This past Monday I got the wonderful opportunity to visit Niagara Falls. Normally if it's sunny you can see a rainbow. A rainbow, the sign God gave Noah showing him that he wasn't going to flood the earth again. Sadly, when I visited it was cloudy and I didn't see any rainbows but I still know that God isn't going to break his promise. Do you know why? God is faithful no matter what.
How many times do we doubt God's faithfulness? Doubt that He's really there for us. How many times do we look at our situation and look right at God and tell Him to go away. We tell God that we are done with Him and how He shouldn't have let this or that happen to us. Even when this happens, God doesn't give up on us (which absolutely amazes me) read Timothy 2:13-
"If we are faithless, He remains faithful; for He cannot deny Himself." Even if we get mad at God and tell Him we don't need Him. He's still going to be there for us! Waiting with open arms for us to realize that Yes! We do need Him!
Now read,1 Corinthians 10:13
"No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation He will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it."
Did you catch that? That verse says that God won't let us be tempted more than we can handle. So that situation that you're going through, God knows you can handle it. He knows that it will grow you closer to Him but we can't take the credit for handling the situation. We can only handle the trial because God is with us. We wouldn't be able to go through the trial without Him.
Now what does that have to do with God being faithful? Yes I know he doesn't give me trials I can't handle but how is that connected with faithfulness?
It has everything to do with God's faithfulness! He doesn't let us go through trials and temptations we can't handle because He stays faithful. If we complain and whine about a trial saying we can't handle it God isn't going to go- "You think that's difficult? Here's something harder." I'm so thankful He doesn't do that to us!
Once you go through a difficulty/trial/temptation it changes you, grows you closer to God. I've gone through a few different trials. One particular trial I went through flipped my whole world upside down. One response I could've made was turn to God and trust Him through it, the other response is getting mad at Him and ignoring Him. I didn't choose the right response. I chose to ignore God because why would He do this to me?
First thing I want to say is that looking back I wouldn't change what happened, I would change how I responded but I wouldn't want to change what happened because you know what? That trial grew me more than I could imagine. While I was going through it I didn't understand God's master plan of growing me closer to Him and to my family but we don't understand God's master plan when going through trials. Even afterwards we don't understand God's master plan completely. Sometimes you see how it grew you and other times you don't see how it affected anything. No matter if you see His plan or not we should still glorify God before, during, and after the trial.
The second thing I wanted to say was that you aren't always going to respond correctly in trials. It's our human nature to blame someone so we blame God. What do we do after a trial, that we responded badly to or if we gave into temptation? Let's look at 1 John 1:9
"If we confess our sins, He is faithful to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness."
There's another verse that talks about His faithfulness! So to answer the question before, we confess. We go before God and talk to Him. We apologize and confess our sins to Him. He will forgive us because He is faithful. That's all we have to do. Isn't that amazing?!
Is there a trial that happened in your life or maybe one you're going through now and you responded or are responding badly to? Talk to God, tell Him how you shouldn't have responded the way you did. Thank Him for being faithful and forgiving.
I also want to encourage you to look up a song it's called- "I'll Never Forsake You" by Steve Pettit Evangelistic Team
(Click on this to go to the link of the song)
-Paige Ward
The Designer