Isaiah 30:29: “You shall have a song / As in the night when a holy festival is kept, / And gladness of heart as when one goes with a flute, / To come into the mountain of the LORD, / To the Mighty One of Israel.”

August 24th, 2024 by Pastor Ed in devotional

The “night” here is a picture of the believer’s “darkest” hour or the most difficult times in their life. The antidote to dark, difficult times, when our dreams seem to fade, is to look to God as the source of our hope. Hope is a gift from God that gives us something to hang on to. Dark nights of the soul can be lifted by a clear view of God’s personal, intimate, and individually fitted plan for our life. When we look at Psalm 139, we see that David clearly says our days are planned from the womb. God made definite plans for us as He wove us together inside our mother.

When we say we have dreams, we mean we have hope. Hope is the anticipation of good things, an expectation that good things will come into our lives because we belong to God and He gives good gifts to His children. If we want useful hopes and dreams, then we should be imagining and dreaming of doing God’s will in our life, rather than our own. When our dreams for our life become self-centered, instead of God-centered, and others-centered, there is no eternal hope or vision. If we are only concerned about how others see us, instead of how God sees us, we are living for the here and now instead of eternity.

In 1982, Vice President George Bush Sr. represented the U.S. at the funeral of former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Bush was deeply moved by a silent protest carried out by Brezhnev’s widow. She stood motionless by the coffin until seconds before it was closed. Then, just as the soldiers touched the lid, Brezhnev’s wife performed an act of great courage and hope, a gesture that must surely rank as one of the most profound acts of civil disobedience ever committed. She reached down and made the sign of the cross on her husband’s chest. There in the citadel of secular, atheistic power, the wife of the man who had run it all, hoped that her husband was wrong. She hoped that there was another life, and that that life was best represented by Jesus who died on the cross, and that the same Jesus might yet have mercy on her husband.

“LORD, help us to live in Your faith, hope, and love this day, in Jesus’ name.”