The Held

"He will also keep you firm to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord." - 1 Corinthians 1:8-9 We, as humans, are inclined to give up. We change. Our interests change, our abilities change. Our resolve wanes, our passion fades. It is the natural course of human life. In most cases, this phenomenon is harmless. We switch jobs. We pick up a different hobby. We watch different kinds of TV shows. But in other cases, it is our downfall. Our marriages dissolve. Our friendships wither.  The raw reality is our spiritual lives are not invulnerable to this natural degression. We lose consistency in spending time with God. Our resistance against temptation dwindles. If we're not careful, this degression could lead to a place that is not even in the same sphere as where we started. There are things we can do to help us fight off this downward spiral and to stay

"But he hesitated. So the men grasped his hand and the hand of his wife and the hands of his two daughters, because the compassion of the Lord was upon him; and they brought him out and put him outside the city." - Genesis 19:16 Lot hesitates. The Lord is about to destroy the city, the angels give him an escape to get to safety, and yet he hesitates. Not because he thinks the impending destruction is fake - he very well knows that it's real. So why does he hesitate? Concern for his sons-in-law? A lingering love for the evil city? Fear about where he would go? Maybe a mix of all of these things and more. Regardless of the reason, the Lord, in His mercy, sends His angels to save Lot, and Lot, in his hesitation, shows that he doesn't want to go. He doesn't want to be saved.  So.  A word full of incredible mercy.   Lot hesitates, so God's angels grasp him.  We choose destruction, God determines mercy. We hesitate, God grasps us.  It is only in being grasped and he

" When you suffer, I suffer with you. To the end I am close to you." -  Shūsaku Endō, Silence The novel Silence   tells the story of a seventeenth-century Portuguese priest who travels to Japan on mission and ends up encountering intense persecution. The main character, Rodrigues, questions God's apparent silence as he witnesses what is going on around him. At the end of the novel, Rodrigues is reflecting back on everything he had experienced and he tells God he resents Him for His silence. God responds to Rodrigues with a powerful statement: “I was not silent. I suffered beside you.” As I read this book, I kept saying to myself that God was not silence just because He wasn't working in the way that the people wanted. It was true that Christians were dying despite the prayers of the priests, but that didn't mean God wasn't working. In the Old Testament, Joseph has this continual "bad luck" and at the end of his life he says that what man meant for ev

"He Will Hold Me Fast" - a hymn written by Ada Habershon and popularized by Keith and Kristyn Getty - is one of the most spiritually grounding pieces ever written. When we are tempted to think that faith is a matter of our own sheer willpower, we are reminded that it is rather a matter of His power to remain faithful to  us . When we fear that we don't have the strength to hold on to Him, we are reminded that it is  His strength that holds us . It is both humbling and comforting to realize that our justification, sanctification, perseverance, and glorification rest not in our hands but in the hands of the One who can do all things and who does not change. In these 5 words we have the message of the Gospel that we can preach to ourselves in any circumstance. There is sweet relief in leaning into the hold of the Almighty One.