Real Hope: PrayerSample

Hopeless To Hope

Jonah was a man who ran and yet God never gave up on him. Jonah was on board a ship in a fierce storm and was thrown overboard. A large fish swallowed him and he lived inside the fish (or whale) for three days and three nights. And inside this fish, Jonah prayed. His despair became the stage for God’s miraculous power.

Look at the facts – he had denied the call of God, run from God, been discovered by God, been thrown overboard, been swallowed by a fish, and had survived. It looked pretty hopeless. Yet, it was at this late moment that Jonah began to pray, and the Lord commanded the fish to vomit up Jonah onto the shore – and it did.

The cure for hopelessness does not lie in the circumstances that surround you, but in you surrounding the circumstances with hope. The cure for hopelessness does not come from the problem but from the promise. With faith in God, anything is possible.

Jonah ran from the call of God straight into a crisis. How can anyone run from the omnipresent God? If the call of God is on your life, you will never be happy doing anything else. We learn the hard way that we can’t run away from the everlasting God. When we procrastinate with spiritual things, we often give in to the lie that it’s too late when we do eventually want to do right. No matter how great the distance between God and you seems, there is always a way to come back – even if we learn the hard way just as Jonah did.

written by CHRIS WITTS