out with their acknowledging the challenges of their situation, but then they end with who is God and and their hope is renewed and strengthened. You know, it’s another quote that you said in your book. And I I wrote so many of them down because they’re so solid. But you said we must understand that it is not outward circumstances that can drag us down, but our own reaction of despair to them when we fail to perceive the hidden hand of God in all events, his his sovereignty there. And in the book, you, you bring out all those little biographies of people who had every right to be discouraged and despairing because of their very challenging circumstances. You highlighted Elizabeth Elliott, you also highlighted Johnny Erickson, Tata. And and seeing how how effective they have been and how the Lord has used them despite the challenges they have endured, that spurs us on. You know, we we can be used by the Lord despite whatever circumstances or lot that we have. If we are submissive to the Lord in that looking to him as our hope and strength. So that encourages me whenever I’m tempted to think too much and dwell too much on my circumstances and and be discouraged by them. I look at those other examples. But if someone doesn’t have a firm grasp on reality, they’re not thinking critically, evaluating their situation realistically, how might that affect negatively affect their life and decisions?
Pam Hardy: When someone refuses to see a situation realistically, it can absolutely have a very negative effect on, especially on their decisions because they’re operating with a faulty, A faulty evaluation perhaps of a situation. They can. There’s many reasons for this. They can just be naive. Of course, they can be what I call foolishly optimistic. I think it’s great to be optimistic and look on the bright side, but you can almost take that to an extreme where it’s foolish. They can also, I think, refuse to deal with reality because it’s just too difficult. It’s too stressful, perhaps, to acknowledge a hard truth, and I understand that. But you still need to do it because no matter what the underlying cause might be, not being realistic will hamper your ability to respond wisely and appropriately to any particular set of circumstances. And you know, some decisions are very minor, very small, but other decisions of major things in life, I mean, that can have far reaching consequences. And that’s why it’s very important that we do our best to be realistic wisdom. If we’re going to be wise, obviously we are to pray for it. I mean, true wisdom comes from above. And so we need to pray the Lord will grant us wisdom. And that includes being able to assess a situation objectively. You need to gather information. And then our goal is to pursue some sort of constructive solution. You’re trying to solve a problem. But if the evaluation at the very first is not realistic, again, the information you gather will be incomplete, it will be faulty. And in that case, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to actually make the best decision or adequately address some existing problem because you’re not, you don’t have all the facts, you’re not seeing it correctly. And so based on whatever our perception of a situation may be, it’s very easy to overreact. It’s easy to under react. We can assume things that are not actually true and make decisions, you know, based on that. Or on the other hand, we may close our eyes and refuse to acknowledge things that actually are true. And it’s very important that we figure that into what we’re going to do that we can. We are not seeing the situation properly. We can come to hasty conclusions that are based on, again, insufficient information. And so refusing to deal with reality and to see something as it is, is not helpful, not helpful to anyone related to the situation and it it is not going to lead to a satisfactory solution.
So in these challenging situations in life, and we will have many of them, first of all, we must be prayerful. We must ask the Lord’s help in responding in a wise and biblical manner. And this actually takes us back also to just the importance of being in the Word. How can we respond in a biblical manner if we’re not in the Bible? We have to learn those things. We have to search the Scriptures for biblical principles that will help to guide us. And also, you know, a very helpful thing is to seek counsel from our pastors, from elders, from other believers that we trust and respect, someone that has walked with God, that has had a faithful life. We need to seek counsel and seek help from others. Proverbs 11 says in an abundance of counselors, there is safety. And so all of these things, seeing the situation realistically, making wise decisions, those are those are just essentials if we’re going to walk in a profitable way through our earthly journey through this pilgrimage here on earth. And obviously we, we always want to make the wisest decision we can, but sometimes we don’t. I mean, sometimes again, we do everything we know and we make a decision and we’re thinking it’s the right one. And sometimes it doesn’t turn out to be, or at least not in our thinking. And I just wanted to tell you something that I share with any time I teach a group of ladies, I always share with them because I think it gives great comfort when we make a decision in one of these. Benny situations and we look back on it and we think, you know, I did everything I could to come up with a wise decision, but I’m not sure it was maybe it wasn’t the right thing. But I always tell ladies, ask yourself in any situation in life, ask yourself these three questions. And the first question is this, could God have stopped it? And of course, the answer to that question is yes. As we’ve already talked about, the sovereignty of God tells us that yes, God is in control of everything and he could have stopped this particular situation that I’m dealing with. So that’s the question number one, could God have stopped it? And the answer is yes. The second question, and this is a very important one, is did God stop it? And the answer to that question is no, no, he didn’t stop it because I’m in the middle of it, I’m dealing with this. So obviously he didn’t stop it. And then the third question is, what is he teaching me? You could also say why, you know, he could have stopped it. He could. He can do anything he wants. He could have stopped my thinking. He could have stopped how I looked at the situation. He could have stopped what I did, what the decision I made, and yet he didn’t. He did not stop it, although he could have. So obviously he has a purpose. He’s doing something. He’s, you know, I’ve heard it said that in everything God does, he’s actually doing 1000 things and we can’t see most of them. We’re fortunate to see one or two of them. He’s always at work. And so he’s either teaching me something or he’s, he’s teaching someone else something. But he is always, we can rest in that. He’s always working out his purposes. So I asked myself the three questions several times a week, sometimes several times a day. All right. And that is for the last 20 or 30 years has been such a comfort to me when I make a decision and then I begin to second guess it. So who’s the three questions? Could God have stopped it? Yes. Did he stop it? No. Third question? Why not? What is He teaching me? And then it gives purpose to everything that’s always teaching us, and we can trust Him for that.
Christi Rose: Just makes me think of Elizabeth Elliott’s maxim in Acceptance Lieth peace, love those three questions. We will put those up on Instagram so the listeners can have those visually to think on and dwell on and to ask themselves in those important times. But. One of the things you said in your book is one of the crucial tasks of the Christian life is to learn how to hold on to reality and hope at the same time and to stay balanced in that. And I just loved this all their way of thinking about it. As we’re kind of walking that tightrope, we’re clinging to the the bar that we’re clinging to is God’s Word, and we’re looking straight ahead at Christ. And that, as a believer, is what’s going to keep us centered and balanced in the Christian life. Cling to God’s word, look to Christ and keep walking forward and he will direct your steps. But Pam, I loved this conversation. I don’t want this to end. I would love to continue chatting with you on this topic. You’ve been so helpful, so grounded in God’s word. And I’m just praying that this will be just a steady thing for the listeners, an anchor. They know that they’re this hope that we have in Christ is the anchor for our souls amidst all the waves of, of this life and all the challenges of this life, we can have hope and joy in the Lord. So just appreciate your time and your study on this topic and would love for the listeners to go and get your book. We’ll link that in the show notes so that they can get their own copy. And I will also do a giveaway on our Instagram page where one of the listeners can win a free copy of this book. But yes, thank you again and excited to hear how God is going to use this for His glory.
Pam Hardy: Thank you, Christi, It has been a joy to be with you and just to discuss all this. Thank you again so much.