I come to church and remember how awesome God is, how wonderful my salvation is, and how glorious heaven is, and then, after leaving, I act like my world is falling apart at the first hint of difficulty. 

One day several years ago, I was working on a sermon in my office.  My mother called and, I’m ashamed to admit, we got into a horrible argument.  She ended up hanging up on me.  I was like, “No she did not!”  I proceeded then to hang up my phone with extreme force somehow believing the slamming of the phone would communicate my great displeasure through the already disconnected line.  I threw myself back into my chair, held my hands behind my head, and sighed deeply.  Okay, I had a sermon to finish.  Turning to my computer, I see “error” on the screen.  What?!?  The problem was that my phone was sitting on top of my desktop computer.  I slammed the phone down so hard that I crashed my computer.  Notes, sermons, and schoolwork were all gone. 

I flipped!  Looking back, it was only a moment in my life, which now isn’t really a big deal; however, at the time, I felt so discouraged, distraught, and defeated.

Can you relate?  Can you relate to moments that have a masterful way of triggering spiritual amnesia pulling your eyes off the glorious reality of who God is, what he has done, and the great future he has for all his children in the kingdom to come?

Maybe your spiritual amnesia is triggered by an ungrateful spouse or child, maybe it’s laundry that never ends, bad traffic, that special china plate that gets dropped when being hand washed, an unanticipated divorce or breakup, unemployment or underemployment, the critical word spoken into your life years ago that continues to come up and haunt you, or possibly just a generally bad day.

Whatever your triggers are, we need to constantly remember the gospel and the reality of our glorious future of reigning with King Jesus in his kingdom, because the deeper the confidence that God has a glorious future for us, the less we will despair in the dark moments of life.

Dark moments will cause a degree of angst, but the greater our confidence that this moment doesn’t change the reality of our glorious future in the kingdom, the less our tension will be.

Paul declared that the present sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared to the glory that will one day be revealed to us (Rom 8:18).  The clear and more concrete the future glory resides at the forefront of our minds in this life, the less desperate the dark moments of life will feel.