Faithfulness

Why is one of the hardest things to do trusting God? Recently, something about my future that I assumed was sure to happen, became something that was unlikely to happen at all. I'm being daily forced to trust that God is actually establishing my steps and has a plan for my future.
I have a faulty memory (which is weird to say considering I can recall exact dates of life events and almost every line of The Princess Bride). This memory has holes in it. Despite the preponderance of evidence showing God as good and faithful in every believer's life, I have the darndest time remembering God's faithfulness, everytime a new trial arrises.
I can, and should, look back and see specific and general instances where God has guided, protected, loved, disciplined and cared for me and yet in the face of this new situation I forget and then worry, fear and sadness creep in. It's made even tougher when I dwell on my lack of faithfulness. I run the risk of feeling condemned and unworthy when I see this as a response to my unfaithful actions. Jen Smidt has summed it perfectly when she says, "When my focus is on my faithfulness (or lack thereof), I begin to believe that God must be far off – that I somehow shook him off in my wanderings."
God has promised he will never leave believers. Psalm 139 is full of the promises of a faithful God. "You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me." I cannot escape His love, despite how I feel about my own faithfulness, or lack thereof.

"Embracing God’s faithfulness to himself frees us from the devastating effects of thinking we have anything to do with the way he sees us. God sees his children through the atoning blood of his Son, covering us for every act of treason and rebellion we have committed. He isn’t faithful to us because of anything we have done well or poorly. He wouldn’t be faithful to us if he was looking for us to uphold our end of the bargain."

So here I am: praying that I can daily/hourly/minutely remind myself that God is not a witholding parent who's own faithfulness is based my own. He has brought me through before, and will again and that brings a peace that passes all understanding.

Tears of Sorrow

I recently was grieved while I watched tears I'd caused roll down the face of my girlfriend. It grieved me to see her hurt, especially when it was my stupid words that caused the hurt. In the midst of this I was convicted; convicted not of my sin towards her but rather of a lack of grieving about the pain I cause God.


While God is not mortal and does not feel human pain, my sin is serious in His eyes. My sin required that He send His only Son to earth to be the perfect sacrifice for me in place of the perfect life I could never live. The SON OF GOD had to die because of me. Why does a momentary pain in the life of my girlfriend cause me more sorrow than pain caused to the Sovereign, Holy, Perfect, Creator of the world?


This is because every human fails in two areas of the law. Matthew 22:36-40 has those areas: loving the Lord your God with all your heart, and loving your neighbor as yourself. Elyse Fitzpatrick writes,

Pure, unadulterated, consistent love for God and pure, unadulterated consistent love for others is the summation of all the law God has given us in both the Old and New Testaments. Of course, the problem is that we never obey these simple commands. We always love ourselves more than we love God or others. We are always building idols in our hearts and worshiping and serving them. We are always more focused on what we want and how we might get it than we are on loving him and laying down our life for others. The law does show us the right way to live, but none of us obeys it. Not for one millisecond.

So when these moments of failure and conviction happen, as they inevitably will, where can we turn. Clearly we can't turn to the law and work harder to earn salvation because this is the same law we are blatantly failing at. Elyse continues,

The law of God also hinders our advance toward righteousness because, in our pride, we think that if we just try hard enough or repent deeply enough, we’ll be able to obey it. We read the promises of life for obedience and think that means that we can do it. The promises of life for obedience are not meant to build our self-confidence. They’re meant to make us long for obedience and then, when we fail again, they’re meant to crush us and drive us to Christ.

Our only option in these moments is to throw ourselves into the loving arms of our Heavenly Father who never runs out of grace for our constant failures.