I AM WITH YOU ALWAYS

I’m quoting Tim Keller from his devotional book on the Psalms, “The Songs of Jesus”, April 1st.

“We have a direct link to the mighty deeds of the past (those deeds recorded in Scripture), because they were the exploits not of our ancestors but of God, Himself, and that God is still with us. Christians should never look at church history as if it contained some great race of heroes that has vanished irretrievably. Their God is our God. Nor should we look at earlier times of spiritual ministry in our lives and think that we’ll never be capable of that again. You weren’t capable of it the first time. It was God. And He is still here.”

Some speak of God distancing Himself from us, being far off, as if God makes Himself absent from His own from time to time. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I recall at the age of 19 the Lord speaking to me these words, “Mark, I want you to know that no matter whether you feel my Presence or not, I am always with you, working My salvation out within you.” I was thrilled to hear this and to “AMEN” it. What happened next was six weeks was a proving ground for my faith. It was a time of feeling my prayers simply dribbled out of my mouth and fell to the floor a soggy mess. I would read a chapter from one of Paul’s letters to the early church and at the end of my reading having no sense of what I had just read. I felt as if God had taken a vacation to somewhere remote in Saskatchewan.

At the end of six weeks, I cried out, “Lord I can’t feel Your Presence! What have I done?” The Lord answered me immediately, “Mark, how do you feel?” I responded, “I feel abandoned and desolate.” He replied, “Well, that must be how My Presence feels just now, because I never left you. Remember what I told you?” The memory of what He had said six weeks before came flooding back and I understood.

My sense of His Presence is NEVER the indicator of whether He is present with me or not. He made a promise, “I will never leave you nor forsake you. So that with utter confidence you can say, “The Lord is my Helper. I will not fear. What can man do to me.” (Hebrews 13:5-6). He also declared through St. Paul that NOTHING can separate us from the Love of God…NOTHING! God is never separated from those He has given eternal life in Christ Jesus. The Holy Spirit has come to permanently life in us the resurrection life of Jesus Christ. He is Life to the believer, the follower of Jesus. He is Life within us.

Never believe that you have been abandoned by God, even for a moment. The awareness of His Presence may be withdrawn, but He never withdraws from His own. He calls us to follow Him, to live from the new heart and spirit He has given to us. I think that that sense that He has withdrawn can be a gift to stir our hearts to seek His face even more fervently. He whispers so we might strain to hear Him, but He is NEVER standing at a distance from us. You can trust that because God promised.

Our hope is not in what we feel, not in what we think we can do nor what we seem to have been able to do in the past. As Tim Keller wrote, we were not capable the first time God worked in and through us. As St. Paul said, “We are not sufficient in ourselves to think that anything has come from ourselves. Our sufficiency comes from God.” (2 Corinthians 3:5) He is our peace!