We Consider Blessed Those Who Have Persevered

We hear a lot about the promises, but not much about the process. Yet it’s when we’re in the process of reaching the promise that the enemy easily stumbles us. That’s because we’ve become a bunch of ‘fair-weather’, ‘Johnny-come-lately’, ‘microwave Christians’!

Success in any venture lies in holding on, even when others let go. But today we seem only to want instant gratification and, if we don’t get it, we leave our jobs, our churches and even our families.

There’s a process you must go through to be effective, regardless of your level of faith. There can be no shortcuts. You’ve got to pay full price – it never goes in the sale!

Just think about this. All Scripture consummates at the cross. It took all of the Old Testament: thousands of types and shadows, altars of sacrifice, feasts and rituals to introduce us to what God planned at Calvary. It took every Aaron, every Melchizedek, every Samuel, every David, every Solomon, every Isaiah for us to be able to grasp something of the magnitude of what God would do in Christ’s short thirty-three year life span. He couldn’t show us the plan all at once. The process took hundreds of years, because the promise was so awesome that it would have been well beyond us otherwise!

This alone establishes the divine principle that, ‘If it costs you nothing, it’s worth nothing!’ Endurance is the price tag of achievement. This is a helpful expanded translation that gives us the true secret of endurance, ‘We pray that you’ll have the strength … not the grim strength of gritting your teeth, but the strength God gives … that endures the unendurable and spills over into joy’, Col. 1. 11 TM.

Hang in there – what God has in store for you is worth any price!