Sermon For Hard Times

When The Fig Tree Does Not Blossom

What do you do when the thing you prayed for does not come? What do you do when you have been faithful, when you have shown up, when you have done everything you knew to do, and the situation is still broken? What do you do when the diagnosis does not change, when the relationship does not heal, when the financial pressure does not lift, when the grief does not ease the way you hoped it would by now?

Those are not questions that belong only to people with weak faith. Those are the questions of honest believers who are living through hard times with their eyes open. And if we are going to preach the Bible truthfully, we have to say that the Bible does not pretend those questions are easy. In fact, the Bible gives us a man who asked them loudly, in public, and God honored him for it.

Open your Bible to Habakkuk chapter 3, and then we will also spend time in Romans chapter 8. These two passages together give us something we desperately need. They give us a faith that is honest enough to name real loss and strong enough to stand in the middle of it without letting go of God.

Here is the governing conviction of this message: genuine faith does not require you to pretend that hard things are not hard. What it does require is that you anchor yourself to a God whose love cannot be separated from you even when your circumstances are at their worst.

Let us read Habakkuk 3, verses 17 through 19 in the CSB.

"Though the fig tree does not blossom, and there is no fruit on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though the flocks disappear from the pen and there are no herds in the stalls, yet I will celebrate in the Lord; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation! The Lord God is my strength; he makes my feet like those of a deer and enables me to walk on mountain heights."

Stop there for a moment. Before you hear the rejoicing, you have to feel the weight of the list. No blossoms. No fruit. No olives. No harvest. No flocks. No herds. Habakkuk is not describing a bad week. He is describing total agricultural collapse. In an ancient agrarian economy, that is not inconvenience. That is survival. That is everything. And he names every single layer of it before he says a single word about joy.

That is the first thing this text teaches us about faith in hard times: honest faith names the loss before it claims the promise.

There is a version of religious encouragement that rushes past the pain. It wants to get to the rejoicing before it has sat with the grief. And the people who are carrying real weight can feel that rush. They know when they are being hurried past their own suffering. Habakkuk does not do that. He lists the losses one by one, almost like a liturgy of lament, and he does not soften a single one of them.

If you are in a hard season right now, you do not have to minimize what you are carrying in order to be a person of faith. You do not have to say it is fine when it is not fine. You do not have to perform a peace you do not feel. The prophet himself did not do that. He looked at the empty fields and the silent stalls and he called them exactly what they were.

But then he says yet.

That little word carries enormous weight. Yet I will celebrate in the Lord. Yet I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. The word yet does not erase the loss. It does not explain it. It does not promise that the fig tree will blossom next spring. What it does is refuse to let the loss have the final word. Habakkuk makes a decision. Not a feeling, a decision. He decides that his joy will not be rooted in the harvest. It will be rooted in the one who is Lord over every harvest and every famine alike.

This is the second thing the text teaches us: the decision to rejoice in God is not a denial of suffering. It is a declaration about where your foundation is.

Notice what he says his strength is. He does not say his strength is his own resilience. He does not say his strength is the community around him, though community matters. He says the Lord God is my strength. And then he uses a beautiful image. He says God makes his feet like those of a deer and enables him to walk on mountain heights. A deer on a mountain does not walk a flat, easy road. It walks on terrain that is steep and uneven and demanding. But it is sure-footed. It does not slip. Habakkuk is not saying God will flatten the mountain. He is saying God will give him the footing to climb it.

That is a word for someone here today. God may not remove the hard thing you are facing. But he is able to give you the footing to walk through it without being destroyed by it. That is not a small promise. That is everything.

Now turn to Romans chapter 8, beginning at verse 31. Paul writes from a different angle but toward the same truth.

"What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. How will he not also with him grant us everything? Who can bring an accusation against God's elect? God is the one who justifies. Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is the one who died, but even more, has been raised; he also is at the right hand of God and intercedes for us. Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword?"

And then he arrives at verses 38 and 39.

"For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Paul does not write this from a comfortable chair. He writes it from a life that included beatings, imprisonment, shipwreck, and rejection. And notice what he does not say. He does not say none of those things will happen to you. He lists affliction, distress, famine, danger, and the sword as real possibilities. He is not offering a life free from hard times. He is offering something better than that. He is offering the certainty that none of those things, not one of them, can cut you off from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

This is the third and most important thing these passages give us: the love of God is not conditional on your circumstances improving.

That is the anchor. That is what Habakkuk was standing on when he said yet. He was not standing on a promise that the crops would return. He was standing on the character of the God who had saved him. And Paul is standing on the same ground. The cross is the proof. If God gave his own Son for us, Paul says, how will he not also give us everything we need? The cross is not just the means of our salvation. It is the evidence of God's commitment to us. When you look at the cross and wonder whether God is still for you in the middle of your hard season, the cross is God's answer. He did not spare his own Son. He will not abandon his own children.

Now let me speak practically for a moment, because this text demands it.

Habakkuk's faith did not make him passive. The image of the deer on the mountain heights is an image of movement, of climbing, of continuing to put one foot in front of the other on difficult ground. Faith in hard times is not the same as waiting for hard times to end before you live. It is continuing to live, to serve, to love, to pray, and to seek help when help is needed, even while the fig tree is not blossoming.

If you are in a hard season, please hear this clearly. Trusting God and seeking wise human support are not opposites. If you are struggling with grief, with mental health, with a relationship in crisis, with financial pressure that has become overwhelming, God works through the people and resources he has placed around you. Reaching out for help is not a failure of faith. It is wisdom. It is how God often provides the footing on the mountain.

And if you are in this room today and you do not yet know the God that Habakkuk and Paul are describing, I want to invite you to consider him. The love Paul describes in Romans 8 is not a general goodwill toward humanity. It is a specific, purchased, unbreakable love made possible through Jesus Christ. It is available to you. Not because of what you have done or how strong your faith is, but because of what he has done. Repent and trust him. That is the beginning of standing on ground that will not give way.

For those of us who already belong to him, the call today is the same as Habakkuk's call. Name your losses honestly. Do not rush past them. And then say yet. Yet I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. Not because the hard thing is over. Not because you understand why it happened. But because the Lord God is your strength, and nothing in all creation can separate you from his love.

Let us pray.

Father, we come to you with the full weight of what we are carrying. We do not pretend it is light. We name the empty fields and the silent stalls in our own lives, the places where we hoped for something and it has not come. And in the middle of all of it, we choose to say yet. Yet we will rejoice in you. Yet we will trust that you are for us. Yet we will believe that nothing can separate us from your love in Christ Jesus. Give us the footing of the deer on the mountain. Make us sure-footed where the path is steep. And let us walk forward in your strength today. In Jesus' name, amen.

Sources Consulted

Childs, Brevard S. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Fortress Press, 1979.

Moo, Douglas J. The Letter to the Romans. New International Commentary on the New Testament. Eerdmans, 2018.

Robertson, O. Palmer. The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Eerdmans, 1990.

Schreiner, Thomas R. Romans. Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Baker Academic, 1998.

Stulac, George M. "Habakkuk." In The IVP Bible Background Commentary: Old Testament, edited by John H. Walton, Victor H. Matthews, and Mark W. Chavalas. InterVarsity Press, 2000.