Sunday Morning: Hope, Peace & Purpose

My Bible is showing age.

The cover is peeling away, the edges are worn, there are notes everywhere, and I’m fairly certain most people would have replaced it by now.

I can’t.

There are too many years in those pages. Too many notes written during different seasons of my life. Too many verses underlined because, at that particular moment, I needed those words.

So there I sat this Sunday morning with my worn-out Bible open and little hands busy beside me, listening to two messages that seemed to fit together in a way I needed to hear.

Faith

Brother Matt preached from Galatians 3, and verse 7 caught my attention:

“Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham.”

— Galatians 3:7

Faith.

Something so simple to say and sometimes much harder to live.

There are days when we feel unworthy. Days when we look at ourselves and see every place we’ve fallen short.

But our relationship with God isn’t built on our ability to get everything right.

God loves us.

We are called to believe Him, trust Him and faithfully follow His Word.

And as I listened, I couldn’t help but look over at the little boy sitting beside me.

He wasn’t taking sermon notes.

He was busy with little-boy things, trying to make it through church.

But he was there.

And I realized again that while I’m listening and learning, he’s watching and learning too.

Someday those little hands won’t be little.

I pray that long after he outgrows sitting beside Mama in the pew, the faith he saw will become a faith of his own.

Hope

Then Brother David preached from Psalm 42.

And if you’ve ever had a season when your heart was tired, Psalm 42 makes sense.

“Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God…”

The answer to a discouraged soul isn’t pretending everything is okay.

It’s remembering where our hope is.

Our hope is in the Lord.

Jesus never promised us a life without trouble. In John 16:33, He tells us plainly that we will have tribulation in this world.

But then He tells us to take heart.

He has overcome the world.

That brings me to something from Brother David’s message that I want to remember:

Peace doesn’t mean nothing bad will happen. Peace means that when something bad happens, God is with us.

That’s a very different kind of peace.

It isn’t dependent on everything around us going according to plan.

It’s knowing Who is beside us when it doesn’t.

Purpose

And then came the part that really made me think about the way we live our everyday lives.

We all want our lives to count.

So we pursue.

We work. We build. We plan. We set goals. We chase the next thing.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to accomplish something with the life God has given us.

But success without purpose is worthless.

What good is gaining everything the world tells us to want if we lose ourselves—or our souls—trying to get it?

The things of this world can keep us chasing forever and still leave us empty.

God created each of us for a purpose.

Maybe the measure of a good life isn’t simply how long we lived or how much we accomplished.

Maybe it’s whether we were faithful with the life we were given.

Did we follow God’s Word?

Did we love people?

Did we make time for the people God placed right in front of us?

Did we point someone toward Jesus?

Did we live for something bigger than ourselves?

And Back to That Worn-Out Bible…

After church, I tossed my Bible on the center console and looked down at it.

Bless its heart.

It’s rough.

And for some reason, after everything I’d heard that morning, that worn Bible and those little hands in the pew felt connected.

One represents a faith I’ve carried through different seasons of my life.

The other reminds me why it matters that I keep carrying it.

That Bible has been opened when life was good and when life was hard. It’s been with me when I had answers and when I had questions. Its pages hold reminders of times when I needed hope, times when I needed peace, and times when I needed to remember my purpose.

Maybe that’s why I can’t replace it.

And maybe someday my little boy will remember it too.

I hope he remembers Mama carrying that raggedy green Bible to church.

I hope he remembers sitting beside me.

I hope he remembers that we didn’t have everything figured out, but we knew where our hope was.

Because those little hands won’t stay little forever.

And of all the things I could leave my children, I hope this is one of them:

A faith that has been lived enough to get a little worn around the edges.

This week I’m carrying home pieces from both messages:

Have hope. Walk in God’s peace. Live with purpose. Love people. Stay faithful to His Word. And when your soul feels discouraged, put your hope right back where it belongs—in Jesus.

And I’ll keep carrying that worn-out Bible, too.

At least until the cover completely falls off. ❤️

-LaDonna