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.
I don't like the label 'plus-size' -- I call it 'fiercely real.' On 'Top Model,' we call it fiercely real. I don't want to use the term 'plus-size,' because, to me, what the hell is that? It just doesn't have a positive connotation to it. I tend to not use it.
One of the things I'm so determined to preserve and restore is the fact that you can be the kid who was born in Dinsdale and find yourself working for the British government in the U.K., to being prime minister.
There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
He who endeavors to serve, to benefit, and improve the world, is like a swimmer, who struggles against a rapid current, in a river lashed into angry waves by the winds. Often they roar over his head, often they beat him back and baffle him. Most men yield to the stress of the current... Only here and there the stout, strong heart and vigorous arms struggle on toward ultimate success.
As flowerlets drooped and puckered in the night turn up to the returning sun and spread their petals wide on his new warmth and light-just so my wilted spirits rose again and such a heat of zeal surged through my veins that I was born anew.
Brothers and sisters of Egypt, you have given the world the most precious gift: the belief that ultimately right will prevail.
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