Session 5

Hope When All Seems Lost

From Overcoming Darkness: Seeing Easter in a New Light

The Big Idea: Hope is about focusing not on what we can see, but on what God will do.

Imagine what it was like to watch God die.

Jesus hung on a cross in the final moments before His death. Most of His friends were nowhere to be seen. Only a few stayed nearby as all of their hopes and expectations died with Jesus.

Imagine the questions running through their minds:

How are we supposed to go on living when Jesus died? Why does anything He said matter if He was only human like us? If He couldn’t save Himself, why would we expect Him to save us?

In our greatest moments of darkness, we all respond differently. Some people ignore God. Some mock Him. Some give up because there’s nothing left to hold on to.

We feel like God abandoned our marriage or our children, or He never answers our prayers like we want Him to. We’re blindsided by the heaviness of depression, anxiety, or the death of someone we love.

It feels impossible to believe in God when your life is surrounded by darkness.

The darkness doesn’t mean God’s abandoned us; we just can’t see what He’s doing.

The darkness doesn’t mean God’s abandoned us; we just can’t see what He’s doing.

Jesus is always doing something far bigger than we can see at the moment.

Hope is about focusing not on what we can see, but on what God will do.

In that moment of crisis, when God seems absent and our plans fall apart, that’s the moment we need to hold on the tightest. Because like walking out of a movie theater into a sunny day, the light is so much brighter after the dark.

Reflect:

• What is one part of your life in which you feel like God has abandoned you?
• What is one way He might be working behind the scenes to do something better than you expect?

Above right: Golgotha, which means "place of the skull," is where Jesus was crucified. 

Below: a hill outside of Jerusalem