Sovereign
Praise be to Jesus, whose holed hands have never let anything slip through
I have tasted the sweetness of the faith. I have experienced the pulling of the Lord. I have been full of love, with passion insatiable to anything I have ever known here. I have prayed prayers that I never wanted to end and have been convinced of the Lord’s presence where two or more are gathered. I have wanted to run away to the Lord and spend just one hour in His courts. I have laughed audibly and smiled visibly when at once I knew the Lord was near. I have stood so firmly that no weight could move me
But sometimes the ink runs dry. For me, I have felt that this entire semester was an attempt to write with a dead pen. Spiritually drained, I thought that if I just prayed harder, read my Bible for ten more minutes, sang more passionately in worship, then it would get better. I felt that God was disappointed in me. Something in me wasn’t clicking right with God, so maybe if I just gave more of everything then I would wake up the next day with that feeling of joy and comfort and eagerness to which I had grown so accustomed. This feeling was totally new. I saw the situation as one that I had to fix. I knew that God does not move, so if I don’t feel that the Lord is near, then it must be my job to work closer to Him. It was a performance theology in disguise. I prayed constantly through frustration for the Lord to improve the situation, for Him to be near like He used to be, but writing in my prayer journal as my pen slowly became dry, I realized,
God never promises circumstance. He promises himself.
It’s a hard situation to deal with in a culture where the difficulty of Christianity is often overlooked. Trials are sometimes seen as bad and the height of faith equals the height of spiritual feeling. But it’s ok to long for the Lord like a deer pants for water (Psalm 42), and even Paul reached a point of despair examining his own heart and his captivity (Romans 7:14-17). The Lord is ultimately more faithful than we can ever understand. His hands are always moving. He is constantly moving us, and all that we are depends on the Lord. He is the creator of us as we are renewed in Him, and He is the sustainer of the person that He has made us to be. All faith that we have is dependent on Him as He transforms our sinful nature into a character of righteousness and we grow up to look more and more like our Heavenly Father. He moves all things across time, pushing people from His left hand into his right, all the while guarding them with absolute security.
A large part of this process for me has been a distrust that the Lord has two hands. I see that I am being moved and immediately want to be back where I was before the Lord began to work. God has never done anything without intention, and in his eternality, every point I reach in life, the Lord has been there before me. So it is not God who moves, but I who am moved by God and this period of temporary exile is not exile because there is no time nor place where God is not. Therefore if my faith is lacking, my God is not. It may be that I never come out of this feeling of a dry season, but that does not change the Lord’s faithfulness nor does it change my standing with the Lord because my righteousness has never been based on anything that I have done, only based on the never-ending faithfulness of God.
For if we have been united with him in a death like this, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like this.