Hope by Billy Graham

Excerpt from Hope for the Troubled Heart

 

“This is the generation that will pass through the fire.  It is the generation… ‘under the gun.’  This the tormented generation.  This is the generation destined to live in the midst of crisis, danger, and fear, and death.  We are a people under sentence of death, waiting for the date to be set.  We sense that something is  about to happen.  We know that things cannot go on as they are.  History has reached on impasse.  We are now on a collision course.  Something is about to give.”

 

I wrote this in 1965!

 

At that time few of us thought that the world could get much worse and survive.  I was wrong.  In many ways the world has gotten worse, and we have survived.  But we are a world in pain—a world that suffered collectively from the violence of nature and man, and a world that suffers individually from personal heartache. 

 

Because we have instant communication today, our planet has shrunk to the size of a computer screen or smaller.  Although husbands and wives, children and parents, have trouble communicating, we can watch a war as it is happening before our eyes.  A comfortable room can be turned into a foreign battlefield or a street riot with the push of a button.

 

In my travels over the decades, I have found that people are the same the world over.  However, in recent years I find that there is an increasing problem that I would sum up in the word “hopeless”.  It may be because we get news of troubled, problems, disasters, wars, etc, instantaneously in comparison to years ago when it might have taken weeks, months, or even years to hear of an event.  But there’s something else even more insidious.  People in the most affluent societies are feeling this sense of despair and hopelessness.

 

Perhaps the greatest psychological spiritual, and medical need that all people have is the need for hope.  Dr. McNair Wilson, the famous cardiologist, remarked in his autobiography, Doctor’s Progress, “hope is the medicine I use more than any other—hope can cure nearly anything.”

 

I remember years ago that Dr. Harold Wolff, professor medicine at Cornell University Medical College and associate professor of psychiatry said, “Hope, like faith and purpose is life, is medicinal.  This is not exactly a statement of belief, but a conclusion proved by a meticulously controlled scientific experiment.  “When suffering hits us personally, that is the common cry.  Why Me?  What the reason?

 

For man without faith in a personal God reactions to painful situations are as varied as pain itself.  Without God's guidance, our response to suffering is a futile attempt to find solutions to conditions that cannot be solved.  We are plummeting into a world where, in spite of wonder drugs and medical breakthroughs, suffering will become more intense.  For all suffering, we know is not physical.  Today, more than ever we need to know what to strength to live life to its fullest to have hope even in the midst of tragedy and loss.

 

Some see God as a harsh father, waiting to punish His children when they do something wrong.  Others perceive God as unable to handle the evil on earth, or indifferent to the suffering caused by it.  God’s love is unchangeable, He knows exactly what we are and loves us anyway.  In fact, He created us because He wanted other creatures in His Image upon whom He could pour out His love and who would love Him in return.  He also wanted that love to be voluntary, not forced, so He gave us freedom of choice, the ability to say yes or no in our relationship in Him.  God does not want mechanized love, the kind that says we must love God because it

S what our parents demand or our church preaches.  Only voluntary love satisfies the Heart of God.

 

On the human level, we frequently love the one who loves us.  In the spiritual realm, people do not grasp the overwhelming love of a holy God, but we can understand God’s love by getting to know Him through Jesus Christ.  No one can grasp the love of the God of the universe without knowing His Son.