Hope for the Helpless

"Hope for the Helpless"

"But You have seen, for You observe trouble and grief, to repay it by Your hand. The helpless commits himself to You; You are the helper of the fatherless." (Psalm 10:14)

Have you ever felt helpless? Perhaps you've experienced the helplessness that comes after giving in to temptation. Or, maybe you've known helplessness in just trying to live consistently for Jesus. All of us have gone through those times when helplessness and hopelessness pervade our souls.

The psalmist knew those same kinds of feelings. He understood that those who love God will experience times of helplessness that come from trouble and grief. He also knew that God takes notice of those times.
That knowledge puts hope in our hearts.

Too many of us who fight for freedom fail to anticipate the hard times.
We think all the hard times happened prior to coming to Christ. It only makes sense to us that coming to Christ should make everything better.
That kind of thinking sets us up for failure.

Reality sets in pretty quickly. While the salvation "event" brings hope and assurance, salvation as "the journey" gets difficult and complicated. When we hit the sharp curves and the pot holes, we wonder what happened to the joy and peace we knew when we first came to faith. We discover the "trouble and grief" of which the psalmist wrote. With the "trouble and grief" comes the sense of helplessness.

This verse from Psalm 10 isn't about the helplessness, though. Rather, it's about our gracious God who knows about trouble, grief and helplessness. He notices! He helps! Everything we need to combat the helplessness that invades our souls is found in God and His grace.

Freedom Fighters hear these words and respond like the helpless of the psalmist day responded. We commit ourselves to God. Doing that assures us of His help when trouble, grief and helplessness assault us. All of us who love freedom in Christ need to understand the realities of walking with Jesus. Trouble grief and helplessness will come. How we respond determines the level of freedom we'll know during those times.

"But You have seen, for You observe trouble and grief, to repay it by Your hand. The helpless commits himself to You; You are the helper of the fatherless." (Psalm 10:14) - Pastor John Strain is Senior Pastor of First Baptist Toms River

God's WORD for YOU: 1 Kings 14-15; Luke 22: 31-46

Think About This: He does not need to transplant us into a different field, but right where we are, with just the circumstances that surround us, he makes his sun to shine and his dew to fall upon us, and transforms the very things that were before our greatest hindrances into the chiefest and most blessed means of our growth. No difficulties in your case can baffle him, no dwarfing of your growth in years that are past, no apparent dryness of your inward springs of life, no crookedness or deformity in any of your past development, can in the least mar the perfect work that he will accomplish, if you will only put yourselves absolutely into his hands and let him have his own way with you. -
Hannah Whitall Smith