Hope For Today

I found myself thinking about hope quite a bit lately. 

Hit with some rough times, I found the message of hope to be one I needed to be reminded of. 

Discouragement unchecked can turn to depression and anger can turn to bitterness.  I have struggled with both discouragement and anger recently and realized I needed to remind myself of the hope we have in Jesus Christ.

I went looking through the Scriptures and found numerous verses that spoke about the hope that the Old Testament men and women of God had.  Their hope was in the prophesied birth of the Messiah.  We, as His children, now have the hope of Christ's return as predicted in the New Testament.

However, as great as those words are, they did not give me hope for today.  For right now.  I dug a little more until I came across a few verses that I believe offers hope for the here and now.  The beauty of this passage is that it gives us hope for the past, present and the future!

Here it is:

Romans 8:35-39, "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

NOTHING CAN SEPARATE US FROM THE LOVE OF CHRIST!

There is my hope. 

No matter how bad I have blown it in the past, no matter what I am going through today and no matter what I will face tomorrow...I am still loved.

Cared For.

Forgiven.

Loved.