"Therefore despair not..."

I’ve had a number of conversations this past week with people of faith and the struggles in their lives. Some were cases of bad choices acted upon and others were people who are in a time of hardship that never seems to get better. What is going on? When is God going to make things better?

I’m sometimes a little hesitant to connect hardship in life with spiritual warfare. No where in Scripture does God promise His children that all will be easy. The Bible is filled with the stories of people who are real heroes of faith, but when you read their stories you always find struggles, sometimes very hard ones, even to the very end of their lives.

But spiritual warfare does exist, as Paul writes in Ephesians 6:12:

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”

There can be times in life where as we struggle we may wonder if perhaps God is no longer with us. Why didn’t he act when temptation came my way? Is he no longer concerned about what happens to me? Has he turned away completely?

Someone who found herself thinking those thoughts many times in her life was Elizabeth Bowes, who was the mother-in-law to Scottish reformer John Knox. Bowes wrote to Knox asking if the sin she was tempted towards, and often acted on, had permanently separated her from Christ? Knox’s response was:

“Therefore despair not, for your troubles are the infallible signs of your election in Christ’s blood, being grafted in his body. As for the assaults of your enemy, sometime alluring you to idolatry, sometime to other manifest iniquity, so that you obey him not altogether, there is no danger; but rather, the feeling of his continual assaults is the sign that he [Satan] has not gotten victory over you, but that there is a spark of faith, which you’re heavenly Father shall never suffer to quench or put out, but will keep and increase the same for the sake of his promises.”

I read that passage from Knox a few days ago and as I write this blog post I hear in it echoes of Isaiah, John and Paul.  Several threads of scripture woven together to remind us that God’s grasp on his children is not a joint activity, in that he only holds us as long as we are interested in being held, but rather that once he grabs us he never lets go.

Never. Nothing that we do changes the fact that when we have faith in Jesus we belong to him forever. It is pretty easy to remember in good times but something we can lose track of during hardship. Our circumstances don’t change the fact that, as Knox states, we are “grafted in his body.”

If you are a Christian and going through a hard time right now, despair not, for God is holding you and he will never let you go.

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.