Christ Will Rescue You

Friday, September 11, 2026

Blessed Are Those Who Wait for Him

Trusting God When You Cannot See What He Is Doing

Isaiah 30:18 (NIV)
"Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion. For the LORD is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him!"

Waiting Can Reveal What Is in Our Hearts

There are things we carry in our hearts that weigh us down, and sometimes we don't recognize how deeply they have affected the way we think, make decisions, and respond to difficult circumstances. Fear can become so familiar that we call it wisdom. Trying to control everything can feel like being responsible. We can become accustomed to expecting the worst and call it being realistic. This is one reason God has given us the record of those who walked with Him before we came on the scene. Romans 15:4 tells us that the Scriptures were written to teach us and give us hope as we wait for God's promises to be fulfilled. The lives of those in the Old and New Testament show us people who trusted God and still struggled, made mistakes, became afraid, and sometimes tried to take matters into their own hands. Yet God continued to teach them, correct them, and strengthen their faith.

Abraham Had to Learn to Trust God

Abraham is one of the clearest examples we have of what it means to grow in our trust in God. He was seventy-five years old when God called him and promised to make him the father of a great nation, but Abraham was about one hundred years old when Isaac was born. That's a long time to hold on to a promise, especially when everything you can see tells you it isn't going to happen. Abraham believed God, but believing didn't mean that he never struggled with fear or doubt. There were times when he looked at his circumstances and responded to what he saw instead of what God had said. He misrepresented Sarah as his sister because he was afraid he would be killed because of her beauty, and Sarah eventually became so discouraged with waiting that she tried to bring God's promise to pass another way through Hagar. They had faith, but their faith had to grow. And I think that's something we need to understand. We can genuinely believe God and still have areas of our lives where we haven't learned to trust Him completely. The waiting has a way of exposing those places. What we do when we're afraid, when nothing seems to be changing, and when God's timing doesn't agree with ours can tell us a great deal about where we still need to grow in our trust in Him.

Fear Can Make Us Reach for Our Own Solutions

Fear has a way of convincing us that we have to do something, even when we don’t know what to do. Abraham and Sarah fell into this trap. Instead of trusting God to protect them, Abraham devised a plan that involved lying about Sarah being his wife. When Sarah became tired of waiting for the child God had promised, she came up with a plan of her own. We can read their record thousands of years later and clearly see where they went wrong, but it isn’t always so easy to recognize when we are doing the same thing. We pray and ask God for direction, but when the answer doesn’t come as quickly as we would like, we start trying to work things out ourselves.

Proverbs 3:5–6 (NLT) tells us, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his Will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.” Trusting God does not mean that we do nothing. It means that we seek His wisdom before we move and that we refuse to allow fear, desperation, loneliness, or impatience to make our decisions for us. This is especially important when we are dealing with circumstances that are harmful or dangerous. God does not require us to remain in danger to prove that we trust Him. We can seek help, tell the truth about what is happening, and take the necessary steps to protect ourselves while continuing to seek God for His wisdom and direction.

Our Confidence Must Be in God

Romans 4:20–21 (NLT) tells us that Abraham “never wavered in believing God’s promise” and that he became “fully convinced that God is able to do whatever he promises.” This was the faith of a man who had walked with God and learned some things about His faithfulness. Abraham’s confidence was no longer in what he could see or what he could figure out on his own. His confidence was in God. This is where our confidence must be as well. We should always be willing to examine ourselves before the Lord, and when the Holy Spirit reveals something in us that needs to change, we should be humble enough to receive His correction. But we must not make the mistake of believing that every hardship or prolonged difficulty in our lives is evidence that we haven’t had enough faith. God was faithful when Abraham was seventy-five, and He was still faithful when Abraham was one hundred. Hebrews 10:23 (NLT) tells us, “Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise.” Our circumstances may change, and there may be times when we don’t understand what God is doing, but His character does not change.

Trust Him While You Wait

Isaiah 30:18 (NLT) says, “So the LORD must wait for you to come to him so he can show you his love and compassion. For the LORD is a faithful God. Blessed are those who wait for his help.” Waiting for God is not about sitting still while life falls apart around us. Neither is it about trying to manipulate circumstances until we get the outcome we want. It is about trusting God enough to seek Him, listen to Him, obey Him, and allow Him to lead us. There may be something He wants us to stop doing, something we need to confront, somewhere we need to go for help, or something within our own hearts that needs to change. We cannot decide ahead of time what His direction must look like. We simply have to be willing to follow it. God sees what we cannot see, He knows what we do not know, and He loves us far too much to leave us where we are. So while we wait, we keep seeking Him. We keep growing. We keep obeying. And most importantly, we keep our confidence in the One who has promised never to leave or forsake us.■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.

Tuesday, September 1, 2026

A Fully Surrendered Life

Try as we might, none of us will ever get away from the reality that what we believe about God will eventually show up in what we believe about ourselves and how we live. If we see God as distant, unreliable, or uninvolved, we will live as though everything depends on us. But when we know Him as our Creator, our Father, our Provider, and the One who has called us according to His purpose, we begin to understand that we were never expected to manufacture a meaningful life on our own. We can do what God has called us to do because He has already provided what we need to walk in His Will.

Ephesians 2:10 (NLT) tells us, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” That verse says a whole lot about who we are and why we are here. God is our Creator. He engineered our design. He knew exactly what He was doing when He shaped and formed us, and through Jesus Christ, He has made us new. We are not random people wandering around the earth trying to come up with a purpose for ourselves. God had purpose in mind before we ever took our first breath.

Doing good comes standard with our packaging. We have been recreated in Christ Jesus and empowered through the Holy Spirit to live in a way that expresses the goodness, love, wisdom, and character of God. This does not mean that everything we do will automatically be right, nor does it mean that surrender comes naturally to us. We still have a flesh nature that wants its own way. We still have opinions, desires, fears, habits, and plans that can compete with what God wants. This is precisely why surrender is so important. God has already prepared the good works, but we must be willing to yield ourselves to Him so that He can lead us into them.

Romans 12:1 (NLT) tells us, “And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.”

A fully surrendered life says, “Father, I belong to You. My life belongs to You. My gifts belong to You. My plans, my relationships, my desires, my future—all of it belongs to You.” That kind of surrender is not weakness, and it certainly is not losing yourself. It is finally placing your life into the hands of the One who knows what it was created to become. The more we surrender to God, the less energy we waste fighting to make life conform to our own limited understanding, and the freer we become to walk in what He planned for us long ago.

But we also have to understand what Godly surrender is—and what it is not—because when surrender is misunderstood, we can find ourselves yielding to things God never asked us to accept.

We need to be very clear about what surrender means, especially when we are dealing with domestic violence and abuse. Surrendering our lives to God does not mean surrendering ourselves to the abuse of another person. God did not create us in Christ Jesus, call us His masterpiece, and give us His Holy Spirit so that another human being could control, intimidate, degrade, or destroy us. There is a tremendous difference between surrendering to God and being controlled by a person. Sometimes we get these things mixed up because we’ve been taught that being a good Christian means enduring whatever comes our way without complaint. We have been told to forgive, submit, pray, and trust God, and all of those things are biblical. But none of them give another person permission to abuse us. Our surrender belongs to God.

Psalm 34:18 (NLT) tells us, “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” God knows what abuse does to a person. He knows what it is like when you have been talked down to so much that you begin to question your own judgment. He knows what fear does when you have lived with it day after day. He knows when you have covered things up, made excuses, blamed yourself, or kept hoping that if you could just do something differently, things would change. But notice what the Word says God does for those whose spirits have been crushed. He comes close, and He rescues. God is not asking us to call something good that is harming us. He wants us to see the truth, because we cannot surrender something to God that we refuse to acknowledge is happening.

Sometimes a fully surrendered life requires us to give God the very thing we have been holding onto with both hands. That may be the marriage we thought we would have, the person we keep hoping someone will become, our fear of starting over, our embarrassment about what people will think, or even our belief that somehow we can fix everything if we just try a little harder. We have to trust God with our whole hearts. We have to trust that He can lead us, that He can provide for us, and that He can give us wisdom for what comes next. Surrender does not mean that we will immediately know what to do or that every decision will be easy. It means that we stop making fear our master and give God permission to lead us wherever His truth takes us. A fully surrendered life belongs to Him, and when we know that we belong to God, we understand that no one else has the right to take possession of what belongs to Him. ■

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Consistent and Unwavering

When Life Changes, God Doesn't

I don’t know if any of you have ever had a conversation with someone who is truly disappointed with life, but I have. I know a woman who had lost almost everything that was important to her. She became jobless, then homeless and car-less, and eventually her children were taken away. As a single mother, she struggled to hold everything together for as long as she could, but it seemed like every turn she made brought another problem. Every time she thought things might finally get better, something else happened. Eventually, she gave up.

What troubled me most wasn't just that she had become disappointed with life; she had become disappointed with God. She believed God was punishing her for something she couldn't understand, and the more difficult her circumstances got, the more difficult it became for her to trust Him. Her mind got so entrenched in that way of thinking that she stopped looking for reasons to believe God and started finding reasons not to. She became bitter, and eventually doubt became more comfortable to her than faith.

I think we have to be careful about allowing what is happening around us to determine what we believe about the God who is above us. Life has a way of changing without asking our permission. One day everything can seem stable, and the next day we can find ourselves dealing with something we never saw coming. A relationship changes, a job disappears, money gets tight, a loved one becomes sick, a door closes, or something we prayed would happen simply doesn't happen. And when enough of these things pile up, we can begin to look at God through the circumstances instead of looking at our circumstances through what we know about God.

Letting our circumstances determine how we view God is a dangerous place to be, because circumstances are temporary and constantly changing, but God's character is not. Malachi 3:6 (NLT) says, “I am the LORD, and I do not change.” Think about that for a moment. The God who loved you when you were celebrating is the same God who loves you when you're crying. The God who was faithful when everything was going right is the same God who remains faithful when everything seems to be going wrong. Your circumstances may change, but God doesn't.

That doesn't mean we will always understand what God is doing. In fact, there will be times when we don't understand it at all. We may pray about something for months or even years and still not see the answer we hoped for. We may ask God why He allowed something to happen and hear nothing that satisfies our question. We may become disappointed, frustrated, and even angry. God already knows what's in our hearts, so there is no reason to pretend with Him. We can tell Him that we're hurting. We can tell Him that we're disappointed. We can tell Him that we don't understand. But we have to be careful not to allow what we don't understand about God to become greater than what we already know about Him. Lamentations 3:22–23 (NLT) reminds us, “The faithful love of the LORD never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies begin afresh each morning.” His faithfulness is not dependent upon whether today looks the way we wanted it to look. He is faithful because that is who He is.

This is why our relationship with Jesus Christ has to be deeper than what God can do for us. If I only trust God when He answers my prayers the way I want Him to, then I'm not really trusting Him; I'm trusting the outcome I want Him to produce. Real faith has to take us beyond that.

There will be moments when we have to say, “Lord, I don't understand this, but I still trust You.” We may not understand the season, but we can know the One who is walking through it with us. Hebrews 13:8 (NLT) says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” That means Jesus doesn't change because my life changed. He doesn't become less loving because I'm hurting. He doesn't become less faithful because I'm waiting. He doesn't stop being good because I don't understand His timing. If I have built my relationship with Him on who He is rather than simply on what He does, then even disappointment can become an opportunity to know Him more deeply.

The enemy would love to use difficult seasons to convince us that God has abandoned us. He wants us to look at everything that has gone wrong and conclude that God doesn't care, isn't listening, or must be punishing us. But we cannot allow pain to become our theology. We have to return to God's Word and remind ourselves of what is true. Romans 8:38–39 tells us that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing. Not disappointment. Not failure. Not loss. Not confusion. Not the season we're in. That doesn't mean God will prevent every painful thing from happening, but it does mean we never have to walk through those painful things believing that we are abandoned by Him. We can be disappointed and still trust Him. Faith isn't pretending that everything is okay; faith is knowing that even when everything isn't okay, God is still God.

So if you are in a season right now where your life doesn't look anything like you expected it to, don't let this season tell you who God is. Let God's Word tell you who He is. Your circumstances may change tomorrow, next month, or next year, but God's character remains the same. He is still faithful. He is still loving. He is still merciful. He is still worthy of your trust. And because of Jesus Christ, you can come to Him exactly as you are, even when your faith feels weak and your heart is tired. You don't have to have all the answers before you trust Him. Sometimes you simply have to make the decision that regardless of what changes around you, you will not change your mind about God. He has been faithful before, He is faithful now, and He will be faithful to what He has promised in His Word. ■

Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.