His Power to Deliver
Faithful Christians often wonder, “Why does God defer our deliverance instead of responding? He is all-powerful, so why doesn’t he solve our troubles instantly? If we are delivered, why do we so often face the same circumstances again?”
Paul explains clearly God’s purpose in this. “But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (2 Corinthians 1:9, ESV). Paul understood that the Lord, in his loving sovereignty, had a purpose in Paul’s difficulties: to shift his reliance onto a God who has the power to raise the dead and thus cause his faith to flourish.
I believe the key to understanding these things is found in the phrase “God who raises the dead.” We are reliant on a God whose powers go beyond all other powers, including death. We are his, and when he allows us to be confronted by a trial, we must know that no power can triumph over his purposes for us.
A woman with a continuous issue of blood spent everything she had to find a cure but was never healed. What she needed was beyond her own resources. When Jesus came along, she recognized what Paul knew about the Lord’s power to deliver. The same was true of Lazarus’s sisters, Martha and Mary. Their brother died, and none of their resources could bring him back. Their only hope was in a God who had power to raise the dead.
What crisis do you face right now? What problem leaves you tossing and turning, causing you to fear what the future holds? If you follow Jesus, ultimately, every remedy you need rests on the power of God. He resurrects dead marriages to life. He brings addicted runaways safely home. He breathes faith into lifeless hearts.
Every Christian must begin by confessing, “I am the problem, and I need God’s touch on my life.” This is how deliverance begins, and it is powerful and thorough. The work of deliverance has to begin within God’s people in repentance, faith, and hope. “On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again” (2 Corinthians 1:10).
The work he does in each of us is for a lifetime. No circumstance is beyond his power to deliver.
