Christ Will Rescue You

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Through God's Love

2 Corinthians 1:3-4(NLT)
“3 All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. 4 He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.”

“I’ve prayed and asked God to help me because I don’t know what to do.”

Many of us know of a friend or family member that needs advice or comfort in their time of trouble. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 tells us that God is the Source of all comfort. He is the One that covers our entire being in His peace, and He comforts us like no other. When we have been strengthened by His wonderful comfort in our times of trouble, He makes it clear in this passage that we have the privilege and responsibility to pass it on.

Not long ago, I bumped into Sharon, someone that I used to work with and hadn’t seen in a long-time. She asked me how I was doing, and I immediately did the same. Without hesitation she began to share with me the details of some trouble in her life. It’s a situation involving her relationship with her ex-husband and her current boyfriend. Six years ago, after twenty-something years of marriage and two children, Sharon decided to file for divorce. She and her husband maintained an amicable relationship after the divorce. She remained single for a few years and concentrated on the kids, but a chance meeting with her high school sweetheart stirred up old feelings, and they began dating two years ago.

Sharon’s ex-husband never gave up hope that one day they’d find a way to re-unite. Faced with her husband’s desire to re-marry, she said, “He’s a good provider. He’s the father of my children and my family loves him. I’ll always have feelings for my ex-husband, but I love my boyfriend. I don’t want to hurt anyone, and I want to make a good decision.” Whenever you’re ambivalent and facing an important life decision like this, it’s a sure sign to turn to God and wait on Him.

We’ve been schooled by society that we should always trust our hearts, that the heart wants what the heart wants, and it will never steer us wrong. This is the opposite of what God’s Word tells us in Jeremiah 17:9(NLT). It says, “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” This verse allows us to understand clearly that none of us know our hearts as well as we think. God, however, knows every detail about us. There isn’t a nook or cranny within our being that is hidden from His eyes. He knows us intimately, and He knows us far better than we know ourselves. He also knows what is best for our lives.

He tells us in Revelation 1:8(NLT), “I am the Alpha and the Omega—the beginning and the end,” says the Lord God. “I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come—the Almighty One.” God knows the beginning at the end, and He knows the end at the beginning. He knows our futures. Therefore, He knows everything about the people in our lives and how these individuals will ultimately impact our well-being.

We can’t see our way clearly, and this is why Jesus Christ commanded us in Matthew 6:33 to always seek God first in all we attempt to do. Heavenly Father is righteous, and He will always steer us in the direction of His perfect Will. God also commands us in Proverbs 3:5 to trust in Him with all our hearts. He tells us not to lean on our own understanding. In other words, we shouldn’t lean solely on our hearts for direction about important decisions in life. We must lean on God and His guidance, because He is the only One that can tell us the right way to go.

Sharon’s husband had been as good to his family as he knew to be. He had sacrificed and provided for them and was willing to continue doing so. But she had gotten bored in their marriage, and no longer loved him the way she once had. She views love chiefly as an emotion and not as the commitment and decision that God has informed us it is meant to be.

Love is pure yumminess. We all crave it in some way, and it is very easy to become hooked on the feeling, but loving God’s way is so much more than this. Knowing and trusting God is love and every other good thing and every other kind of love is birthed from loving Him. Romans 8:28(KJV) declares, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” The knowledge of this verse should be the basis for how we extend God’s comfort to others. God is the One that causes all things to work together for our good, and the condition for this is simply that we love Him with all our hearts and minds.

Philippians 2:13(NLT) tells us, “For God is working in you, giving you the desire and the power to do what pleases him.” Loving God by living according to the example of Christ is the solution to all life’s problems. It gives us the strength and the desire to do what pleases Him. Doing what pleases God always ends in our success, because there is no greater remedy or joy than loving God through Christ. There is no greater plan for us than learning more about His love and applying it to every aspect of our lives. This cancels all ambivalence and realigns us totally with God’s Will. Our faith in God sets it all in motion.

It’s no question that we all go through seasons in our lives where we experience pain, suffering or ambivalence about what direction we should take. As we trust God and receive His comfort and healing, we are strengthened. We can then comfort others. We can do this with confidence that He has given us authority through His love to pour out love, grace, and comfort to others. Our message should then be clear, when we don’t know what to do, trust God. This is the direction that all believers should point those in discomfort. We should pray for them and encourage them to pray for God’s guidance and most especially, we should all pray that He will teach and help us to love greater through Christ.■

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, July 12, 2022

The Source of All Comfort

A good friend of mine just found out that her husband of eighteen years cheated on her. To make matters worse, she learned he fathered a child with the other woman. She and her husband have two children, and now she feels that so much about the life they shared was a lie. She’s having very troubling thoughts, isn’t sleeping and the heartbreak is like nothing she’s ever encountered. The whole situation is consuming her mind and heart, and she says that she feels as if her insides are just melting away because she can’t get past the shock of it all. Her mother told her that at least she now knows the truth, but this hadn’t been any consolation, and at this point, nothing seems to ease the pain she is experiencing.

When life presents the kind of challenges that my friend is facing, it feels like the bottom has collapsed beneath us, and we need reassurance that everything is going to be okay. Our Heavenly Father is the One that holds our futures. He offers the comfort and assurance that will support the very core of our beings. In 2Corinthians 1:3-4(NLT), we learn about the comfort He promises to give us. This verse says, “All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. 4 He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.”

God is truly the only One that can bring us comfort and peace. As 2Corinthians 1:3 proclaims, He is the Source of ALL comfort, and He desires that we bring all our problems to Him, because He cares for us and wants to help.

To increase our faith in the comfort God offers, examine the way most of us view physical pain. It is usually felt when we are experiencing a physical ailment of some sort. Although many physical conditions or abnormalities gradually progress over time, at its worse, physical pain grabs our attention very quickly. We immediately set out to remedy the situation. We’ll either take an over-the-counter medication or if it’s more serious and persists, we’ll make an appointment to be seen by our physician. So, it’s very normal to address physical pain, and to do so before it gets out of hand. The point is that in most cases in which we experience physical pain, we have no problem trusting that there’s a remedy for our physical ailment, and we also believe that this remedy will make us feel better.

None of us can readily see inside our physical bodies, but when our brain receives a message that something in an area of our bodies is ailing, pain sensors go off and we feel it. We then take the medicine prescribed, and even though we can’t see it working through our bloodstream, comfort and relief registers in our brain and we feel better. All of this is going on and does so with millions and millions of folks every day. None of them can visually see this inner process. We can’t see it, but we have all been taught and trained to trust the process and believe in it, and most of us do.

Emotional pain can be just as, and even more, intense that physical pain. We understand that emotions are not tangible. No one has ever seen emotional pain with their physical eyes, but most of us have very definitely witnessed the effects this pain can have on a person’s life. It pounces on an individual unexpectedly and can make us feel like we’re carrying around a thousand-pound boulder on our shoulders. If we stop to think about this, the realization must sink in that the weight of pain is in fact a spiritual reality, because the weight can’t be held or touched, only felt. It is a spiritual issue that can only be truly addressed by God’s spiritual medicine.

Both physical and emotional pain rely on signals, and none of us can visually see them working against us, but when that pain hits, we learn with all due haste to trust something we can’t see. The thing we must also trust is that God’s willingness and ability to comfort and heal us is more reliable than the pain we feel. Psalm 34:18(ESV) tells us, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.”

It’s no question that we will go through some seasons in our lives where we suffer physically and emotionally. We might not reach for an over-the-counter medication for our emotional pain, but the discomfort means that there are internal issues that need to be addressed. The pain didn’t suddenly make a grand entrance when the person we loved most betrayed us. It’s been inside us for quite some time. The event of betrayal caused us to snap to attention about it. We can’t heal it ourselves. We need Jesus Christ, because he is the healer of broken hearts. He alone can pick up the pieces of our broken lives and put them back together again. He tells us in Matthew 11:29(ESV), “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”

God is the Source of all comfort, and we must trust that His love is the medicine we need for everything that is wrong in life. Romans 8:32(NLT) says, “Since he did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t he also give us everything else?” God gave His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, as a sacrifice for our sins in order to save us from a life of sin and death. Heavenly Father didn’t want us to walk around sad, downtrodden, and broken. He wants us to live a life that is more than abundant. He wants us to live in His love and light. God is able to heal our broken hearts. If we will place as much faith in this truth as we do the pain we feel, God will comfort and restore us. Through our faith, He’ll give us a new heart and fill our lives with His everlasting joy.■

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.

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Matters of the Heart

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

I trusted my man with my life, and instead of having my back, he took advantage of my love and trust. I won’t ever trust a man again.

When our hearts are bruised and abandoned in a relationship, it’s common to feel that the man has taken advantage of our love and violated our trust. The sting of a situation like this can linger and make us bitter, so much so that some of us vow to never trust a man again. Some of us may also allow this heartache to interfere with our relationship with Heavenly Father. We play the blame game and blame God for allowing us to get into such a hurtful situation. We think that He should have warned us or kept us from ever meeting this man. We must come to the reality that blaming anyone for our broken heart isn’t going to lessen the pain. It only keeps us from examining the larger issue, which is why we attract relationships with people that continually disappoint us.

Relationships reflect how we view ourselves. This is a big dose of truth that many are not able to digest. We’ve been told things like, “we can’t help who we fall in love with” or “the heart wants what the heart wants.” Myths like these convey a heart that is out of control. They convey that people were not created with the ability to be disciplined about matters of the heart, but God’s Word says the opposite.

God is not to blame for our heartache and pain, and it is very important for us to correct this in our hearts and minds. Our Heavenly Father is a loving God. 1John 4:16 affirms that God is love, and that we can know and rely on the love that He has for us all, because His love will not fail. This verse also says that all who live in God’s love also live in Him, and He lives in them. This is tremendously good news! Living in God’s love gives us the foundation to love others with confidence, because it shows that we’re not conjuring up our own ideas about love; that wouldn’t work. To love through God means that we shift from our brand of love to His.

Our brand of love usually includes a bit of selfishness and sin, but God’s love is perfect! When we love through Him, we don’t make the mistake of putting the person or anything else ahead of God. This understanding is crucial. Proverbs 4:23 tells us to guard our hearts with God’s Word because the issues of life flow from the heart. This means that even when we’re not aware of it, our hearts are attracting or repelling situations and people. When God’s love is number one in our hearts, we have the capacity to love from a very good place—a place of His strength, and this can only help us. And not only this, we will have the spiritual depth and maturity to maintain the relationships that are important to us.

Living in God’s love means that we live according to the example of Christ. Ephesians 5:2(NLT) urges us, “Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God.” Many of us get away from his example when it comes to the significant person in our lives. We hardly ever consider this man’s spiritual well-being. We don’t think about God’s plan for his life or how our actions may be harming his spiritual growth in the long run. We don’t think about the possibility that our connection to this person may have been his only opportunity to see the love of Christ, and to see it operating in someone that has no agenda other than to be a blessing to his spiritual walk.

2Timothy 1:7(ESV) tells us, “for God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control.” Sometimes we come to the table with many insecurities. We fear we will not be loved adequately, that if we don’t do certain things, the man will withhold his love or not want to be with us. The man should never call the shots when it comes how we respond to God’s love and Word. If we allow this, we will not be satisfied with the results. God is letting us know that 2Timothy 1:7 is our reality, and we must trust this. To demonstrate that we have faith in this truth in God’s Word, our conduct must be rooted in God’s love, power, and self-control. When it is, we are sufficiently guarding our hearts and allowing God the room to bless our relationships.

It’s a spiritually immature move to want the rewards but not do the things required to receive them. This is the kind of mindset that leads to confusion, disappointment, and heartbreak. Yes, we’re going to make a ton of mistakes in our significant relationships. We’ve done it in the past, and we’ll most likely make a few doozies in the future, but through it all, our hearts must be loyal to God. We must be motivated out of our love for Him. Relationships do not give us license to chuck our responsibilities to the faith. They were created by God to foster our relationship with Him. We don’t have to be emotionally out-of-control, that’s not love. Instead, we should always make it a priority to pray for God’s guidance and remain humble to Him. He will teach us to walk in His power and love, and to be spiritually disciplined about matters of the heart.■