The word of God is filled with encouragement and promises for His people. It is impossible to read the word of God and leave unchanged. Indeed, whenever we come into contact with the word of God we are not left the same. This week, as I was reading the word, I came across these truths that I am sure you know but will encourage you nonetheless. They were not new truths to me but they had a different meaning this time, I understood them differently. It’s almost as if the word became alive in me. The first truth is that faith is capital in the walk of a believer. The second truth is that trusting in the Lord brings peace, clarity and vindication and the third truth is that God wants to deliver His people from any sort of bondage that exists. Like I said earlier, these are probably truths you already know or have read about in the bible but let me bring you to where I was brought by the Holy Spirit this week.
First, faith is capital in the walk of a believer. There are three main verses that come to mind when the topic of faith is discussed: 1) “the righteous shall live by faith” (Galatians 3:11), 2) “Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness” (James 2:23; Genesis 15.6) and 3) “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). There are more passages that talk about faith in the bible but this week, for some odd reasons those jumped out to me. What they all have in common is that faith is necessary in our walk with the Lord. In fact, without it, we wouldn’t be counted righteous before the Lord. Just as Abraham believed God to be credited “righteousness”, we too must believe Jesus to be credited “righteousness”. So our belief is the currency that allows us to receive the righteousness of Christ and stand faultless before the Throne. I am amazed at how powerful faith is! I believe one of the reasons it is impossible to please God without it is simply that without faith you are relying on yourself and whosoever relies on himself cannot be a child of God. You need to come to the end of yourself in order to be a child of God because He requires complete surrender. Faith therefore, is not just a thought, it is a deep conviction that God is who He says He is; a complete surrender to the One who is able to do more abundantly above what we can think or imagine. That is what Abraham did. He believed God when God told him to leave his people and go to an unknown land, he believed God when God told him He would make him a Father to many nations, he believed God when God told him to sacrifice his one and only son. Indeed, Abraham believed God when it did not make sense to his natural mind. Truly, the righteous shall live by faith.
The second truth I was reminded of this week is that trusting in the Lord brings peace, clarity and vindication. I cannot even count how many times the bible encourages us to trust in the Lord, to put our confidence in the Lord or to wait on Him. We know that whenever a theme is repeated it means one must pay attention to it. In the book of Isaiah, this command is also repeated. We see that placing our trust in the Lord gives us clarity and removes shame from our lives because God Himself vindicates us (Isaiah 50:7). When you think about how mightily the Lord came through for His people Israel throughout history, you know for a fact that He is able to come through for you with the same vigor. After all, He is the same yesterday, today and forever. Whenever the bible has asked us to place our trust in the Lord it was always backed with promises and a reminder of what the Lord had done. It is almost like the Lord is reminding us of what He has done in the past, what He is capable of doing so that we would have full confidence and peace of mind when trouble comes. This too is mind-blowing, the Creator of the universe comes down to our level and “begs” us to trust Him by showing us His pedigree. He requires complete trust which is why He ensures we know who we are believing in when we come to Him. I find it intriguing that the Most High God spends time to tell us who He is and what He has done in order to boost our confidence in Him. This is His mercy and love at work because He does not have to do that. Do me a favour and read Isaiah 45 and note down all that the Lord has done as well as the character traits of God that come out. By the end of it, you will be astonished by the God we are privileged to put our trust in. In fact, everything that God says of Himself in that chapter are all reasons for us to trust in Him.
The final truth I was reminded of this week is that God desires to save His people from any bondage. Throughout history, God is always the instigator of deliverance. It is never because the people have suffered long enough or because they have cried out a lot before Him. No, before time, God already had in mind the salvation of His people. It started in the Garden of Eden, when Adam sinned, God set a plan in motion to redeem the human race and restore the broken relationship that existed between Him and man. So you see that the plan of salvation originated with God, it is not the suffering or the cries of men that brought that plan forward. Thinking about this alone should help us know that God is indeed for us, that He wants us to succeed, He wants what is good for us. God was willing to let His one and only Son die for your sake so that you would have life abundantly; so that you would be free, why would he not want the best for you today? God is love and this means all that is good he wants for you. Indeed, “no good thing will he withhold from the one who walks uprightly” (Psalm84:11). Again, if God is for you who can be against you (Romans 8:31)? Unfortunately, we as believers are constantly being caught up in our circumstances, we look at what we go through, the pain we face, the sickness we have, the financial difficulties we endure, the hatred we received, etc. and we believe the lie of the enemy that God is against us when all the while His plans for us have not changed. Another recurring theme recently is that God always commands us to not look at our circumstances as though they were defining moments, He commands us rather to look at Him. Our focus should be on what He has said in His word, His promises. Our identity and our trust in Him should never be dependent on what we have or on what we do not have, it should not depend on what we lack or are filled with. In chapter 52 of Isaiah, the deliverer is promised to Jerusalem and this is promised at a time when hope seemed lost. In fact, God summons Jerusalem and tells her to clothe herself with garments of splendor, to awake, to free herself from chains on her neck meanwhile Jerusalem is in captivity. What the Lord does in this chapter is remind Jerusalem that He is her salvation and that she will be delivered and for that reason, she ought to live as a free nation because she is free in His eyes.
God’s ways are not our ways and whenever God speaks, He does not speak from a finite perspective because He sees the beginning from the end. Therefore, when God tells us to rejoice always, we should rejoice always because the pain we are enduring or the difficulty we are facing should not define us and as Paul reminds us, all these are but momentary suffering and do not compare to the surpassing measure of seeing Christ our Lord (2 Corinthians 4:17). This is not an easy task to do but it is repeated everywhere in the bible which means we must do it. I pray the Lord teaches us to have a mindset that is not focused on our circumstances but rather focused on Him so that we can honour Him in all that we do and live victoriously. Amen!
A Word Aptly Spoken 