When Hope is All You Have

The first time I preached publicly was in a federal prison. Me and another man drove several hours at night out to the country to a heavily secured building where we were led through several security checkpoints to a concrete room with about 50 wooden chairs and a podium. Then the inmates were brought in, and once they were seated in those wooden chairs, the guard left and closed the door behind him.

As I stood at that podium and looked around at those convicts, at those murderers and rapists and thieves, I was scared to death. I had never preached before publicly, and my audience before me was absolutely terrifying me. I told them I had selected for my text that evening Psalm 40, and those that had a Bible, would they mind turning there now? And I did my best that night to tell those men that this was a message of hope.

That there is hope in God, that no matter how bad things look, there is still hope. I told them about David, who was the writer of the Psalm, that he was a man in a lot of trouble, for he had been thrown into a prison. I told them that back in Bible times, it was common to dig a deep hole in the ground for the purpose of throwing someone in there so they couldn't get out on their own, like Joseph's brothers did to him.

I told these men that this hole in the ground was called a bottleneck prison, because it was shaped like a Coke bottle, wide at the bottom and narrow at the top, and the floor of that prison was worse than the floor of this room we were in, because we were on a concrete floor, but David was sitting in mud, then that added to his discomfort and misery. I told them that when it would rain, the bottom of that prison became very slippery in the mud. David writes, he brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay.

I told the men that this prison had walls that were slanted toward one another, so you couldn't climb out on your own, and the fact that it was slippery and muddy in there made it impossible to escape on your own. So here is David, and he is in a desperate place, and all he can do is pray. He tells us, I waited patiently for the Lord, and he inclined unto me and heard my cry.

I told them that the Hebrew word for the word patiently meant hope, that it was a verb that literally meant hope, and its root word means to bind together like a rope or a piece of twine. It has the imagery of a man in prayer wringing his hands in desperation, like someone would twist a piece of rope in his hands. I told the men that perhaps David had somehow gotten some cloth or twine, and he had twisted it into a long piece, in the hope that someone from above ground would pass by and hear him cry, see his need, and grab hold of the end of that rope and pull him up and out.

That's the imagery here. Often caravans would pass by, and the only hope a person had who was stuck in a bottleneck prison was to yell and holler so loud that they would hear him. In Psalm 40, it talks about a horrible pit, and that horrible pit literally means a pit of noise.

So here is David in a terrible place, and he can't get out on his own. He is hungry. He is wet.

He is cold. He is lonely. He is desperate.

And I told those men that that's the kind of prayer God hears. He hears desperate prayer. When we get to the place in our life where everything has failed us, and we can't extricate ourselves out of our predicament, all we can do is pray and have hope in God.

That's all we can do when hope is all you have. So as I told them about David in that hole in the ground, in that bottleneck prison, I did my best that night to prove to those men that there is still hope in God. God is a God of hope, and that's what this Psalm of David was about, hope.

And as I finished my sermon, my worst fears were realized. For the whole time I was preaching to these men, I was scared to death that any moment they would jump up and rush me and hurt me because the prison guard had left us alone in there. I'd never been in contact with any prison convicts before.

I didn't know what they were going to do. I literally was trembling the whole time I was speaking to them. And as I finished my message, the men seated in the wooden chairs on the front row suddenly jumped up and rushed me.

Well, I froze like an ironing board and I closed my eyes. And soon I felt arms around me as one man after another was hugging me and loving on me and thanking me for coming to speak to them that night. And on the long drive home, I thought about it.

I thought about how men, all men, are imprisoned by sin one way or another. And life is hard, at times too hard. But because there is a God in heaven, there is hope.

And we can pray to that God in heaven and he will hear our prayers because he is a God of hope. His son Jesus is the blessed hope.