When Jesus Returns // Merchants of Hope, Part 1

<p>Most of us are so busy getting through the day, that we’ve forgotten completely that Jesus is coming back. In fact the reality of today, and the promise of Christ’s imminent return almost seem … incompatible.</p> <h4 class="p1"><span style="color: #ff9900;"><strong>Is Life Tearing You Apart?</strong></span></h4> <p class="p1">Great to be starting a new series on a subject that pretty much all of us are really interested in: Hope. I don’t know how much you’ve thought about this, but having hope for the future is fundamental to our well-being today. Think about it. If you don’t have any hope to look forward to, if you have no hope for the future, then you and your life are what we call hopeless and hopelessness, if you’ve ever been there, is the place where people start thinking about taking their own lives because they’ve got nothing left to live for. The future looks so bleak that we come to the conclusion: ‘Well, what’s the point?’</p> <p class="p1">I once read a book about a holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, and he makes the point so powerfully when he recalls an experience from a concentration camp. Have a listen to what he writes:</p> <p class="p1" style="padding-left: 40px;"><em>The prisoner who had lost faith in the future, his future, was doomed. With the loss of belief in his future, he also lost his spiritual hold. He let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually, this happened quite suddenly in the form of a crisis – the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate. We all feared this moment not for ourselves, which would have been pointless, but for our friends. It usually began with a prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash and to go out on the parade ground. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect: He just lay there hardly moving. If the crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up, and there he remained lying in his own excrement, and no