Point of Departure

It is really important that we have established our point of departure as having accepted Jesus as Lord and Saviour, as well as acknowledging that He is there.  I have realised that in the hardships that we are faced with as children in Christ we need to hold on to the promise that God is there and that He will never leave us nor forsake us, however that seems to be the one thing that we forget the most. I believe that if we constantly remind ourselves of this promise, we could avoid a lot of unnecessary feelings which deceive us and make us move away from God.

Lately I have been going through what I call a dry season. I did something I knew was wrong and as a result I let it create a gap in my relationship with God. I stopped reading the word. I stopped doing my daily devotion. I stopped praying. I stopped praising and worshipping Him. In its place came idleness and as a result I was filled with feelings of condemnation, discontent, jealousy and so forth. I felt lost, empty and purposeless. Things just didn’t make sense. Someone on Twitter said that “we cannot continue using God’s grace and forgiveness as a free pass to keep doing what we ‘know’ is not the right thing to do”. So I used that to justify what I was going through: that God is tired and that He deserves more than what I am doing to Him- He deserves praises and honour from someone who is worthy to be in His presence. I think most of us get caught in that trap where we answer for God and we forget that God is way bigger than we are and that He doesn’t answer to us but we answer to Him.

During this time there was an incessant stream of thoughts, that it was hard to recognise the voice of God but I could feel the battle raging within me as God fought for me.  I experienced this in the little things where someone would randomly share the word with me and it would be so relevant to what I was going through or I would just find myself singing songs of praise to the Lord. Through this my blog was born and this is what God used to speak to me. He made me realise that He is indeed there (here) and that if I’d acknowledged it, I would have not opened myself up to a wide range of feelings of not being good enough. Thus would have not moved away from Him because of the understanding that God being there (here) means that He loves me irrespective of what I have or have not done and as a result He will never leave me nor forsake me.

We need to realise that even if we have missed the mark, which is to sin, God remains ever faithful and He still deserves all the honour and the glory. It goes beyond what we think or what we feel.

Therefore, it is vital that we engrave on our hearts this promise that God is there. This will lift us up at our lowest times and keep us from moving away from God but rather be encouraged to praise Him all the more because we recognise that our hardships are meant to build us into strong women and men of character that He intended us to be.

Jesus did not die on the cross for us in vain so our hardships as born-again Christians are not in vain…