God begins the process of surrender by knocking us off our high horse. This literally happened to Paul. He was going his self-assured way, riding toward Damascus, when a blinding light came from heaven. “He fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’” (Acts 9:4, NKJV).
The Holy Spirit gave David the key to deliverance from his sorrows. David could say, “The reason God delivered me is that I am precious to him. My God delights in me!”
“He also brought me out into a broad place; he delivered me because he delighted in me” (Psalm 18:19, NKJV).
“If you ask anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14, NKJV). We show the measure of our Christ by what we ask in his name. We are told to ask large and to expect great things. We show forth the greatness of Christ by the greatness of our requests. We have so little of Christ because we ask so little.
We limit our petitions to material things. It’s true that we are to make our needs known, but to ask only for food and shelter is to diminish our vision of his greatness.
“Giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 5:20 NKJV).
We are all pressed down by problems and distress, but Paul has given us the answer when he tells us to “do it unto the Father.” The great preacher John Calvin said that singing and giving thanks always is all feigning and hypocrisy unless we are fully persuaded that God is our Father.
Some time ago, I had an unusual experience while in meditation with the Lord. His still, small voice asked me, “Do you still believe? Do you still believe I love you unconditionally…that you are right now being led by the Holy Spirit…that I bottle every tear you shed…that you are right now in this place, in the perfect will of God?
God has a preordained plan to deliver us out of our fiery trials. No matter what you are going through, he has a plan tailored for every difficulty, one that could never be conceived by the human mind.
For example, take the trials that Israel faced in the desert. There was no bread or food of any kind. What committee could have come up with this idea? “Let’s pray that tomorrow we wake up and discover white flakes of food with a taste of honey covering the ground.”
Today I want to speak to believers who are overwhelmed by accumulating afflictions. You are not alone. In the psalms, David tells of being nearly crushed by unbearable troubles. “My heart is severely pained within me, and the terrors of death have fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling have come upon me, and horror has overwhelmed me” (Psalm 55:4-5, NKJV).
Search the scriptures, and you will not find anyone who speaks more than David about trusting God. No one opened up more about seeking and waiting on the Lord for strength in times of need.
Faith is a command. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. It is written, “Now the just shall live by faith; but if anyone draws back, My soul has no pleasure in him” (Hebrews 10:38, NKJV).
Unbelief is a bottomless pit of fear and discouragement. It begins with fearing what we cannot see. One fear leads to another, then we begin fearing everything present and future. The result is uncontrollable anxiety and despair. This is not a small issue with God. It is a matter of life and death.
God has embedded in me a dread of unbelief. This dread is the result of searching the scriptures for examples of the dire consequences of unbelief. I thank him for revealing to me the harm and ruin caused by unbelief. We believers have taken this matter too lightly, thinking that God overlooks the doubt of those facing great affliction and hard times.
“Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated and untrained men, they marveled. And they realized that they had been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13 NKJV).
We see in Acts 4 that as Peter and John stood waiting for judgment to be pronounced, the man who had just been healed stood with them. There, in the flesh, was living proof that Peter and John had been with Jesus. Now, as the synagogue rulers looked on “and seeing the man who had been healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it” (Acts 4:14).