If you’re anything like me, you probably ask yourself at least a hundred times a day, “why me?” As in, why did this thing happen to me as opposed to happening to the next guy? Unfortunately, there is no answer for that. The only thing that could be said is, “it is what it is.” i know that sounds defeatist, but to go on speculating on why we are the ones that suffer as opposed to anybody else, would be a futile engagement and a complete waste of time. What we can do is find solace and comfort in knowing that we aren’t alone as we question, “why me.” Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. – 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 Finding comfort in our lives consists in two distinct but very interrelated parts. The first part is finding the source of our comfort. This comfort comes first and foremost from God. God, the Father, provided comfort to His Son, Jesus, in a time of great tribulation. Comfort was given to Jesus, and by comfort I mean rest, when Jesus had the most at stake, when he was most in doubt. Jesus didn’t doubt His Father’s plan, nor did he doubt himself. Jesus’ doubt came from his humanity which caused anguish in his heart about the actions he was going to commit to. Paul writes to the Church in Corinth that is suffering in afflictions, set backs and doubts about where they are headed, to reaffirm the staying power of God through the pain and discomfort of living life. The wear and tear of our daily existence is felt by and consoled by God if we ask Him for it. Unfortunately, even as Christians we mostly forget to reach up towards him despite knowing God is the supreme comforter. Just as Jesus reached up to his Father in the Garden of Gesemene, we can pray and reach up to God in our darkest hour as that option is fully available to us as His adopted sons and daughters. The second part of comforting comes in our ability to walk with people in their discomforts. We have this uncanny ability to feel humanity because we are undoubtedly linked to other humans through our humanity. From a simple embrace, to a kind gesture and even an encouraging word, comfort extends from us and our discomfort to reach the uncomfortable and be comforting. But instead of becoming comfort to receive comfort, we isolate ourselves and clam up in our discomforts and stay uncomfortable. In return we become surrounded by uncomfortable people. Trust me, you, I and they all have been torn apart by life and we can all find comfort in each other if we are willing to reach out and become the comfort God calls us to be to one another. If we are trying to find some type of comfort in our lives, we have to do these two things right now. We have to reach up to heaven and ask God for the same comfort Jesus received and share in that. Then we have to turn around and reach out to those in need of comfort and begin to give it to those around us. Then we can stop our search for comfort because we would have already received it in abundance. We would be able to constantly find it when we need it. The days of turmoil and despair would end. Our lives would be found to be more content; our joy unsurpassing; our afflictions the reason for abundant salvation. Stop searching for comfort, you already received it, now live it as your own.

Sometimes I’m amazed by my obstinate insistence that I can force myself to change. I train myself with the fervor of Pavlov training his dogs to respond to the bells and find myself unable to respond the way I know I should. I’m told over and over about my shortcomings and I work harder and harder to fix them; but, at the end of the day, I fail miserably. I tell myself, “today is the day I quit.” Unfortunately, today becomes tomorrow, and tomorrow turns to the next day and at the end of my long trip down a path I force upon myself, I am lost and utterly miserable. I know every semester I’ve been in school (32 semesters since graduating high school) I have said I will procrastinated less, get an earlier start, and work harder. Thirty-one semesters later, my bad habits are still bad, if not worse. I do this during new years resolution time too. “this is the year I will change,” I tell myself, but I stop trying after three weeks. How sad. I know you can relate because it’s human nature to try to better one’s self. We want to change, but just can’t do it on our own strength. We keep messing up somewhere. When we do mess up, moralizing pastors and friends say, “the important thing is that you pick yourself up after this.” Everybody knows that’s the important thing. That’s not what we want though. We don’t want to fall down in the first place! I know it’s part of life, but who really wants to fall down? More than that, who really wants to get scraped and cut and have scars from falling? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? – Galatians 3:3 Paul writes to the churches in Galatia, “let’s stop messing around pretending we can help fix ourselves with some type of action we do on our own.” He says, “what makes you think you can save yourself now?” I mean, our ancestors couldn’t save themselves and their stories are written in the Bible. God knew He had to intervene within history, so some could be saved. So Jesus was born in the flesh. He lived on the fringes of society. He changed the lives of people neglected. He changed how people can cleanse themselves from guilt. He died horrifically. Jesus was resurrected on the third day, carrying all our sins to the grave and leaving them there to be glorified by God. It is this hope that one day we can be heirs to receive a resurrection like Jesus’ own. Yet, having hope we foolishly attempt to save ourselves. Are we so dumb? Here is the logic behind Paul’s question: the change agent in our lives is God. We become changed because we believe God will change us. We are perfected in our weakness to become the glory of God, by His power, not our own. All the power we possess in the world cannot change us; but God’s power is spoken into our lives and alters the fabric of our being creating change. Knowing fully well that we will fail, we place our hope in Jesus who gives us grace. We become righteous with God when we faithfully believe in the change agent of our lives. We become cleansed by knowing God is cleansing us despite who we are and where we come from and what we did. There is a change agent who wants nothing more from us than a willingness to believe that God will use our brokenness for change. Our shortcomings can never be compensated for by our own flawed efforts. So the question is not, “why do we continue to try”; but “why don’t we trust in the change agent of God– the Holy Spirit?” Today, I want you to reflect on what you’ve been trying to fix or not fix in your life and ask yourself whether you are putting faith into God’s change agent or if you are masking around as your own agent of change. After serious consideration, I want you to pray, because I pray, this solemn week, that we can believe we will be perfected by the Spirit of God, the Change Agent of our lives.

Have you ever tried to bribe children into doing something for you? Something like getting you chips from the pantry or finding your TV remote or maybe even to stop crying? I’m sure that when you did make the lucrative bribe, it was a worthy exchange. The children scratch your back and they get something for their troubles, usually green pieces of paper or sugary snacks. But have you ever bribed a child into forgetting something? A memory you want stricken from everybody’s collective memories? What usually happens is that the secret weighs so heavily on them that the price you pay them isn’t enough to keep the secret under wraps and you lose both the bounty and the secret. It doesn’t work with kids and we definitely know adults can’t keep any worthy secret, but interestingly enough, we try. In fact, we stretch the failing practice to God!

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and perform your vows to the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.” – Psalm 50:14-15 Most of the time, and you can email me if you think I’m wrong, our sacrifices/offerings are made out of a sense of duty/ religiousness/ obligation/ guilt and under the false hope we won’t be judged by our faulty actions. There is nothing wrong with offerings and on it’s own, offering is a good thing. In fact, if you read verses four and five of this Psalm, you see sacrifices and offerings as a sign of covenant linking ourselves to God. It only becomes a problem when our sacrifices and offerings to God become something of an arbitrary bartering ploy. We think we’re offering God something He wants from us and we hope He will give us something in return. We all know God is not a kid, nor is He a frivolous blabbermouth and yet we think our bribery tricks (obligated guilt offerings) will work on Him. He created us and knows our hearts. I don’t know whether its immense pride or just plain stupidity leads us to believe in our tricks. What I can tell you is that God cannot be bought. God cannot be bribed. God cannot be played by a two bit con that pretends to give with contriteness in the hopes of becoming absolved from guilt. The reason we can’t buy God off is because He doesn’t need our offerings like a child “needs” our bribes. Everything belongs to God in this universe because He is the creator of all things. So why do we believe He needs anything we offer? Honesty, if He really wanted, he could just speak it into existence. However, if we are going to offer God anything from ourselves, God says to make our offering one of “thankfulness.” That is to say, God just wants you and me to reflect upon life and try to understand how God has provided us with a life to be grateful for. We have so much to complain about with our first world problems; but we forget way too quickly and far too often that we have so much more than we are allowed to imagine. I mean, we are alive and we eat to the point of overindulgence. To be thankful wouldn’t be enough if we truly looked at our lives. As judge of this world, we must understand our lives to be fashioned with righteousness because God is the epitome of righteousness and He is the great judge. It’s hard to believe sometimes with all the travesty going around in the world, but it’s an undeniable fact of life that sometimes righteousness and judgment may not seem fair. Being linked to God in a covenant of sacrifice found in our relationship with Jesus Christ, God’s Son, provides for us a very unique disposition. Our disposition becomes one where we can ask and receive freely. Where we do not need to barter or vie for God’s love and tender touch. God provides our lives to be a place of thankfulness. Here is a promise and the greatest reason for us all to stop trying to buy off God and absolve our own guilt: when we are thankful, God comes to the rescue in our need. God can’t be bought off. God can be appreciated and adored. We definitely don’t adore and love God with enough thankfulness. We know our thanks should indefinitely resonate with the actions we take and our lives should become living sacrifices of thanks to God. Shouldn’t we stop trying to buy God off with obligated sacrifice and give Him loving thankfulness instead?

Lip service is the best, isn’t it? You simply agree, and people go away and don’t bother you again until the next time they need lip service. It’s the best tactic with parents. They don’t really expect you to do what they tell you to do, they just want you to say you will do what they want. That blind acceptance and empty obedience satisfies and appeases their need to be good parents. I know you know this. I also know the deep-seated guilt following such empty gestures, when you secretly and covertly undermine their wisdom. We do this to our doctors, bosses, friends and teachers all the time! Best of all, we do this to our pastors and especially to God. We simply don’t follow instructions or pay any attention to outsider advice. Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you? – Luke 6:46 Let me tackle the question of why it is even important to follow instructions: first, it’s important because you obviously sucked at whatever it was that you were doing, thus invoking somebody to give you advice or instruction. Yes, get a clear grip on that. You aren’t flawless; otherwise, they would stare and gape at you with little else to say. Sorry, the truth hurts. Secondly, following instructions and heeding advice save you trouble when it comes. Trouble will come; but, when you’ve followed instructions, you will already have found shelter to weather the trouble. Third, instructions exist because without them, things wouldn’t work the way they are designed to. It’s like putting together a piece of furniture from Ikea: you can either follow the instructions and get something sturdy to eat your Swedish meatballs on, or you can just eat your Swedish meatballs using the splintered piece of furniture that broke because you didn’t follow instructions. So I’ll ask you: what instructions haven’t you been following? Like a doctor, Jesus gives us instructions on how to get closer to God, and we seemingly ignore it. Jesus provides guidance on how we can live a life filled with the Spirit of God, but we dump it. We have passage after passage in the Bible in which we can find satisfaction, and yet we’d rather walk away dissatisfied. The irony in Jesus’ statement is that we clamor to Him, asking Him to provide instruction. That is what it means when He says, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord…'” The word “Lord” in this passage is a double meaning: first, it means the person whom I revere and follow; and secondly, it means the person I worship. Goodness, it is a condemnation of lip service given by Christians! Jesus doesn’t even tell us to do a lot, He knows we’re not even capable of complex instructions. He tells us to worship God, and love our neighbors. He says, He will provide the faith and grace for everything else; yet, even with that, we ignore His instructions. We don’t worship God, we worship everything but God on most days. And for loving our neighbors, well let me just say that loving people don’t act like such haters. If only we stopped to think about the implications of our reckless disregard for God’s instructions: where would our lives be, if we loved people for who they are and not what we want them to be? What greater things would we be able to weather, if our foundations in worship were dug into an unshakeable God? What amazing opportunities would be afforded to us if we could follow instructions?

Jay-Z and Kanye West have this song called “Who Gon Stop Me,” where they critique the excess of American Consumerism at the cost of its own people. That is the current state of individualistic paradigm. It’s prevalent in our attitudes, views and our so-called altruism. Here’s what Jay-Z and Kanye say in their critique: “so many watches I need eight arms/One neck but got eight charms” Yes, it is extravagant and wasteful, but we’re no different than these rappers. All we have to do is open our closet. All we have to do is look in our trash can. All we really have to do is look at our credit card statements. We are consuming so much by ourselves and nobody is stopping us to question where this is all going. We forget the cost behind the money being spent. We forget that while we make ourselves overflow with stuff, people fade into the periphery of society, devoid of life. But I want us to imagine: what would happen to our culture if we shifted that paradigm? If we altered that mentality and stopped thinking about us and how we can be saved – and asked, rather, how can God be glorified, celebrated and adored by our neighbor – our lives may be radically different. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor. – 1 Corinthians 10:24 The Apostle Paul writes this directive knowing that the Christians of Corinth have taken the communion and fellowship with God, and their life of the gospel unfolding before their eyes, and made it into a consumerist ideology where their personal salvations stem from seeking an ultimate longing for eternal happiness. In plain English, the churchgoers in Corinth only went to church because they were trying to consume eternal life. They didn’t really care about God or His glory. They had an ulterior motive and were caught pretending. Perhaps that was too strong: the Corinthians did have strong inclinations towards God’s glory, but had lost that passion. They didn’t really care about God and His glory anymore, because they began to consume the Christian religion like we consume Big Macs. They were alienating people (Christians and non-Christians alike) in their quest for whetting their appetites for the good things of God through an astonishing act of selfishness, thus corrupting the original intention of Christ’s sacrifice. What they were interested in was how to get into the promised land, and what it was going to cost. In response to that, Paul says, “I’m gonna stop you.” He changes the paradigm of salvation completely. When I talk about salvation here, I’m talking about the work of God that continues to save us from ourselves daily, moment by moment: the grace of God on our lives in the process of sanctification. He directs our attention away from ourselves and focuses it on the salvation of somebody else, that is, he wants to know whether our actions are self-interested motivations or if they are concerned with the purification of people around you. He begs the question, “what if your salvation is not really about your salvation but really about the other guy’s salvation?” Our reflection this morning is simply difficult; it is easy to say, but hard to fulfill. The thing that stops us from consuming for ourselves is the physical presence of our neighbors. Our neighbors are people whose lives are affected by our living: starting with the homeless person on the street you stare down in sadness, to the hungry crying child on the subway, and on to the people you work with in the office. Their presence should stop us from doing things just for ourselves, for the sake of consumption. Their presence should compel us to consume their needs, fulfill them. Underlying this idea is the fact that when we all fulfill each other’s needs, we all get taken care of in a circle of gospel-centered life. In seeking the good for our neighbors, we glorify God, celebrate His love, and become mindful of Jesus’ actions of seeking the good for humanity on the cross. God’s good doesn’t abound in our consumption, when our needs are satisfied and we are blessed; on the contrary, it abounds and floods out when His people seek the good and bless the world at large.

My pride and my ego tell me that nobody can be trusted. It tells me that there is nobody I can rely on but myself. I am told that the moment our weaknesses are found, we will be undone.

So we build up these walls and barriers. We develop cover stories for our cover stories to make the chinks in our armor less visible, less pronounced, less vulnerable. We separate our emotions from our judgments, although we know our judgments are clouded by a dirty mist of emotional pain and angst that we will never leave behind.

We take our disappointments in ourselves and mentally scourge ourselves with the most painful afflictions– regret and shame. We take our failures and beat ourselves with rods of disgust. We use our shortcomings as excuses not to try anything that can potentially fail. It becomes a vicious cycle where we are always the loser and our faces show no delight. However, we only feel this way because we believe our talents, strengths and skills somehow contributed to whatever success we believe we accomplished.

We trust in our weapons, whether it be brute strength, sharp tongues or intellectual prowess to save ourselves and delight ourselves. But we quickly realize we don’t have enough weapons, lack the strength, and our intellectual prowess falls infinitely short to that of our enemies’. We correctly judge that it is “me versus the world” because that’s how we feel and what we’ve experienced; but, just because the rest of the world is against you doesn’t mean that you will fail, that your shortcomings are unforgivable or even that we’re perennial losers.

for not by their own sword did they win the land, nor did their own arm save them, but your right hand and your arm, and the light of your face, for you delighted in them. – Psalm 44:3

Psalm 44 is written as a “Maskil” type of poem, meaning that it’s didactic– trying to teach the reader to contemplate and reflect on how things actually work beyond simple perception and observation. The reason I started this quiet time with evocations of our past shortcomings, disappointments and failures was not for you to bring back dark memories you long tried to forget; rather to point out where we would often direct our frustrations. We put our lives in our own hands; and in our dissatisfaction, we project our misery and disappointment in ourselves, and assume that God feels this way towards us. What does that mean?

I mean to say that we basically think God feels the same way about us as we do about us when we fail, fall short or simply become disappointed. The good news is that God doesn’t feel that way about you or me. No, God is “delighted” in us.

He takes pleasure in us, regardless of what we think we accomplished or how well we think we performed. This is the didactic moment– what exactly did we singlehandedly accomplish in our lifetimes, that we should feel compelled to a prideful revulsion of things we couldn’t do on our own? When we look back on our histories, we didn’t really accomplish anything on our own.

We really don’t have much to take credit for. We didn’t really earn anything. Despite all the hard work we put into something, there was something else moving other things into place which pushed opportunities for us forward that we really only stepped into. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me the phrase “with a lot of work and a little bit of luck” wasn’t referring to this exact phenomena. Yes, we work hard, but so does everybody else; interestingly, we’re the ones moving forward, and it’s not because you outworked everyone else.

Read our passage for today, it says: “not by their own… but your [God’s] right hand and arm.” Everything we have or did until this moment, our successes, as well as our shortcomings, were opportunities afforded to us by God who “delighted in us.” God takes pleasure and finds incredible satisfaction in us, in our flaws. God delights in us despite what we can or cannot do.

This is evidenced by Jesus, the perfect Lamb of God, who sacrifices Himself for people who fall short, fail, and disappoint consistently. Christ does this in love, knowing we will fail Him sooner rather than later, just like his disciples did when they scattered at His trial. He accepts our shortcomings and doesn’t find misery in them, like we do. Rather He uses it to transforms our lives to show us that we are not alone, nor abandoned; and, trusting in Him to fight for us is delightful. Let us all accept and live into the identity of being who we are: His delight.

To understand today’s quiet time, you need to have faced or in the midst of facing enemies looking to kill you in your sleep; a burning heap of rubble at your feet; and your strength failing under the burdens you are bearing. Actually, you just needed to have lived life for longer than two minutes to understand any which one of these three instances I just mentioned. Every single time you hit a snafu in your life, where things didn’t go as you intended or planned, is a moment when the anxiety within you screams out with suffocating effect in your mind. This is part of the human experience and a painful reminder that we have failed, we will fail and we will meet insurmountable odds. In fact, probably more times than not, we gave up on trying to rebuild or starting something new because we got tired and our strength and drive flickered away.

Yes, I’ve done this with my relationships, I’ve done it to my career, I’ve done it with school; and more importantly, I’ve done it with my faith and my life. I gave up and walked away because all I could see was the rubble that lied before me and circumstances were looking grim. I failed to see what I was working so hard to build and that is our flaw.

In the place where you hear the sound of the trumpet, rally to us there. Our God will fight for us.” – Nehemiah 4:20

Nehemiah had a great job in Babylon. He worked directly for the emperor of the sprawling empire. But he left that cushy government job to venture out into a place where his passion could thrive. He left to become a construction worker. Except, he wasn’t constructing homes or office buildings. He was constructing the Temple of God.

He was actually reconstructing the Temple from the heap of rubble that was left littered on the the ground by invading forces of wars past. He had supplies and money to rebuild, but his plan and his intentions weren’t the problem. He had to worry about opposing armies trying to tear down what he had just arduously started to rebuild. These armies had no reason to attack the rebuilding of a temple except for the fact that they were mean spirited and wanted to show Nehemiah that no good work goes unpunished.

From this passage, we can gather that the phrase, “God will fight for us”, is a rallying cry for us to step into action and hold strong to seeing what God envisioned us to do. For the Israelite people, this was no cryptic fortune cookie type of statement that is a lot easier said than done. No, I’m not talking about a symbolic rallying cry; I’m talking about a loud, powerful “call to arms” where somebody cries, “Our God will fight for us,” and we pick up hammers in one hand, swords in the other, and then sacrifice our minds and bodies for an epic battle against the enemies of those who work with us, live with us, eat with us, are with us and are us.

But therein lies the problem– we pray “God will fight for us” blow trumpets and horns and do nothing about it. Isn’t the reason we feel hopeless, alone and abandoned really because we cry “Our God will fight for us” and nobody responds? I believe God wants you to respond to those cries in a tangible way.

I believe God empowers you to respond in His name. I believe God wants people to respond to us in our cries and I believe He provides people to fight for us in His name. But here’s the greatest thing of all, when we gather to fight together in God’s name, He will be there fighting with us in His power and righteousness and justice.

Don’t fail to see what He has you doing just because all you see are set backs, enemies and a pile of rubble. So pick up your hammer and sword and go out boldly because that’s how God fights for us.

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies. – 1 Corinthians 6:19-20

We are not our own masters, but belong to God. I know that statement goes against every ounce of American pride boiling within us. It smacks us in the face because it overturns everything we were taught to believe about who we forge ourselves to be when we pull ourselves up from our bootstraps.

Yes, that means we do not live for ourselves or self pleasures, and are really subject to people. Perhaps our greatest dissatisfaction comes from realizing that no matter how much you “do you” it’s not enough for you. Life is not about “doing you” per se, it never was and never will be and as soon as we realize that our dreams and aspirations must be curbed because of the people around us, the faster we will realize that our lives should have broader effects and concerns than what our own selfishness lends itself toward. I know this is where a lot of you will stop reading today’s quiet time. But I want to encourage you to read on because self-denial in the Spirit of God may be more beneficial than the compounded results of our hyper-individualism in the flesh.

When we believe “we are our own,” we live in a selfishly motivated world whose center is “I.” In this world there are no problems when they are not my own problems. There is no injustice when I inflict the injustice. There is no accountability since I am not accountable to anyone but me. When we have nothing to tie us to our neighbors, our decisions have no weight.

Our successes are not shared. Our lives narrowly small. Our sight hazily limited, keeping us from seeing life from another light, our perspective ruined and broken. What does this look like? It looks like a two year old child who bites other people when upset, cries when upset, and throws tantrums when his or her will not be done. The two year old has the world revolving around himself or herself and when we are our own, that’s what we believe life to be. I bet you remember a time in your life, when you weren’t two and over eighteen when you did something like that.

You could probably think of multiple occasions in the last seven days alone. Also, when we are our own, we play the game of self-comparison and wonder whether we are smarter, richer, prettier, happier, and overall better than the next person. When we are our own, we are motivated to compare to define happiness and contentment, but we are never happy and won’t be satisfied. Then disappointments weigh us down as we go on weeklong drinking binges to drown our so-called sorrows. That is if only we don’t have other vices to keep us steadily intoxicated with the idea that we are to be compared and better than the next person.

We then realize in our own-ness that we are unhappy and held back by not being of our own so we ditch people and leave them behind. We tell ourselves not to stop pursuing and to be lonely and of our own to be the smartest, richest, cutest, happiest and the best-est. It doesn’t matter what the cost, it doesn’t matter how, and the consequences are largely ignored; after all, we are our own and life is about “doing me.” So on our own, we become our own and do things alone. But you are not your own.

Paul writes, “you were bought at a price.” You did not come to be on your own by yourself, you didn’t will yourself to where you are and as a result you are accountable to more than your own. Because you’re not your own, there is no comparison. When we are not our own, no comparison matters and our own accomplishments mean little. You are belong to the incomparable. You belong to God, you belong to the people who can’t be on their own. You live, breathe and die as they live, breathe and die.

You are in God as He dwells in you because you are His. When we live “not as our own” we move with the Spirit of God to witness the power of others becoming something other than their own. We begin to love others like they are our own. Likewise, we become their own and they love us as their own selves. Being our own didn’t work before and won’t work in the future.

Isn’t it time we honor God by becoming one of His own? He did pay the price for our lives. He gave us uniqueness that cannot be compared. So it’s time to stop living selfishly for ourselves– “being of our own.” It’s time to wake up and realize that we are not our own and are accountable to Jesus, who purchased us with his blood, and to all the people who surround us that add their own lives to our own.

If you are struggling with weakness, press toward faith in God in your moment of anxiety because that is where victory awaits you. What do I mean by weakness? I mean everything that takes away your confidence from who you are in God. I mean the loss of identity from forgone relationships (whether it’s loss of loved ones, breakups and divorces), the repercussions of bad mistakes (we all made them), or setbacks in your career (because of political or race issues). The loss of confidence comes from troublesome emotions and emotions don’t break us mortally and physically, it harasses us mentally in the quiets of night and in the noise of silence. It pervades our thoughts, slowly wreaking havoc until we are rendered useless.

Don’t be mistaken, you are not thrown to the wayside just because you lose your confidence or because your identity is in question. Doubt is a natural part of living life, but doubt is never supposed to destroy our lives, which it does so frequently. Further, the same doubts should not cloud us day after day, and year after year, it is not supposed to be as cyclical as the seasons.

I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD. – Psalm 27:13-14David is having doubts about himself, about who he is in God. He sees the world coming against him. He feels alone. Everything he learned in church seems to be useless. His faith, which has been consumed by past success, is finally being met with having to choose a price for what he believes because now everything is going to cost more than just mere belief– his life is on the line. He is at a point in his life where he does not have any friends, but has also been abandoned by his family, the very people who share his blood. Even when he calls out to God in desperation, there doesn’t seem to be any response, it feels like God doesn’t care. What do you think all of that abandonment means for his confidence?

Isn’t this how we feel in our times of weakness? Isn’t this what we experience when we are so let down by everybody and everything in life? We are brought to our knees and faced with fight or flight; but you can’t take flight because there’s nowhere for you to go and at the same time, the fight will certainly bring death and still there is no answer from the all loving God. Then we give ourselves up to our doubts and dangle through life, hanging on threads of a meaningless life.

Our eyes become sullen, they look of misery and the fire flickers to a cold death. A few of us will grit our teeth and abandon everybody else and stop expecting anything from anybody before we become abandoned and turn to an insular self-reliance to deal with our painful dis-confidence. The results are the same whether we fight or take flight– confidence dies. Today, we need to all change. We all need to wait for confidence to come in our anxiety during our weakness. If faith is really confidence, like the Bible says, then we need to wait expectingly for it to come from God. Confidence is lost when we stop waiting.

Confidence is lost when we stop expecting. David’s confidence comes from knowing one thing: that in the end, faith in God ultimately triumphs over all difficulties which besiege and imperil our lives. Yes, faith in God will cost us something precious to us, but God’s mercy will protect us from the despair of that cost. Be strong and take heart, see the goodness of God in your life. See the people God brings to you who are not against you and embrace them because God embraces you always. So wait for confidence, wait for God in expectation.

It’s often difficult to tell when and where reality emerges with life– the moment a thought manifests itself in motion or when an idea coming to fruition in action. Perhaps the trauma of pain, anguish and uncertainty becomes the epicenter of an unspeakable reality.

Unequivocally, reality hits hard and is inexpressibly tangible, rocking the very depth of our souls and leaving our spirits broken or solidifying the heartfelt resolve of earnest faith. However, we too easily credit our joyfully temporal realities to our own power and strength; and similarly, we point accusatory fingers at God for realities that hamper our perceived happy realities. We have the tendency to perceive only the reality we want to see and so we live in a reality of twisted fantasies.

Walk about Zion, go around her, number her towers, consider well her ramparts, go through her citadels, that you may tell the next generation that this is God, our God forever and ever. He will guide us forever. -Psalm 48:12-14Zion is the mountain on which Jerusalem is built. Zion is symbol of where the reality of God’s kingdom touches the physical world in which we dwell. It was on Zion that David built his home, where Solomon built God’s Temple, where Jesus dies and overcomes death by becoming the sin and ultimate sacrifice for our shortcomings and imperfections. Zion is the place in our lives where God’s reality emerges and begins to unfold in our lives. It is not just a spiritual reality, but it is a tangible physical one.

Zion was built for you and for me, a place where we can dwell with God in the realities that define our lives. It is the physical representation of who God is for us in our lives– the insurmountable stronghold. The Psalmist writes that we should examine our Zion; the place where God manifests in our lives.

You will notice that God manifests all aspects of our lives when we examine ourselves carefully. Our examination compels us to recount who He is as the guide to our reality. The good and the bad of what we perceive in an unfair life is found emerging from Zion. I am not going to rationalize senselessness in our lives, where the pieces and parts just don’t add up to anything a good God would do; but it doesn’t mean that God’s reality can’t be found through those circumstances. Simply said, your reality may suck tremendously right now, but it doesn’t mean that your life reality has to be defined by it or even that you are prisoner held by it. This means the pain and anguish you are currently suffering is the point where God’s reality emerges in your journey of faith to replace your current hopeless reality.

We have a hard time swallowing all of that. Especially since God is not tangible like a fortified city. But reality is what emerges from Him, not the terror that seizes our lips when people attack and come to pillage our lives. God calls you to His city everyday, but we are not ready to leave our fantasy, we don’t want reality to emerge in our lives. Yet deep down inside, we know we should accept it.

How do we accept God’s reality? We begin by taking a look at the towers, ramparts and citadels in our lives placed strategically by God for us. The “towers” of where God places us are the friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues that stand watch over our lives, guarding against predators and attacks. We usually don’t listen to these people and resent them when our fantasies are struck by reality, but they are part of the reality God places us in.

The “ramparts” or shelters in life are provided for you in the form of reliability– these are people are the love givers whom dependability is proven when you face difficulties. You may very well be a rampart to another person and that is a reality of His kingdom, because you and I fortify each other.

Let’s not forget the “citadels” in our lives, those people that influence our lives deeply and meaningfully. Like a citadel provides direction and guidance for a fortress, living citadels provide for hope, they are an essential part of God’s reality. They are there for you by the will of God to change your reality into His own.

God is the embodiment of all these things. He is the mover and shaker of all people. Because our God is forever and ever, His reality is never ending. God is all these things to reality as reality emerges from who He is and His providence alone. God’s reality is the only one worth tangibly living. We need to find where that reality emerges in our lives from God. Come with me and see God’s reality emerging from where you are placed today.