Melissa Spoelstra - Dare to Hope: Living Intentionally in an Unstable World

Melissa has a wonderful way of making the book of Jeremiah come alive, not only in our heads but also in our hearts.

Marilyn Hontz

author of Shame Lifter and Listening for God

The message of HOPE right now is countercultural, and Gods people can be viral kingdom agents with this message. Melissa Spoelstra helps us understand how critical Jeremiahs words are for us. Her deeply personal and insightful treatment of these scriptures makes them more relevant than todays news.

Reggie McNeal

author of Kingdom Conspirators and Kingdom Come

LIVING
INTENTIONALLY
in an Unstable World

MELISSA SPOELSTRA

DARE TO HOPE

LIVING INTENTIONALLY IN AN UNSTABLE WORLD

Copyright 2019 Abingdon Press

All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been requested.

ISBN 978-1-5018-7965-4

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.

Those marked NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org/

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MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Sean.
Daring to hope alongside you has been a roller coaster, but my grandma was right. When she first met you, she said life with you would never be boring; and it has proved true. Thanks for loving me so well and showing me Jesus with skin on time after time. You are forever hopeful, and I love that about you!

Surrender

Reject Counterfeits

Listen

Check Your Heart

Take Personal Responsibility

Pursue Intimacy with God

When we look around at todays world, hope usually isnt the first word that comes to mind. In many ways we live in an age of uncertainty. If we allow our thoughts to linger on things such as the national debt, the condition of the environment, the increase in violence toward even our most innocent, and the looming moral bankruptcy of our culture, we can get pretty discouraged. The situation only compounds when we add our personal issues to these corporate ones. Life can be rough. When marriages fail, bank accounts run low, friendships end, or the everyday demands of a fast-paced life get us down, we sometimes feel the ground shaking beneath our feet.

Living in such an unstable world can give us a propensity to worry. Other choices of fear, doubt, and bitterness call us to select their posture when life gets overwhelming. Yet God offers us another choice. Through Him we can dare to hopenot in the government, our family, a job, or even the church. God calls us to surrender our wills to His and rest our hope in Him alone.

Sometimes I get moving through life at a breakneck pace and forget to be daring with hope. I command the calendar, devote time to work and ministry, juggle the kids schedules, do some laundry, take care of other chores and errands, make plans for dinner, check in with friends, and then get up tomorrow and start all over again. I need a caution light as Im racing through life to wake me up and say, Slow down and pay attention!

I got one of these wake-up calls one day while driving. Instead of a caution light, I got a caution bump. I had just dropped my girls off at a school activity and was on my way home. Earlier I had dumped out my purse on the passenger seat, frantically looking for something I needed at a moments notice.

Now I was stopped at a red light, and I leaned over to put things back in my purse. Suddenly I felt a huge jolt as my van bumped into the minivan in front of me. I slammed the brake down hard, backed up, and went to talk to the woman in front of me. Thankfully, there was no damage to either car, but as I finished the short drive home, I was a little shaken. How could my foot have let up on the brake without me even realizing it? I was so caught up in my task that I slowly let the car slide forward without even being aware of what I was doing.

I laughed with God as I thought about what He was showing me: I need to pay attention to really important things instead of letting a small distraction put me in danger of hurting myself and others. This is so true in my spiritual life too. The minutia of day-to-day life as well as the trials that so frequently present themselves put me in danger of missing the hope in Gods plans for me.

A similar wake-up call came in my life several years ago as I studied the Book of Jeremiah and discovered the words of the prophet echoing into my life and our culture with great relevance. This prophet found himself in a nation known for materialism, economic crisis, political globalization, and religious plurality. Sound familiar?

Much of the content in this book is drawn from the lessons God taught me then as I wrote the Bible study Jeremiah: Daring to Hope in an Unstable World, which continues to be going strong because hope is something we still desperately need in our world today. And there are no signs that is going to change! My prayer is that by sharing these insights in this new format, Gods message of hope will reach even more people. Each chapter ends with a Dare to Hope challenge, and there are Scripture memory verses and practical helps at the end of the book.

A number of years ago, Francis Schaeffer said it this way,

What, then should be our message in such a worldto the world, to the church, and to ourselves?

We do not have to guess what God would say about this because there was a period of history, biblical history, which greatly parallels our day. That is the day of Jeremiah. The book of Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations show how God looks at a culture which knew Him and deliberately turned away.

In the Book of Jeremiah, God calls out to His people, continually asking them to place their hope in Him instead of political alliances, material possessions, and people. Jeremiah gets his reputation as the weeping prophet honestly as he delivers weighty messages full of bad news and cautions for living. Yet if we are willing to look beneath the surface of Gods warnings to His heart of love behind them, we find this underlying message: