To Encourage You

Psalm 116:1-2 “I love the Lord, because he has heard my voice and my pleas for mercy.  Because he inclined his ear to me, therefore I will call on him as long as I live.”

Have you ever been at the end of yourself?  Have you ever been in a situation in which you had no answers, you didn’t know what to do, and it seemed that nothing you could do mattered?  Have you ever been totally and completely without strength, unable to do anything for yourself?  Maybe you’re in that condition right now. 

Situations like this come in many forms. Sometimes they are times of extreme physical need or illness. Sometimes they are times of financial need.  Sometimes they are decisions that you need to make or tasks that you absolutely have to do, but you are at your wits end as to how you are going to do them.  If you are a Christian, have you ever been in a situation where you were out of answers, out of personal resources, and devoid of strength? Have you ever been in a situation where you couldn’t even pray, of if you did pray it was as if your prayers bounced off the ceiling, if they even got that high?

Well, if you have been, and you’ve come out the other side, you have learned the reality of the presence of God, because without Him, you could not have made it through.  Your endurance through that trial came not because of your strength but in spite of your lack of strength, and you know it – and you know that God knows it.  That’s why you know that it was God and God alone that came to your aid.  You were reduced to a place in your life when the only one who could have helped you was a supernatural being, because your situation was impossible without such help. 

The truth is that it is in these situations that a believer’s faith grows for he or she knows that it was in such moments that the Lord had indeed heard your pleas for mercy, even if they had almost no strength to voice them.  He was the only one that could have heard, because no one else knew the depths they were in because they didn’t even know how to tell them.  It is in such moments that we, like the psalmist in the verses above, learn the love of God as we otherwise could not have, and our love for him grows like it otherwise could not have as well.  It is in such difficult times that we learn that God indeed does hear us, and not just when we can hardly speak, but at any other time as well.  We learn in such valleys of the shadow of death that He most certainly heard me.  It was personal, and we know it, and we know the One Whom we cannot see is more real than anything else we can see. 

So, if you’ve been in the situation I’ve just described, you know exactly what I’m talking about and you can say “AMEN!” But if you don’t understand this, and you are going through a very deep, deep trial right now, wait on the Lord and keep calling out to Him for mercy.  He is no respecter of persons, and at just the right moment, in just the right way, you will come to understand that He has been seeing you all along, He has been hearing you all along, and He has been nearer to you than you could have ever imagined, even though you may have felt that He was nowhere to be found.  Trust Him, hold on to Him, and keep coming to Him in your times of need. He knows, He hears, and He loves you more that you could ever imagine – but for you to understand, really understand that He hears you, He will stop at nothing to teach you.  And when you have learned, you will have learned a lesson for life – and you, like the psalmist, will call on Him as long as you live, a life that, for the believer, will go on forever.