Making God Your Strength

Our world is fallen, brittle, dark and difficult to navigate. We wrestle with challenges and attacks on our souls, our families and our communities that can feel like a gut punch and knock the breath and fight out of us.

What are we to do? How are we to stand amid the onslaught when our strength is gone.

You may feel like nothing can come into your life that will knock you down. But, just live a little longer. One day something bigger than you will come into your life that makes you cry out for something/someone bigger!

When that day comes, who will uphold you? When the weight of grief, disappointment and even death comes to call, what will shelter you, hold you, sustain you? Your own wisdom and renown? Your riches?

You may have friends who will surround you, yet there will be moments when even they don’t have what you need to get through. Or perhaps your friends will abandon you as they watch trouble take over your life.

David’s life was confronted with death, enemies and danger beyond his ability to endure and overcome:

“The cords of death encompassed me;
the torrents of destruction assailed me;
the cords of Sheol entangled me;
the snares of death confronted me.“

Psalm 18:4-5 ESV

Where do you turn when life is too much? Where is your wisdom when relationships go south and test the very depths of your resolve and love? How do you move forward when you crave the comfort of the past, the stillness of peace you used to know before this?

We will be tested. Our nerves will be tried. And when that day comes we will need a strength that is not our own. Our strength will run out and we will come face to face with our humanity. Even Paul realized that his strength was limited. But the Lord had the solution:

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” 2 Corinthians 12:9 ESV

Would God allow things to get so bad in our lives that we would come to the end of ourselves?

“For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. ⁹Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. ¹⁰He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again. “

2 Corinthians 1: 8-10 ESV

Paul discovered that he had a strength greater than anything he faced, even death. And trust in God’s strength was what he chose! His circumstances introduced him to THE Strength of his life! The Lord, Himself!

Be encouraged when you face hard times. You don’t have to try harder to be strong, only surrender to the Strength that is God!

“I love you, O Lord, my strength.
²The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,
my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,
my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.”

Psalm 18: 1-2 ESV