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    Hope for a Hopeless Day: Encouragement and Inspiration When You Need it Most
    Hope for a Hopeless Day: Encouragement and Inspiration When You Need it Most
    Hope for a Hopeless Day: Encouragement and Inspiration When You Need it Most
    Ebook101 pages1 hour

    Hope for a Hopeless Day: Encouragement and Inspiration When You Need it Most

    By Jack Hayford

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    About this ebook

    When no hope is left, to whom should we turn? Through the words of Jesus as He was dying on the cross, Jack Hayford unfolds the secret of triumphing over the ultimate season of suffering. Establishing a framework for dealing with hardship, Hope for a Hopeless Day challenges readers to examine the way they handle trials and encourages them to focus on the power that frees--the cross. Here are real-life stories of individuals who triumphed over their "hopeless days." Readers will be heartened by their stories of bravery and integrity--even while facing the anguish of marital infidelity or financial collapse. Although facing what seems like insurmountable odds, "we are called to hope just as surely as we are called to the Cross, for the Savior who speaks there is teaching us the way to live as surely as He is dying to give us life." Hope for a Hopeless Day does more than encourage you to endure; it inspires you to overcome.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBaker Publishing Group
    Release dateSep 4, 2007
    ISBN9781441268228
    Hope for a Hopeless Day: Encouragement and Inspiration When You Need it Most

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      Book preview

      Hope for a Hopeless Day - Jack Hayford

      PREFACE

      Hopeless days are commonplace in our world.

      That isn’t a cynical observation. It’s an honest one. And in many regards, the same kinds of things that lead to hopeless days for people like you and me were experienced and overcome on one very big day, a long time ago.

      This is a small book about that big day. Moreover, it is about an even larger wonder—the miracle power in the words spoken on that day by the One who turned the ultimate bad day into one that history now calls good. We still call it that today. Every year, when the calendar rolls around at springtime, we arrive there two days before Easter: It’s called Good Friday.

      There are many reasons Good Friday is called good, but they are not related to our usual human notions of nice, happy or comfortable. Rather, the good in that day is that it was the day God’s love gift of His Son, who had arrived in Bethlehem years before, surrendered to death on a Cross in Jerusalem.

      The good is in the Good Shepherd, laying His life down for His sheep.

      The good is also in the mystery revealed in the fact that, at the price of Jesus’ life-blood, forgiveness for my sin and yours is now a God-given provision offering eternal hope and promise.

      And though there are even more reasons, these provide us with a solid beginning of good reasons why we call that Friday good.

      But it was a very bad day. It was a day filled with many of the same things that make our days bad at times—bad things that sap the life out of living and wring hope out of our hearts.

      It was a day that involved being bitterly betrayed;

      a day of being lied about, and experiencing injustice.

      It was a day of being beaten brutally—abused hatefully, and of blood and tears;

      a day of being screamed at, laughed at, cursed and mocked by a mob of fools.

      It was a day of being rejected, of stark loneliness, of friends running away and of enemies dealing violence.

      It’s the bad day called Good Friday because Jesus did things that day that have resulted in an unshakable source of hope—hope that saves us, hope that will keep us, hope that will accompany us and hope that will carry us through.

      All of that is because Jesus conquered hopelessness by breaking the yoke of sin and death. Those two enemies are at the core of everything that diminishes or ruins life at any point. Meeting Jesus at His Cross, and then choosing to follow Him, is the way we arrive beyond our bad days to share in the results of His Good Friday.

      I am writing this book because I want to relay something that I learned from Jesus’ day of dismal darkness, thunder and earthquake—that God-forsaken day in which God Himself was killed as He submitted Himself to the hands of His own creatures. I learned how that day, beyond all others (and yet so much like a thousand of our own in certain ways), holds the keys that open the doorways to hope. And how that day in Jesus’ life laid the steppingstones for you and me to walk with Him beyond our hopelessness.

      Let me tell you about the morning of a day like that in my life. Let me relate the feeling of utter hopelessness that was being announced to me by circumstance and enunciated by a biting voice that sought to tear hope away. And let me share with you, dear reader, how that prompted me to call on the One Who is able to teach any of us the words that can turn a hopeless day into a transformed one.

      CHAPTER 1

      WHEN IT’S DARK EVERYWHERE AROUND

      It was pitch black in the bedroom as I opened my eyes on the morning of October 24, 2003. The digital clock on my bedside table registered precisely five o’clock, a fact confirmed by the chimes I heard from the grandfather clock down the hall in our living room. It had now been 33 hours since Scott had collapsed. It happened instantly—his skull flooded internally with blood as a congenital aneurysm burst and the hemorrhage began to crush his brain stem toward lifelessness. By most evidences he was gone from that moment, though doctors worked valiantly on his behalf, and our church prayed passionately for their pastor.

      Scott Bauer, Anna’s and my son-in-law, had married our daughter Rebecca over 25 years earlier and had assumed my role as pastor of The Church On The Way, succeeding me after my 30 years as senior pastor there. This decision had not been choreographed by us—neither Scott nor I had ever discussed his following me as pastor, even though his 11 years as my associate would have seemed to suggest it. But our church, while led by the pastor, is governed by godly eldership. Few can imagine my joy when they asked Scott to serve them as God called me away to found The King’s Seminary—a new center for training pastoral leaders for the twenty-first century. The church had continued to thrive under the leadership of Scott Bauer—a highly gifted, servant-hearted and Spirit-anointed shepherd of souls. That had suddenly changed 33 hours earlier.

      And now, that morning of October 24, 2003—exactly four years to the day of his being installed as pastor—at just 49 years of age, the only things keeping Scott’s heart functioning were devices scheduled to be unplugged at two o’clock that afternoon. Every vestige of sustainable life was gone. Scott, the man who was my son according to the common faith in Christ, the husband of our oldest child and the father of three of our grandchildren—Scott, the pastor upon whom I, along with the elders of our church, earlier had laid hands as he became senior pastor—was gone! The final gesture indicating closure remained until that afternoon, when his parents would arrive from Texas; but in fact, Scott had been declared brain-dead within hours of his collapse.

      That had happened Wednesday night. Scott had stepped forward to dismiss the mid-week service, which earlier had been graced by a guest speaker, and then paused for a moment—seemingly bewildered after he had asked the congregation to stand for the benediction. He turned to Dr. Jack Hamilton, one of our pastoral team, and said, Jack, come and dismiss the service. Then he stepped

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