God IsSample

Faithful And True

How often have you found yourself in a situation where the presence of God feels far away – where life starts to feel a little hopeless, and maybe even that the promises you felt God had given you were not true? I have felt that countless times throughout life.

There were seasons when jobs didn’t work out the way I thought they would, where my family’s dynamics changed in a way I would have never imagined, and even when I witnessed the suffering of people who I felt shouldn’t have had to walk through it. All these times, it felt that God didn’t see the circumstance and was blind to what was needed. It felt like God wasn’t really looking out for me.

As I prayed, I began to be challenged with the dichotomy between what I felt God should be versus what the Biblical narrative shows him to be. The problem I was having wasn’t that I didn’t know the truth of God, but rather that I couldn’t see it in the middle of the situations I was in.

What I learned was that the promise of God isn’t that bad things won’t happen or that life won’t have its problems, but rather that God is faithful in and through those situations. In Lamentations 3, Jeremiah shows the heart of this idea well. It begins with the author expressing and attributing his suffering to God. The reassuring part of the passage though is that even through his sorrow, he attests to his trust in God’s faithfulness to take care of him.

The book of Job shows very similar attributes of God. After all of Job’s suffering, God was faithful to him and restored twice as much as he had lost. What is consistent through these passages is that the authors were in very tough situations. Even though they may have lamented about their situations, they always found the character of God to be true and trustworthy.

It is sometimes hard to see God’s character and workings in the middle of hard times. What I would challenge you to do in those times is make a list. Take time out of your day and sit and begin to write moments that God showed himself to be faithful and true — not just in the Bible, but in your own life, so that as you feel that God isn’t present, you can be reminded of times he has shown up in ways you couldn’t see in previous seasons. For as the Psalmist wrote, “The Lord is righteous in all his ways and faithful in all he does.”

Written by Julian Fort