Always Faithful

Christine Wyrtzen Devotional:

PARALYZING INERTIA
 
"Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will bring it to pass."  I Thess. 5:24

    I used to live frozen in inertia.  I reviewed my failures and all the self-proclaimed reasons I believed I was inadequate and decided to stand still in order to avoid the humiliation of failing.  I lived in perpetual self-condemnation.  My energy was depleted.  I remember entertaining thoughts that something was physically wrong with me, when all the time, self-hatred and the sinful thought patterns that accompanied it sapped the life out of me.

    I did not know Jesus intimately.  Though He was a faithful Savior, I had not opened my heart to experience Him.  I was completely self-focused.  The Word of God was nearby but I didn't know how to live in it to find life.  In 1997, all that changed and I was re-born.  I looked at Jesus and saw His glory.  I was stunned by Him.  The love and healing I experienced as He unveiled the power of His Word confronted my self-hatred.  The darkness of condemning self-talk began to melt away under His penetrating Light.

    The circumstances under which Paul wrote these words is pretty amazing.  He was being persecuted severely for preaching.  Could this not have looked like failure to Him?  He could have fed himself the wrong message about God's faithfulness.  It appeared he had no thriving ministry, no audience, no altar full of people wanting to commit their lives to Christ.  It could have appeared that everything he was called to do was being thwarted.  

Instead, He remembered the life of Jesus.  What often looks like failure is the dark threads of redemption's story.  God was faithful to Jesus even though He hung on a cross.  But when it's me, I struggle to see it.  In hindsight, it's usually clear but in the throes of the trial, I can question His faithfulness.

God calls each of us to recognize any internal lies which could bring us to a standstill.  We are to renounce them, one by one, and get up by faith.  He is faithful amidst the backdrop of these dark times.

I do not have the advantage of hindsight today but I do review our history. You have always been faithful.  I declare You the same today.  Amen