Empowered to Persevere 4

In case you haven’t noticed, we live in a world that has been damaged by sin. “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12). Sin’s one time act creates an ongoing influence; an influence that can only be overcome by the ongoing influence of God’s presence.

Healing is a process.

By practicing spending time in God’s presence, the presence of sin can be mitigated. The brokenness of sin and death will never fully be removed while we are on earth, but we can persevere through the brokenness when we do it with God. God wants more for us than to give us an easy life; He wants to join us in our struggles and storms. Sometimes, He allows storms into our lives because He wants us to trust Him to carry us through; sometimes, He allows storms into our lives because our enemies cannot swim. The stormy waters can show us who is depending on God for strength and who doesn’t really make God a priority in their life. If we lose our cool during difficult times, it could be an indication that we don’t fully trust God in our life. 

The vision of life is seeing God's work being done in your life instead of looking to see if your life is going well. 

We persevere through the hard times in life by depending on God and looking for what He is doing behind the scenes in our life. We can only see clearly what is happening in our life when we are looking for what God is doing in our life. All that matters in life is knowing God and giving Him glory. If we keep looking to see how God's work is being done, we will have a good purpose for our life. The difficulties of life can distract us from God’s work if we let it, but we get to choose what our focus will be on. 

The more we train our focus, the more we will naturally focus on that thing. The more we focus on God, the more we will see Him in our life, the more we focus on ourselves, the more we will be discouraged. We are not God, and we cannot make ourselves happy through self-indulgence. We were made for more than ourselves, we were made in God’s image to give glory to God. We persevere through life by doing what we were created to do: give God glory in every situation in life and allow Him to work in our life in Power and majesty.