One Last Hope

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When God leads us to the place of insufficiency, we are more than compelled to cry out to Him. It is the cry of desperation. We have no hope but Him, and we know it. In fact, we are deeply and excruciatingly aware of it.

“We had hoped to have our stressful situation resolved by now” or “We are at the end of our rope” we cry. “Only God can fix things now.” Or, as I have often heard it said: “All we can do now is pray.”

Over and over again, the Bible stresses the importance of faith. Quite the strange commodity, I think. I often wonder, why didn’t God choose works as the currency of His Kingdom? Why didn’t He choose our flawless understanding as His condition for acting on our behalf? Something as simple as faith? I just don’t understand.

Luke 18:27
“What is impossible with men is possible with God.” – NIV

God chooses prayer as our ultimate act because it is the only thing that sets Him up to show His glory. If God’s intervention was based on our own works, who would be glorified then? If God’s action was dependent on our complete understanding, would He be the one shining in the aftermath? Or, would all of God’s blessings become little more than offsprings of our own awesomeness?

Our place of one last hope was the place where God would have had us all along. It’s kind of ironic that what we should have been saying from the start was: “All we can do now is pray.” He stands ready to be the strength in our weakness, the wealth in our poverty, the health in our sickness and the deliverance in our captivity.

Imagine if we had more Christians for whom prayer was a first resort and not the last.