Christ Will Rescue You: December 2022

Tuesday, December 27, 2022

God’s Grace is Our Paradise

2Corinthians 12:9(NLT)
“Each time he said, “My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.” So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me.”

If you listen closely, you can hear the voice of God in this scripture. If you’ve digested it like a good meal and believed it with your whole heart, His Words will reverberate throughout any difficulty you face. We know that there are times in life where difficulties and heartache show up unexpectedly. We cry out to God and ask Him to take away the emotional pain because it can cut like a knife. We expect Him to do so immediately, but we must recognize that when we ask God to take away our emotional pain, we’re asking Him to take away the love as well. That is something that He will not do. However, what He will do is comfort our hearts and take on our burdens. Understand that He also expects us to do our part as well. We must focus our attention on loving Him, so that we can be the overcomers He’s made us in Christ and learn to live and love through His grace.

We need to be strengthened in our conviction that God always keeps His promises. We should hold to the truth of 2Corinthians 12:9 with all that we are, because the truth of God’s promise will encourage you to keep the faith. And make no mistake, at times, it can be a battle in our own hearts and minds to keep the faith, especially where our significant relationships are concerned.

In Proverbs 3:5, God tells us to trust in Him with all our hearts, and He also warns us not to lean on our own understanding. Our Heavenly Father isn’t making a suggestion here. He’s directing us to trust Him with our whole hearts and to steer clear of making decisions and choices without first consulting Him. Huge mistakes happen when we fail to do this. In Proverbs 4:23(NLT), He tells us to “Guard your heart above all else, for it determines the course of your life.” God is giving us very simple instruction here. The heart is the source, and He’s telling us that if the heart is polluted, then issues become polluted. So, not guarding our hearts in a way that pleases God will always come back to bite us.

We are the ones in charge of our hearts and minds. God’s warning and instruction in Proverbs 4:23 is to keep our hearts pure, to watch what goes into them and watch what comes out of them. He wants us to learn to guard our hearts, to be careful about who we love and how we love, so that we will not make relationship decisions that work against us rather than for us.

God wants our hearts to be at peace, so that we are kept by Him through any situation. Our problem is that too often we leave God out of the equation. We’re jumping into relationships without His guidance, so when trouble hits, we don’t have the level of faith in Him that we should. Because of His incomparable grace, God wants to help us make the right relationship decisions. He also wants to help us heal and become better when we make the wrong ones, but we must be willing to learn the lesson of His love and grace. This means that we learn to invite Heavenly Father into every aspect of our existence.

God’s grace is His unmerited favor. We can’t do anything to earn it, He gives it freely. God demonstrated His grace toward us through forgiving our sins and giving us salvation through His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. When our precious Lord was fastened to the cross as a sacrifice for our sins, he prayed for the people that crucified him. Jesus was crucified between two thieves. One of them that hung beside him had a hard heart and scoffed at Jesus, but the other criminal protested and came to Jesus’s defense. Luke 23:42-43(NLT) tells us, “42 Then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your Kingdom." 43 And Jesus replied, "I assure you, today you will be with me in paradise." The response of Jesus to this thief is another clear and wonderful example of God’s grace.

We are delivered, saved, and made whole through the grace of God. His grace is our paradise. Instead of taking away our pain, our Heavenly Father desires us to be strengthened through His grace. In other words, God’s grace is our strategy for overcoming any fear, heartache, or troubling condition. Nothing is too big or too hard for our God. Let Him into your pain and give yourself totally to Him. Don’t focus on the pain or hold on to it. Be committed to love greater through Jesus Christ! Focus on God’s grace to strengthen and help you become the person He has predestined you to be. His grace is all you need, and this is always the lesson of victory over any heartache that we endure.■

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, December 20, 2022

The Lord is My Strength and My Shield

Psalm 34:18(NLT)

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.”

Karen took a part-time job as a receptionist after her last son graduated high school. She liked the change and was contemplating finishing her associate degree in communications, but these days it’s the last thing on her mind. Karen has a crushed spirit and everyone around her knows it. Her joy of being a loving mother and wife, and her love of baking, is notorious. She shares her generosity with co-workers by bringing in delicious baked surprises, and they are all so very fond of her. The way she’s been acting lately has left them very concerned. She seems emotionally drained, and this isn't like Karen at all. The truth is that her marriage has been in turmoil for the last several months. Her husband moved out, and before his affair, she had depended on him for financial support. She doesn’t think she can hold things together, emotionally or financially.

Life can throw things our way that we never saw coming. They seemingly come out of nowhere and throw our lives in turmoil. There are very few things that can cause the kind of emotional uneasiness that a situation which completely upends life as you knew it will bring. If we go under the hood a little bit, we’d see that we’re devastated because deep down, we placed all our confidence in an individual that wasn't the Lord Jesus Christ. When this individual disappoints us, the disruption is experienced at our core. For the first time, we have an opportunity to look internally and recognize that we’ve built the foundation of our strength and power on a person. This person is not equipped to handle the heft of our expectations, dreams, and happiness. No human being is.

That’s a shocker for most people. We’re accustomed to making the spouse, the children, the job, or the wealth our everything. There are some men that use their bank accounts as the foundation of their manhood. If ever something happened to all their money, they’d crumble or become an unrecognizable version of themselves. Deep down, they are not anchored in truth, but anchored in the love of money, which 1Timothy 6:10 tells us is the root of all evil.

Whether it is spouses or boyfriends, women can sometimes make the mistake of clinging to the significant man in their lives in a way that locks God out of their hearts. We can develop very unhealthy fears when our Heavenly Father and His Word is not the foundation of our existences. We make our husbands and our boyfriends our everything, and we don’t realize we’ve done this until they no longer want to be a part of our lives. We’re devastated when this happens, and it reveals that we’ve been clinging to them rather than building our faith and confidence in God. Karen made the mistake of doing this. She has repented and is learning to lean on God with her whole heart, and to walk in the strength of His power.

We must remember that our spouses and boyfriends are not our property. They don’t belong to us. We all belong to God, and our responsibility as spiritually mature men and women is to pray continually for our spouses and loved ones, and to recognize that Jesus Christ is the head of our lives. He commands us in Matthew 6:33(ESV) to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” We can’t honor this commandment if we are depending on others in an unhealthy way.

Building faith
God wants us to build our faith in Him before we’re engaged in serious significant relationships. He wants to help us navigate the complexities through His Holy Spirit. Consider how we build and maintain anything of quality in our everyday lives. For instance, in the natural realm, buildings and homes are very useful and meaningful to us. They are necessary and require construction. We understand very clearly that good construction requires quality tools and materials. This is a given. Also required is the expert skill of the person that will be using the tools and materials. So, the premise that a quality outcome is a result of quality construction and maintenance is very applicable to how we approach building and maintaining our faith in God.

Also, consider our physical body. To take care of them, we need to ingest and digest water and the proper food, and we also need to exercise. We must commit to these practices to maintain good health. In the spiritual sense, our faith in God must be increased and strengthened to maintain a quality existence. Faith is like a muscle, and to keep it flexible and pliable to God’s Will, we must ingest and digest the Word of God. Romans 10:17(NLT) tells us, “So faith comes from hearing, that is, hearing the Good News about Christ.”

Faith is required for any quality thing we attempt to do. It doesn’t come from another person, so a relationship with a mere mortal can’t give us faith. When our actions convey that this is our approach in a relationship, that we’re relying on ourselves and the other person to hold things together, we’re headed down the wrong path. The love of God in Christ is the only glue strong enough to hold a relationship together, and our faith in Him must demonstrate our understanding of this truth. God is our everything, not another person.

When our hearts are broken and our situations seem unbearable, faith in God is our rescue. Psalm 28:7(NLT) affirms, “The LORD is my strength and shield. I trust him with all my heart. He helps me, and my heart is filled with joy. I burst out in songs of thanksgiving.” Psalm 28 is a cry to God for help. It’s a prayer from the psalmist, King David, who had enemies seeking to harm and destroy him. David believed in God’s power and love, and he praised God with thanksgiving because David had faith in the victory God would give him. God came to David’s aid, and He will do the same for us. You and I don’t know what the future holds, but we must know that God holds our today, our tomorrow and our future. When we seek Him with all our hearts, God is able and willing to restore us and give us peace. His Will is that we trust Him as our strength and shield with all our hearts, because He is faithful to bless and help us and our faith in Him will not disappoint.■

English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

“The Lord is My Strength and My Shield”, written by Kim for https://rescuefromdomesticviolence.blogspot.com© 2022. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

The Pain of Letting Go

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.”
Psalm 34:18 (NLT)

“I never prepared myself for this kind of pain – we were fine, until we weren’t.”

A woman described the emotional pain she felt after the break-up of her long-time relationship. She said her life began to spiral downward after he abandoned her. “I never saw it coming, and I certainly never thought that our relationship would fall apart.” She said. Some version of that statement has been spoken over the years by women too numerous to count. We give our hearts to the significant man in our lives, and sometimes they are unequipped to reciprocate it, or they simply don’t appreciate it. We’re sorry that we put them in the prime number one spot undeservedly, and if we’re blatantly honest with ourselves, we’ll recognize that doing this was the origin of our hurt.

Psalm 146:3(ESV) says, "Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation." Human beings cannot save one another. We are unequipped to be someone’s everything, because that is a position that only the Lord can occupy. This truth must be anchored in us to the point that we do as Jesus Christ commands in Matthew 6:33(ESV), which is to “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.” God is the only Supplier of our needs, and this is something many of us ignore when it comes to relationships with men.

In our significant relationships, even before we get married, we willingly and blindly head down the path of seeking the man first. We put their needs above all else, and we ignore what God has said in His Word. We do this, put the man’s needs over God’s desires for us, because there’s an emptiness in the hearts of every human being that has ever been born into this world. As women, we experience this emptiness in our hearts and convince ourselves that a man other than the person of Jesus Christ can fill the void. This isn’t possible, and for many of us it is a tough pill to swallow. We long to be loved totally and completely all our lives. We have this longing for love because God created us for relationship and fellowship with Him. This longing, this seemingly unquenchable thirst, can only be satisfied by Him and Him alone.

So, in truth, it’s not when the breakup happens that our hearts burn from missing the presence of the other person, it goes way back to the place where we first denied to fully open our hearts to the Lord Jesus Christ. The disappointment from the man that hurt us exposed the longing for true, lasting, and real love, but it is indeed old pain. Romans 8:22 says about the earth, “For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” Since sin entered the world, all of creation is groaning, conveying its pain and despair for the absence of God’s glorious perfection that it once knew, and so it is with us.

When our souls realize that we’ve tried to use a substitute for the real love of Jesus Christ, for the first time we notice the absence of something that is overwhelmingly precious and is a treasure just for us. It is a wealth of richness that we can hardly imagine, but God tells us that it is in Him, and all we have to do is ask Him to receive it.

Colossians 2:10 (NLT) declares, “And ye are complete in Him, which is the head of all principality and power.” This truth is monumentally important to our emotional and mental health. You might know a woman that is either going through heartbreak or has endured it. Some of them say things like, “He is my everything, and I don’t know how to live without him…” or “He’s my life. I’m lost without him.” We say things like this when we’re not convinced of our identity in Christ. God created us to be whole and complete in Christ. When we begin relationships with this truth firmly anchored in our being, we will not look for a man to complete us, because this is something he simply cannot do.

We should never trust someone else’s love more than we trust in God’s love, truth, and provision. He says we are complete in Christ, and He, our Creator, is the definitive authority on the subject. In truth, losing the love of another person should never be our undoing. If it is, it means that we have idolized someone, and this is never good. Getting over the hurt requires us to open our eyes, and most importantly, open our hearts to Jesus Christ as we never have before. He invites us in Matthew 11:28-30 to come to him with our brokenness, and he will give us comfort and peace.

Let go and let God! Surrender the pain you feel over the man that caused you unhappiness or is no longer a part of your life. Yes, it may hurt for little while, but the swelling will go down as you allow the love of Christ to fill up your empty places. Choose to honor your completeness in Christ more than you do the pain. You can’t help the fact that the man chose not to honor you as God’s treasure, but you can honor yourself that way. Verbally declare the truth that you are more than a conqueror because Christ loves you (Romans 8:37). Declare that you live in his peace and love (Philippians 4:7), and you can do all things through Christ because he gives you strength (Philippians 4:13). Do this as often as you can and pray continually. God will make it so that the days ahead of you will be far better than those behind you. So have faith in Him and thank Him for loving and healing you by His power and grace. ■