God of Through
I realize it has been awhile since I have blogged, but a lot has gone on in my life since that last post. And when I say a lot has gone on, I really mean that I have been going through some hard times. What is interesting to me, is that my prayer for the past several months has been for God to strip me of everything that isn’t of Him. I didn’t know exactly what that would entail, but, I guess God has answered my prayer, and has stripped me of some junk in my life.
I never fully knew how painful that stripping was going to be until recent. My heart has ached and ached and ached as I have dealt with having to deal with someone I love not loving me in return, my ministry not going as I would have hoped, my parents and my relationship being rocky over some silly differences of opinion, and even my wondering when I will come out of all this grief, etc. to be joyful once again. I truly have found out these past couple weeks that life is a lot harder than I thought.
Needless to say I have been studying the Scriptures lately trying to find out what to do. I truly believe that we can find help and answers to life in the Scripture and what I found that has helped me was in the book of Daniel. Therefore, since it has helped me recently I thought it could help others so on Sunday, I preached a message entitled The God of Through, that looked at the life of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and their fiery furnace experience. Do you remember the story? If not, it basically is about these three guys and how they didn’t bow to another idol and then the king got mad and through them into this fiery furnace. Anyway, the part that I lifted up is that it was then in the fiery furnace, that Jesus joined them and was with them till they walked out of the furnace. In other words, God was with them through this fiery time in their life.
The reality for us all is that God is with us and will be with us through our problems or our fiery trials. After my sermon, my friend and pastor back home was talking to the congregation and said a phrase I liked. It was basically this, “God doesn’t just take us to it, He takes us through it.” How true is this statement? God was with David through the fight with Goliath, the Children of Israel through the desert, Daniel through the lion’s den, Paul through prison, and I could continue mentioning many more “through” stories! Oh! Here’s one more, God was with Jesus through death to help him defeat death. To me, these through stories are encouraging cause I need to know God is with me because honestly sometimes it doesn’t seem like He is.
I guess I say all this because I don’t know where you all are in your life. Some of you, like me are scared and frustrated over jobs, mariage, dating relationships, school, finances, relationships with parents, etc. and you are at the end of your rope. Listen to me, I know what it’s like to think you can’t win for losing or that everything is just going to end up a trainwreck! But here’s the thing, God will be with us through this time in our lives. God isn’t going anywhere, and He’s saying, to quote a Steven Curtis Chapman song, “Remember, all the times I’ve told you loud and clear, I’m with you, and I am for you, so believe me now.”
It is so difficult to understand why the Lord allows us to go through such hard times when we are in the midst of them. But I always find comfort in the Lord’s promise (I think it’s in Lamentations) that His mercies are new every morning. The night may be long, but morning will always come. It may seem as though, the “night” you are experiencing is long and dark, morning will always come because God is nothing if not faithful. Indeed, his faithfulness is one of the greatest things about Him!