Have you ever come to a place in your life where you are standing at a crossroad, or perhaps teetering on the edge of a precipice, where there is nowhere to go and nothing you can do? When you’ve run out of options and you realize that in your own strength there is absolutely no human answer for the difficulty at hand, it is in this very moment that you may realize you need something more, something beyond human comprehension, an intervention, if you will, of something greater than us in our finite limited capabilities. Abraham Lincoln said, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.” I have always considered myself an overcomer; I am a survivor, and there has always been something deep within me that causes me to persevere and rise above the overwhelming odds that have been the story of my life. It has not been very often that I find myself in this very place, because after all, I am a believer, a follower of Christ, and my faithfulness to Him should be sufficient for the day, right? But the day came when personal tragedy struck and I was unable to connect the dots of my personal faithfulness to a God who is supposed to be the tenderhearted, benevolent, compassionate lover of my soul, and that is when doubt set in.
2 Corinthians 1:20 says, “For no matter how many promises God has made, they are ‘Yes’ in Christ.” How do you move past the crippling doubt when the popular influences of the day tell people that our God wants us to have good health, wealth and prosperity? When my child died, I couldn’t help but ask my Father in Heaven, what did I do wrong? After all, I truly thought I had based my whole life on believing His promises. Oh sure, I never believed in the prosperity gospel, but I did believe that my God was a good, good Father, and that He wanted good things for His children. In the days and months following my child’s death, my pain overshadowed His promises. I was bone weary; I was tired of running the race, and I had lost track of the prize. I hit a brick wall. I could not bring myself to believe that God could use the ugliness of my pain and overwhelming grief that came as a result of his death. The question I asked Him over and over again was, “God, where are You in this?” The truth is, His promises are that of peace, joy, love, goodness, forgiveness, salvation, sanctification, fellowship, hope, glorification and Heaven, which are all made possible and are being fulfilled in this very moment in Jesus Christ, yes, in Christ alone.
Philippians 4:19 says, “Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice.” We cannot run this race in isolation, we need the people of the Living God, encouraging us and cheering us on. Perseverance is built on the promises of God. Perseverance is born out of my pain, but it is not built on my own strength. I have always looked at what my pain is taking from me, not what my pain is doing for me. The enemy of my soul is constantly telling me I am alone, that God’s promises are not true, but I know now that God is using this, all of this, and that the God of peace is with me, but my misplaced expectations of my circumstances was based upon incomplete information. And so I will throw off the illusion that all should be what I think is called good, the misguided notion that what is occurring in my life is not a part of His divine plan, and I will put into practice all that I have learned, all that I have received from Him, and boldly run the race fixing my eyes on my Jesus, the author and perfecter of my faith.
