How God Often Works: A Case Study

16Who rises up for me against the wicked?
Who stands up for me against evildoers?
17If the LORD had not been my help,
my soul would soon have lived in the land of silence.
18When I thought, “My foot slips,”
your steadfast love, O LORD, held me up.
19When the cares of my heart are many,
your consolations cheer my soul.

–Psalm 94.16-19 (ESV)

If you read any of my posts, you will know that I am keen on urging everyone to put their faith, hope, and trust in God. We live in the desert, a common biblical metaphor that describes our having to live in a broken and often hostile world, and if Christians cannot count on God to help and sustain them as we struggle to live faithful and obedient lives, that faith will surely be destroyed.

But God does not abandon us and I want to share with you a recent experience that I think illustrates very well one way in which God commonly works to support and sustain those who put their hope and trust in him. As the psalmist reminds us today, life is hard and we can get beaten down and beaten up pretty easily. So our fears and anxieties are nothing new to the human experience. They have been with us for as long as humans have lived in a fallen world.

This past Sunday as I was sitting with my wife on our patio enjoying the nice afternoon, it suddenly came to my mind that I should email a note of encouragement to one of my friends. The impulse was quite strong and it came out of the clear blue. I resisted doing so initially because my friend is typically not real receptive to receiving encouragement from others and I did not want him fussing at me for writing him. So I delayed acting on this impulse until early evening, even though it stuck in my mind and kept nagging at me to get it done.

Soon after I wrote my friend that evening, he replied and thanked me for my note. Unbeknownst to me, he apparently had suffered a bad couple of days of late and was feeling beaten down. He didn’t get specific with me but I could tell by the tone of his email that he was genuinely appreciative that I had sent him a note of encouragement.

Let me be clear here. I am not tooting my own horn. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite. This was clearly God’s hand at work, using me to help one of God’s faithful people deal with a lot of crap in his life at the moment. I was simply a poor schlep whom God used as a vehicle of encouragement for my beleaguered friend.

Then yesterday, my friend called and read me another note of encouragement that he had received out of the blue and had found encouragement in reading it. Do you see what is going on here? This is how God typically works in and through his people. He uses all sorts of folks, Christian and otherwise, to help support and sustain his embattled people (and let’s not make any mistake here: trying to live a faithful and obedient life is a struggle because there are lots of forces out there who hate Christians and their Lord).

The critic would suggest that all this is coincidence. But I have no interest in arguing that because neither of us can prove his position. However, I have had things like this happen to me too many times and have seen it happen to others too many times for me to believe stuff like this is coincidence. This is God at work in and through his people to comfort and encourage them and I am absolutely blown away by the fact that God would use someone like me to bring encouragement to my faithful friend. That is simply amazing. And yes, I think my friend very much appreciated seeing God at work to bring him some much needed encouragement at precisely the time when he needed some. That is the coolest thing of all!

If you ever wonder where God is in the midst of the dark times in your life, stop and consider this story. Chances are God is in the person who has reached out to you to offer you support or who tells you they love you. God is speaking to you through the people who show you concern and compassion, even as they are struggling to deal with all the bad stuff in their own lives. God is in the midst of those who give tirelessly of themselves as they serve their Lord by serving others, especially those who do not deserve any of it. God is in the touch of your loved one who reaches out to you when you are feeling particularly alone. The list is endless but you get the idea.

This is how God typically works. He has called humans to be stewards of his creation and has given us the gift of life in Jesus. But we have to be smart enough to accept the gift by faith. When we do, it changes us and opens our eyes. We know that God is infinitely wise and powerful. We also know that God has chosen to reveal that wisdom and power by becoming human and dying on a cross for us. That is not how the world defines power, but it is how God defines it. When we understand this, we learn to look for God’s power in the midst of our weakness and if we pay attention, we will find God in the actions of those around us whom God uses to provide for us exactly what we need.

I confess that I don’t often get it right in the “being faithful” category. But this time I did (perhaps that is why God’s prompt to me was so hard to miss–he knows with whom he is dealing). It is a wondrous and awesome privilege to be used by the Creator of this vast universe to be of some help to my friend (whom God has used to be a great help and encourager to me when I needed it.) If you open yourself up to God’s Presence in your life and are willing to answer his call to you to bring his great love to bear on his hurting creatures, you too can discover the joy of being Jesus’ agent of healing and New Creation. There is nothing like it in the whole world.