The story of Christian reformation, revival, and renaissance underscores that the darkest hour is often just before the dawn, so we should always be people of hope and prayer, not gloom and defeatism. God the Holy Spirit can turn the situation around in five minutes.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes maintaining hope and faith, especially during challenging times, as positive change can occur rapidly.
Os Guinness highlights the transformative power of hope and prayer amidst despair, illustrating that even in our darkest moments, renewal and change are possible. He suggests that just before a breakthrough, negativity can prevail, but with faith and the influence of the Holy Spirit, circumstances can shift remarkably and swiftly.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming life's challenges.
By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching committment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful, but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine outselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant
In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.
We betray our modern arrogance and forget the place of mystery in God's dealing with us.
The question the doubter does not ask is whether faith was really useless or simply not used. What would you think of a boy who gave up learning to ride a bicycle, complaining that he hurt himself because his bicycle stopped moving so he had no choice but to fall off? If he wanted to sit comfortably while remaining stationary, he should not have chosen a bicycle but a chair. Similarly faith must be put to use, or it will become useless.
Either we conform our desires to the truth or we conform the truth to our desires.
At the supreme moment of his dying Jesus so identified himself with men and the depths of their predicament and agony that no man can now sink so low that God has not gone lower.
A man who doesn't dream is like a man who doesn't sweat. He stores up a lot of poison.
God deliver me from the dread asbestos of “other things.” Saturate me with the oil of the Spirit that I may be aflame.
I try to get that across in the work, to try to, if I'm lucky, to make this world a little bit better for all of us before I check out. And that's if I'm lucky, I don't always get to have that privilege but I try always.
I can't tell you how much I appreciate these young [Israeli] designers. There's too much strife in the world. If we become united in our creativity, not only in what we wear, but what we do, we will change the world. It's truly an honor to be around such inspiration.
It was not enough to come and listen to a great sermon or message every Sunday morning and be confined to those four walls and those four corners. You had to get out and do something.
We've survived by believing our life is going to get better.
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