God’s promise for Week 2:
“Be bold and strong! Banish fear and doubt! For remember, the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." (Josh 1:9 MSG)
For those who want further Scripture reading each day here are a couple of suggestions:
-Read one Psalm a day and meditate on it.
-Read a chapter or part of a chapter out of Acts or Matthew or Hebrews each day, focusing on the idea of faith.
Day 9
“If we are faithless, He will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself." Timothy 2:13 NIV
Self doubt: In my life, I have to admit that my biggest barrier to faith has been, and continues to be, self-doubt. I trust that God is good and that His ways are perfect and that He loves me, yet when I pray, I am plagued with the thought that even though this is all true, what if my failings somehow hamper God’s work in my life and cancel out his power? Some of you may remember hearing about the two young girls who were killed by a falling tree while hiking near Banff last June. Some of you may also know that my family was on the trail that day and helped the father attempt to resuscitate his five year old daughter. Through this tragic, painful experience, God has taught me so many things. That day, I laid my hands on that little girl and I prayed that God would spare her life. I wanted so badly for her to come back to life and run into the arms of her desperate parents. However, all the while I was praying, I knew that she was not going to wake up. It has plagued me deep in my heart since that day that maybe if I had not had those doubts, she would have risen from the dead right then and there. Was it my weakness and lack of faith that hindered that miracle? When I expressed this plaguing thought to a pastor friend, he pointed me to Romans 8:26: “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with his will." As I prayed on that tragic day last June, the Holy Spirit took my words and turned them into “groans that words cannot express" and I know that God was there that day. Perhaps one day I will know that my prayers were answered, not in the way that I, in my limited knowledge, wanted, but in the way that our infinite, all-knowing God willed. Perhaps on this earth I will never know. Either way, I know now that God is bigger than my weaknesses and that He can take my feeble attempts and turn them into something beautiful that accomplishes His purposes on earth. So for every one who doubts, for everyone who has prayed and not seen them answered, know this: God hears. He hears and He answers. Romans 8:26 was a life preserver thrown to me as I floundered in the stormy sea of self-doubt, and I’m going to cling to it as a drowning man. I’m going to hold tight to the promises of God. When our reason fails, when our arms are weak and our knees are trembling, let us KNOW that God’s promises are true. When we don’t know what to pray for, let us pray anyway, the best we know how—because it’s not about us and our failings—it’s about our God who NEVER fails.
Prayer:
Lord, help me to know that You are faithful.
In Faith:
Pray for your “hopeless cases", all the while remembering that God is faithful!
