When Life Seems Like a Dead End Place

Although we don’t like to admit it, we all occasionally run into dead end places in our lives where we don’t know what to say, what to do, where to turn, or even how to pray.  Sometimes it seems like we’ve hit a dead end.  In other words, it seems like everything is finished, over, and done with!  If you’ve ever been in a place like this, you know what a hard place this can be!

I remember coming to a dead end when we were in the midst of one of our building programs.   What the building inspector was demanding was going to cost us about a $100,000 more than we budgeted to spend.  Sometimes when you come to a dead end, it seems like you can’t go forward but turning around is not an option either.  One of the worst things that we can do in a dead end situation is to become a bone on your own and try to figure your own way out.  I chose to reveal it to congregation and encouraged them to pray for a breakthrough in the situation.  The end results was that God made a way out of no way. The Bible says that God is no respecter of persons.  If He did that for me He will do it for you.  God has a purpose for dead ends in our lives.  It doesn’t always mean the end but it sometimes marks the beginning of a new season if we will persevere and not take defeat as an option.

Through these kinds of experiences, you and I discover that in our own strength, we are no match for some of life’s problems.  That’s why we must learn to depend on the power and wisdom of God! The apostle Paul tell us that he, too, went through this kind of learning experience when he found himself face-to-face with life-threatening situations in his own ministry.  In 2 Corinthians 1:9, he says, “But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.”  Paul was definitely at one of those dead end places that we’re talking about. In fact, the situation he faces was so bad that he compared it to a sentence of death. 

But in spite of how it looked, Paul didn’t die, nor did he fail at fulfilling the job God had given him.  It may have looked like it was the end of the road, but it was really the beginning of a new supernatural flow of divine power into Paul’s life.  That’s why he went on to say that through it all, he learned not to trust in himself, but in God who raises the dead.

When you don’t know what else to do and when you have no one else to turn to, that’s usually when God’s resurrection power begins to operate in you to the greatest measure!  You see, there’s no such thing as no hope.  If you learn to rely on him, that dead end place in your life that you’re facing right now can become a new beginning!