Encouragement – Page 11

Shield of Faith

In our spiritual journey do we feel more like a target than a soldier? Struggling to keep our joy only to find we’re constantly being taken down in worry, frustration, disappointment and fear? Perhaps we’re missing our shield.

Many helpful pieces comprise our armor, but none’s more essential in spiritual warfare than the shield of faith. (Ep 6:16)

Above all. Above our sword, above the girding belt, above the shodden feet, salvation’s helmet and the breastplate of righteousness … we must have our shield of faith.

Faith: knowing God is for us, because He says so. (Ro 8:31)

Faith: knowing, no matter what happens, that all things work together for good to us who love God, because He says so. (Ro 8:28)

There are many dangers, toils and snares in our homeward journey, yet God is faithful. Faith is knowing God sees the end from the beginning, that He’s able to keep us from falling, and that He’ll present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy. (Jud 24-25)

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Live by Faith

Faith is basic to spiritual life (He 11:6), but what exactly is it?

Faith is supernatural confidence (Mk 11:22), absolute assurance (He 10:22), the absence of doubt about something. (Ja 1:6) It is so inexplicably complete and strong that it becomes in itself evidence of the veracity of its object. (He 11:1) It is distinct from desire and wishful thinking; it can only be stronger or weaker in terms of the scope of what is believed, not in the strength of the belief.

Faith is God’s gift enabling us to trust Christ for eternal salvation (Ep 2:8), to abound in hope (Ro 15:13) and to access the transforming power of God. (He 10:38) It is the flip side of repentance (Ac 20:21): God’s gift of full persuasion convincing us of truth.

When we lack faith, let’s follow the disciples’ example and ask God to in crease our fai th. (Lk 17:5) He is able to glorify Himself in and through us. (Ep 3:20)

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My Course

Why am I here? Alive on this earth? It’s a question we all ask; rooted in our nature. We’re driven to find purpose and meaning, but what does this mean – for life to have meaning?

Claustral Canyon, Blue Mountains, Australia

If no one ever acknowledges my life, considers how I’ve lived or what I’ve done, I have no purpose. Having meaning implies being acknowledged, understood and evaluated: judged.* But by whom?

In the end, Man can’t give me meaning; I can’t give myself or others purpose. Living just to please others is empty. (Ga 1:10)

Only the One Who made me gives me purpose; Jehovah designs and creates each of us for a reason, and this defines our purpose. In Him I find my race, my course. (2Ti 4:7-8)

God gives each of us unique gifts, dispositions and opportunities (1Co 12:8-11) so that we can fulfill God’s unique purpose in creating us. He commands each of us to diligence in finding our calling, making sure of it (2Pe 1:10), for it’s in leveraging my own unique design to serve and honor God the best I know how that I discover my course and run my race. (Ro 12:6-8)

I can’t spend my life trying to exercise other people’s gifts; I’m not designed to do everything for God. (Jn 21:22) What I do best is where I fit in His kingdom; it’s where I belong, for His glory. (Re 3:12)

In the end, only one thing matters: hearing God say, “Well done.” (Mt 25:23)

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*See first comment below

Your Father Knows

In giving perspective in prayer, Yeshua grounds us in the fact that we aren’t informing God of anything: He already knows what we need. (Mt 6:7-8) So it isn’t the form or quantity of our prayers that matters; the key is in our motivation. (Ja 4:3) Prayer is God inviting us into His work. (Ep 1:11)

Chapada dos Veadeiros National Park, Brazil

Given this, it really makes no sense to recite prayers unless our hearts find honest, sincere expression in them. Just think how anyone else would feel if we scripted conversation like that!

Similarly, neither does praying in tongues, apart from our understanding and will, make any sense — using our bodies as passive conduits rather than expressing our hearts. (1Co 14:14-15)

To pray apart from thoughtful passion is to think wrongly of God, that He’s disinterested in our hearts, that He’d rather partition and fragment us than engage intimately with our entire being. (1Jn 5:14-15) It treats Him more like a vending machine than a loving father, like a robot responding to command stimuli, regardless of motive or source. It’s a pagan view of God.

While God delights in engaging us in His work and transforming us through prayer, He’s not limited by our ability to pray, or even our lack of prayer. (Da 4:35b) He’s actually the One moving in us to pray according to His good pleasure (Php 2:13); and when we don’t pray like we should, or don’t know how to, He is praying for us Himself according to His own will. (Ro 8:26-27)

So let’s pray like we breathe … organically, intrinsically, continuously (Ro 12:12) … telling Him everything, moving in and through Him with every pulse of our being. (Ep 4:6) Dial Him first thing in the morning, and never hang up.

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What If God?

Why does God allow so much evil, pain and suffering in the world? We know instinctively that He could stop it all … but He doesn’t — so we’re tempted to doubt His goodness. What could be His motive?

Well, what would it be like if God never allowed anything bad to happen? Sure, there’d be no sin or suffering, but what would we know about God or ourselves?

We’d never know He was preventing evil and suffering … would we? We’d never experience His mercy or patience; we’d know nothing of His sacrificial love or His willingness to suffer with us, or of His justice, wrath and holiness … or of our own selfishness and depravity … and very little of His wisdom and power. It would be pleasant for sure, but rather dull … uninteresting … boring. There’d be no contrast.

The truth is that God is preventing most of the evil that could be occurring in this world (2Th 2:7): no one has ever fully expressed their own depravity. (Je 17:9)

By allowing the evil that He has, God has been perfectly revealing both Himself and everything outside Himself; this is actually His motive in Creation: the evil He allows perfectly reveals both His nature and ours. (Ro 9:22-23) God wants us to experience Him, to know Him intimately in all of His character and holiness. This is only possible as we see Him responding to a wide variety of enemies who are opposed to Him.

Will knowing God intimately be worth it all in the end? Evidently, God thinks so … and He’s already there (Is 57:15) … bringing forth unspeakable beauty from all the brokenness. (Is 61:3, 1Pe 1:7)

The truth is, God hasn’t responded to most of the evil in the world yet, but He will one Day. (Ac 17:31) Just because we haven’t seen full justice doesn’t mean we won’t. And if the little we’ve seen of His response so far is any indication, it will be utterly amazing, glorious beyond description. (Re 20:11)

Meanwhile, God has shown us enough to help us rejoice in Him, to trust Him implicitly and confidently, and to glory in Him alone. (Je 9:23-24) Let’s do so, believing He will never break a promise, be unfaithful, or a disappointment in the end. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” (1Co 2:9)

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Not Under Law

Of all the phrases used by the Apostle Paul in the New Testament, “not under law” may be the most misunderstood. Most think it means God’s laws in the Old Testament are obsolete, but context implies something very different: Paul says, “sin shall not have dominion over you: for ye are not under the law, but under grace.” (Ro 6:12-14)

Not being under law is what causes us to overcome sin … yet sin is breaking God’s Law. (1Jn 3:4) Paul isn’t telling us we can sin all we want now, but how being in Christ causes us to sin less and less.

The key appears to be in the contrasting phrase – under grace: experiencing the power of God as He transforms us into the likeness of Christ. (Ep 2:8,10)

As God works in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure (Php 2:13), we are no longer under law, trying to obey in our own strength, feeling only the duty and command but no empowering life, with no inclination to obey, always failing, rebelling and feeling the terror of our condemnation. Rather, we have Christ in us, the hope of glory (Col 1:27), Who delights in the law of God within us, moving in us to obey Him in spirit as well as the letter, that the righteousness of the law might be realized and fulfilled in us as we obey it from the heart. (Ro 8:4)

Jesus Christ overcame the world (Jn 16:33) and is doing it all over again in every one of His children (1Jn 5:4), delivering us from both the penalty and power of sin, giving us grace unto glory. (Php 1:6)

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Saved by Hope

Hope: an expectation that something good will happen, the delightful foretaste of blessings not yet seen, the heart’s response to God’s faithfulness. Hope is a cornerstone of spiritual life, intrinsic to all godliness. (1Co 13:13a) Life can be unbearable without it; Jehovah says we are saved by it. (Ro 8:24)

Hope saves by rescuing us from anxiety, worry, despair and despondency, giving us strength to live joyfully, to walk worthy of Him, with purpose and dignity even in the midst of our afflictions.

Knowing God is just and good keeps hope alive in this broken world. We must remember that YHWH has a glorious purpose in allowing evil and suffering. His Day will come: He will right all wrong; He will judge all in righteousness and truth. (Ps 9:8) In the end, as surely as we are, God’s children will exult in Him.

The Almighty makes no promise lightly; He puts His name and character on the line in every single one. He need not do so for Himself: He is giving us an ultimate opportunity to honor Him, to trust His heart before seeing His hand.

Will Heaven see any promise unfulfilled? to even one person? What have we to lose in acting out His faithfulness? Is there a better way to glorify Him? Or any other way … is it even possible to honor Him without trusting Him?

Let the world go its way, heedless of glory and judgment to come. Keeping our eyes on the heart of our King, let us count on Him; expect Him to fulfill His Word. Let our story be the joyful anticipation of heavenly reality … an abiding witness of God’s eternal faithfulness. “Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost.” (Ro 15:13)

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Ponder the Path

Jehovah says, “Ponder the path of thy feet.” (Pr 4:26) We should be thinking carefully about the course we’ve chosen so far in life, and where our path is leading. Our decisions comprise our path, and our motives determine its course.

There are paths of the righteous (Pr 2:20) and of the wicked (Pr 4:14) … and God is pondering all of them. (Pr 5:21) Every choice we make extends our path in one direction or another, towards God or away, and God is noticing every time; though we can always turn back and retrace our steps, we can never actually erase one.

When we walk in darkness and lies we can’t see what we’re stumbling over (Pr 4:19); it’s an unstable path that’s impossible to understand. (Pr 5:6) “But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” (Pr 4:18) Let’s choose each and every step of life thoughtfully, and well.

Staying on the right path ultimately distills down to just one thing: pleasing God. God give us grace, to know wisdom, to walk in in the light, in Your ways, in strength and power. (Pr 4:11-12) As we seek Him He is faithful to show us the path of life (Ps 16:11), and to walk with us along the way. (1Jn 1:7)

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The Voice of God

Many of us long to hear the whisper of God’s Spirit guiding us in life’s journey. Wouldn’t life be so much simpler if God would just tell us what to do? Perhaps we need to learn to quiet ourselves, wait on the Lord, and listen to the voice of the Spirit for supernatural guidance.

Yet Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.” (Jn 10:27) If we belong to God, He says we will hear His voice and follow Him; Christ never says this is something we need to learn. In fact, the idea that God’s children will miss doing His will because they don’t hear His voice seems to me foreign to scripture. (Jn 10:2-5) Perhaps we don’t yet understand the spiritual realm and what it’s like to hear the voice of God.

Following God seems to me simpler than we think. (Mt 11:29-30) As we walk in the light, He wills in our wills, speaks in our thoughts, and works through our acts. (Php 2:13) It isn’t complicated, yet most of us who call Christ Lord aren’t doing what He said (Lk 6:46): hiding His Word in our hearts and seeking to know wisdom as a manner of life. (Ja 1:5) If we aren’t even doing the basics, is it any wonder we’re struggling? If we aren’t careful, seeking supernatural guidance rather than doing what He says, we might open ourselves up for deception and hear the voice of strangers seeking to counterfeit the divine. In my experience, when we are obeying what He’s already told us, that hunger to hear a supernatural voice is fully and completely satisfied.

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He Learned Obedience

Joyfully obeying God is perhaps the highest form of worship. (1Sa 15:22b) It’s love acting out, “God, You’re worthy; You’re supremely important; Your desire is my only priority.” Those who love Him need not know why He commands, only that He does; “for this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.” (1Jn 5:3)

ChristInGethsemane2 — The Passion: Christ Praying in Gethsemane

The greatest example of obedience ever may be Christ praying in the garden, “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.“ (Lk 22:42) As He’d planned from eternity past, His will was to ransom those He loved. Yet He could not be self-willed in dying for us: He was willing to give that up and die an eternal failure in the garden, lying on His face in the dirt, if that was His Father’s will. It was the ultimate submission, where He Himself learned obedience and revealed His perfection. He was then fit to author eternal salvation for all who obey Him. (He 5:7-9)

So often God gives commands without telling us why, yet the quickened soul implicitly knows God is good. Like Christ, the Author and Finisher of our faith, we obey, not always knowing what blessing will come, but that there is blessing in any and all obedience. (He 12:1-2) Yet it is not for blessing we obey, but simply for Him, because He is worthy.

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