Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
5 13 2024
It’s been a hard week. I don’t want to go into detail but sometimes you get down on yourself. Sometimes you feel like you just can’t put it together or keep it together…and that my friends is a slippery slope headed the wrong way
When exactly does a bought of depression set in? Where did feeling sorry for yourself every take you? anywhere positive? Anywhere uplifting? Anywhere close to resembling faith?
Psalm 145 19. says it more clearly that I could every hope to articulate: “he fulfills the desires of those who fear Him he hears their cry. And he saves them”. So can I start with that second part? He hears your cry. Just hearing that makes me cry harder. When we cry… we all cry out at times for one crisis or another…sometimes its every little thing that piles up…It wasn’t even a big thing at that moment.
But Papa says… He hears My cry. He hears my cry. He hears my cry.
2 Corinthians 3:18 says that “When We behold” Jesus with the eyes of faith, we ARE transformed,
“We Become more like Him”, from one degree of glory to another…that is a progressive process over time as we behold him more and more. One degree at a time…but when you’re up to your eyeballs with alligators who has time for another degree of water, when you are already drowning?
Progressively…Over time… AS we behold him…more and more.
Have you ever been that encourager to others and then found yourself in the same well? What was it you told them. I will pray for you! I will stand with you in faith. You tell them to dive into God’s word. You tell them to have faith. Do a word study. Look up to where your true help comes from. Start speaking things as though they are. “Faith the essence of things hoped for the evidence of things not seen”!
NOT YET! Not Yet!
How is this done? What does one do? First I think we need to be honest about what we’re looking at. What is it that has put us on tilt? That has stolen our faith? That has compromised our thinking?
2 Corinthians 3:4-6 “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think of anything as being from ourselves, but our sufficiency is from God, who also made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant”,
Isn’t that the main culprit? We are beholding the wrong thing. WE are NOT sufficient in ourselves. How many times have circumstances or our failures put us in this spot of failure, depression and hopelessness? When we lose our sufficiency in God…when we start doubting the sovereignty of God, where else can we go but to the dark side?
The Spiritual Fight
Why is it our fall back position is to believe what we see or hear? why is it we forget that we live in a spiritual battle? It makes me think of Israel today who have been livng for years under the terror of incoming missiles….siren screaming…school children running frantically for some bomb shelter. That’s just not right! But in comparison, looking at the bombardment of Satan and his crafty cohorts, sending his deadly arrows into our lives… is it really any different?
The difference is, we do not instantly connect the dots that I CANNOT war against this in the natural. IT’S A SPIRITUAL FIGHT…REQUIRING HEAVENLY WEAPONS.
Eph 6:10 So how do we grow from one glory to another. That can’t mean from one mountain top experience to another. Who would every have a problem with that? I think it includes every valley of the shadow of death. Don’t you agree?
So what stops us?…FEAR— We feel alone and impotent. We are beholding the wrong thing!
Sometimes we’re even afraid to be transparent and vulnerable to ourselves. The drop is just too far. And who will catch us? We see what we see and not what God tells us to see and believe!
When darkness meets light. What happens?
We have the light in Gods words but lack the faith to remove the shades of doubt and fear that blind us.
The light of his word…living and effective, so sharp it separates the Spirit and the soul, the bone and marrow. Hebrews 4:12
And even then I can hear his words rumbling. Oh ye of little faith. Only believe!
It implies not an absence of faith but, rather, a deficiency of faith.
He later mentions anxiousness which goes hand in hand with “a little faith”.
And from that precipice of despair he sends forth the his grace to stand. Then he sends a command:
To hold up the shield of faith to save the day from those fitfull moments of spiritual torment and those blinding scales Satan uses to blind us from the truth. Gods truth and power to stand with Gods two edged sword drawn… Saying as Jesus said in Matt 16:23 to Peter “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to Me, for you do not mind the things of God, but the things of men.”
But then, I can hear his words of encouragement.
Greater things than this will you do because i go to the father…Only believe me! Joh. 14 12
Not by might, not by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord. Zach 4:6
You possess the enviable choice of choosing of what voices you will listen to.
What thoughts you’ll entertain. The choice is not so hard really.
Choose faith. Choose to believe God the Holy Spirit OR choose the darkness to believe the lies that you are alone and defeated. Because he hears your crying and promises to see you through with his gift to you of just a mustard seed of faith. What your beholding your becoming!
Behold and see the Salvation of the Lord!
Casting Crowns Voice of Truth
