Abandoned - or abandoned?

It’s a strange title -- but I’ll explain.

Some of you will know Elaine and I are transitioning out of leading a local church into a wider ministry next summer. Out of her experience of nine pregnancies (we lost one baby through miscarriage), Elaine decided that transition, the point just before birth, was the hardest point in labour. And it can be the same in other areas of life.

Transition is that point at which it all begins to happen. It’s too late to go back, yet seems impossible in the searing pain to move ahead. But in the end, the baby is born.

When we determine to move ahead in God, and when that determination involves radical change and steps of faith, the birthing process will be contested by the enemy with all the power at his disposal. He will use everything from external circumstances to pressing the buttons on all our weaknesses.

Our transition process has turned out to be longer and more complicated than I had envisioned. My previous experience was step out in faith, obey God, plant a church, and trust that he will provide. It wasn’t easy, but it was simple. We never had any money or support to back us up, but God showed up. Twice. But that was a long time ago.

Now our step of faith involves other churches and other people, and it’s not just God and us. And we have to honour how God speaks to and works through others.

So things really began to get on top of me.

But in that moment, a couple of weeks ago, I had a revelation.

Don’t worry -- I didn’t see seven angels, seven lampstands or four living creatures. No, I had a revelation of a basic truth of the Word of God.

In that moment when the enemy was telling me I was abandoned, God spoke to me to abandon myself to him.

I opened my Bible and began to read Matthew 6 out loud. God feeds the birds and clothes the grass. He asks which of us through our anxiety can add an hour to his life? And he tells us to live in his grace for the only day for which he will give it, which is today.

Our problem is this. We try to control tomorrow by our thoughts. We think of all the positive outcomes we can imagine, but we never win this battle because all the negatives come flooding in and overwhelm us. In truth, our efforts to control the future in our thinking are a mild yet still deadly form of divination.

There is only one possible solution to our anxiety, and that is to abandon ourselves to God. Cast all your cares on him, as Peter puts it. Roll them into one big bundle and throw them into his arms.

In times of fear, stretching and transition, it can appear that God has abandoned us.

That is never true. The problem is the opposite. We have not abandoned ourselves to him.

Jesus said his yoke was easy and his burden light.

He will give you grace for today. And when tomorrow comes, he will look after that as well.

Our transition continues. But Jesus is in charge.

What do you do when you fear you're falling?

Many times I have felt weak, faltering, about to fail. Circumstances look insurmountable. Fears arise on every side. Yet I have to keep going. I have a family to support, a church to lead, people in various places who are dependent on me in one way or another. Most of all, I have a Lord I want to honour. I don’t want to fail anyone, and more than anyone else, I don’t want to fail the Lord.

When I feel like this (which is thankfully not all the time), I am encouraged by the fact I have not walked this way alone. “Afflicted in every way, yet not crushed; perplexed but not despairing; persecuted but not forsaken; knocked down but not knocked out.” Those are Paul’s words, not mine. And yes, before anyone points it out, I admit that his trials were in a whole different league to mine. But still, it’s comforting to know others we respect have gone through the same range of emotions. Christians do not go through life with a bullet-proof coating guaranteeing immunity from every negative experience and emotion.

But whatever my struggles are or yours, how do we get through them? One good answer comes from Paul himself, writing to Timothy, his spiritual son, at a difficult time in Timothy’s life: “You, my child, be strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:1).

“Be strengthened” in Greek is a present passive imperative. What does that mean, you ask? Well, the most important part is the passive. We cannot strengthen ourselves. We haven’t got the ability or the power to do it. We need someone else to strengthen us. There’s no point whipping yourself when you’re down because you can’t turn your world right side up again. No amount of will power, emotional energy or mental concentration will do anything for you. You can’t think your way out of trouble. You can’t will your way out of trouble. You need to be rescued from it, and right here he tells us exactly how that happens. Our strength does not come from within, it comes from somewhere else. It comes from the grace of God.

Grace is not firstly a theological concept. It is not firstly a doctrine. It is not firstly a principle or a truth. No, grace is an energy. Grace is the power of almighty God sent to set you free. Yes, we can (and must) explain grace in the words of a doctrine or teaching or principle or truth. But we can never reduce it to any of those things, for it is something much greater. Grace is God’s rescue mission at work by the power of his Spirit in your life.

And Paul’s command “be strengthened” is a present imperative. The “present” part refers to something happening in this very moment. It does not refer to something that happened a long time ago or every so often. We need to find the power of the grace of God on a present, continuous basis. The grace of God that delivers me today is an amazing thing, but today’s grace will not deliver me tomorrow.

I need to stay in a living relationship with the Lord so that his mighty strength will flow into my life today, tomorrow and the next day. Without it, I will dry up. But the good news is, even if you feel dried up, you can still go back to the well. There is always grace for you. Ask, and you will receive.

Go somewhere and cry out to God until he meets you. It’s as simple as that. Take my word for it -- I’ve been doing it for decades! God’s grace will not solve all of life’s difficulties. But it will get you through them.

And in the end, here is a rock we can all hold onto: God will never call you to do something or be something or endure something without giving you the grace to get through it.

Let me leave you with one final thought. The goal of being strengthened by grace is not to rise above everything that would unsettle or disturb our comfortable lives. Jesus came to draw us into an adventure. This adventure is never without risk. It will cost us. But the price is always worth paying because of the reward. The reward is to walk alongside God and experience his great power and love. And then one day to hear those words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Don’t lose heart -- his grace will get you there.

Winning the fight against fear

“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to life-long slavery.” So says Hebrews 2:14-15.

The Old Testament presents God as the great hero, the champion who marches out against his enemies to destroy them: “The Lord goes out like a mighty man, like a man of war he stirs up his zeal; he cries out, he shouts aloud, he shows himself mighty against his foes” (Isaiah 42:13).

Hebrews presents Jesus to us as God himself marching forth to destroy his greatest enemy. That enemy is the devil, and his most powerful weapon is fear.

None of us should be ashamed of admitting that we battle against fear. Fighting fear is fighting Satan, and all of us are in that battle.

What this Scripture shows us is that all the fears we face are rooted in one basic fear, the fear of death. At our desperate and most fearful moments, our heart cries out: “What is going to happen to me?” God answers the question for us: “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:37-39).

God sent Jesus to die on our behalf, to take our punishment on his shoulders, so that we would never be separated from him or from his love. Physical death is nothing more than the doorway to eternal glory. Not one saint who has ever died would ever want to return to this life. They are now part of the heavenly chorus of Revelation 7:9-10, the “great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’”

The battle we fight every day against fear has in truth already been won. Every fear you have has been faced down at the cross. The devil has only one strategy left: to persuade us that this is not so. To fight this battle, we must ask God to send his Spirit into our hearts to strengthen us.

Some fear is good. For instance, the fear of God is a good thing. It puts a boundary line of protection around our conduct. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7).

But most fear is not like this. Most fear is planted in our lives by the enemy.  There is an interesting difference between godly fear and demonic fear. Godly fear is fear of something very real. If we act foolishly and disobey God, this is what will certainly happen. “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it” (Proverbs 22:3). But demonic fears are often perceived dangers rather than real dangers. The mandate of the enemy is to suggest to us that God will not look after us when in fact he will. So he whispers continually in our ears that we will not be provided for, that we will become sick or die, that we will lose our job and so on.

We will face challenges in life. Yet God promises to keep us in the midst of these. We may get sick, yet God is our Healer. Finances may run short, yet God is our Provider. We may feel alone, yet the Lord is our Shepherd. We will face death, yet Jesus is the resurrection and the life.

He will not abandon us. The bottom line is this: your life is not in the hands of people or of circumstances. It is in the hands of God: “He has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we can confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?” (Hebrews 13:5-6).

Jesus made this statement: “Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble” (Matthew 6:34). Knowing that God will provide for us, that he will do our heavy lifting, we can say goodbye to anxiety. Anxiety deals with tomorrow, not today. It lives in the mind and the emotions. It tries to control the future by thinking and feeling. It never works, because the future is not in our control. Jesus does not say every day will be without trouble. In fact, he reminds us there will always be some difficulty to deal with. But he promises to meet us when that trouble comes.

The antidote to anxiety is its opposite -- faith. What is faith? Faith is the confidence that God will act on your behalf. You can’t think yourself into faith. You can’t feel yourself into faith. But you can ask for it, and it will be given to you.

Faith gives you peace in your heart that God will act on your behalf today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and the day after that. It cures us of fear by filling the vacuum that fear lives in.

The battle against fear is real. Most of us fight it every day. But let’s remember that Jesus won that battle at the cross, and he is there waiting to apply it in our lives now.

Rejoice in the Lord always

One of the most familiar commands in the Bible is this: “Rejoice in the Lord always!” (Philippians 4:4). But how do we do this? The answer comes in the next verse: “The Lord is near.” At the darkest times in my life, of which there have been a few, I have cried these words out to the Lord: “Lord, let me know that you are with me.” Not “Lord, let me know I am a success,” for in those times all I know is I am a failure. Not “Lord, let me know that I am strong,” for in those times all I know is I am weak. Not “Lord, let me know that everything is going to be alright,” because I know at those times that nothing is right. No, all I can cry is the one thing I know that in spite of all circumstances is true, “Lord, let me know you are with me.” And somehow in those darkest hours, he sends me reminders that he is right there.

And it is because the Lord is truly with us that Paul goes on: “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” The word for worry or anxiety here means to carry the burden of the future oneself. No one who tries to carry the burden of their future will be at peace. They will be controlling, anxious, inward-looking, insensitive to the needs of others because they are preoccupied with their own needs.

Time and again, right up until the other day, God keeps taking me at times of great personal anxiety and putting me into the life of someone else whose need is greater than mine. Why do you think he does that? Because forcing me to put my own worries aside is the best way to freeing me of them. As I choose to show care to someone else, his Spirit flows through me and he meets me and shows care for me. And when I feel his care, I know he is near.

Knowing that the Lord is near is the cure to anxiety. Knowing that he cares is the cure to fear. There may well be a lot to be anxious about -- the command not to be anxious assumes that we are anxious.  Yet there is an answer to our anxiety. Paul talks about prayer, supplication and thanksgiving, but what he is really saying is this: “Do not be anxious about anything, but pray, pray, pray and pray.” At the darkest hour, when it appears God has forgotten us and abandoned us, the apostle reminds us that God cares about us. He wants us to pray. He wants us to bring our needs before him. He wants us to bring the despairing cry of our hearts to his eternal ears. It is when it seems he is not there that we need to know that he is. And if he is there, he is there to listen and to reply and to help us.

And now comes the best part: “And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” The mind is the place of fear. It is the place where we ponder our situation, where we worry about what is going to happen to us, where we consider the obstacles we face, where we think about all the possible things that could go wrong for us. It is the place of depression and despair, of hopelessness and loss. We can’t think our way out of this place, because in such times there are always more negative thoughts than positive. Neither can we feel our way out, for there are always more negative feelings than positive.

No, the fact is we need to be rescued out of it. The peace of God does not rescue us by analysis or emotions, it rescues us by supernatural power. The peace of God is not the mindless serenity of the bubbling fountain, it is the very breath of Almighty God rushing upon our troubled soul to revive us and to deliver us. It breathes life into our flagging spirit and weary soul, and somehow overpowers and overcomes the negative thoughts and feelings, and lifts us out of the place of fear. It comes whether our requests have been fulfilled or not. It doesn’t give an answer; it is the answer.

Sometimes we have to make a decision of faith that in the face of hardship, of despair, of hopelessness and anxiety, we will choose to rejoice. To rejoice is to place a higher value on our fellowship in Christ than on all the things the world has to offer, including the things we genuinely need. As we choose to rejoice, as we come to him with the desire to submit our lives to his service, as we determine to show love and patience to others, the same Holy Spirit who came with fire at Pentecost will come with power to build a fortress of hope around you.

May the Lord be near to you.