One key to living by faith is to realize that faith laments.

Lament is ultimately hopeful.  Seems paradoxical, doesn’t it?  The person sitting before you is weeping and wailing about his pain, and it is supposed to produce hope?  There, of course, is a fine line between complaining and lamenting, but too often we dismiss the baby with the bath water.  Dan Allender says that one who laments often looks like a grumbler or complainer, but that biblical lament is nothing of the sort.  Instead, lament contains in itself the possibility of extraordinary hope, restored desire, a changed heart.  Lament is, at its core, a search for  God.  It is not a search for answers.  It is not an invitation to fix an ailment.  Rather, lament enters the agony with the recognition that it might not go away for days, months, even years.  And yet, the lament carries with it the hope that God will eventually show.  Dan Allender puts it this way:  “Lament is a search – a declaration of desire that will neither rest with a pious refusal to ache, nor an arrogant self-reliance that is a hardened refusal to search.”

Godlessness is anti-shalom. Godlessness spoils the proper relation between human beings and their Maker and Savior. Sin offends God not only because it bereaves or assaults God directly, as in impiety or blasphemy, but also because it bereaves and assaults what God has made.

Here are some questions I’ve heard frequently already:

• “What in the world is going on?”
• “How are we to think and feel about violence?”
• “Does the Bible say anything about violence?”

Very helpful thoughts HERE by the Resurgence

These last two Sundays in July we’ll look at Habakkuk.  Here’s the book at a glance.

3 chapters, 56 verses. Habakkuk is the prophet who asked two questions that God answered at length and who then responded with a great prayer testifying to his faith in God. More specifically, the prophet expresses questions and doubts regarding God’s justice and management of the world. The book of Habakkuk has affinities with the branch of philosophy known as theodicy (reconciling God’s goodness toward the human race and his omnipotence, considered within a context of evil and suffering), inasmuch as the prophet’s response of faith in the third chapter demonstrates that for him the power and goodness of God have been satisfactorily reconciled with the evil and suffering that he sees in the world. The most famous part of the book is the prophet’s great testimony that he will maintain faith in God even if his external situation becomes disastrous (3:17–19).

source is ESV Literary Study Bible