The Special of the Day… From the Orange Moon Cafe…
"Our Confidence"
"Being confident of this very thing, that He which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ" (Philippians 1:6).
"And God is able to make all grace abound toward you; that ye, always having all sufficiency in all things, may abound to every good work" (II Corinthians 9:8).
God's promised "good work" provides the foundation and power for the believer's "every good work." All steps of our "walk by faith" flow from the gift of His promised "I will dwell and walk in them" (II Corinthians 5:7; II Corinthians 6:16). We live for God by living from God. The New Testament abounds with this marvel of a life lived by the presence, leading, and enabling of our faithful Lord, who in the new birth gave us the wonder of a gift even eternity will not fully exhaust: "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians 1:27). Indeed, He gave Himself to us as the Life of our lives.
"Christ… is our life" (Colossians 3:4).
The key to experiencing the gift lies in Paul's affirmation: "being confident of this very thing." Do we believe such truth to be true? Have we built an altar within our hearts whereupon we sacrifice the carnal notion of confidence in our human faculties, making way for trust in divine faithfulness? "We are the circumcision, which worship God in the Spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh" (Colossians 3:3). If so, we live in the assurance that regardless of our human foibles and vagaries, our Heavenly Father ever works to finish what He started. Thereby, we find ourselves more and more enabled to walk in the trustworthiness the flows from His trustworthiness known and embraced. Yes, for God, from God.
We do not have to live this day as if alone. We will not live this day alone. However, we can falsely perceive ourselves as such, resulting in a walk that does not proceed from our Lord's walk in us. No greater tragedy can be imagined. Indeed, the Lord Jesus was forsaken by the Father and the Holy Spirit on the cross of Calvary that the promise of "I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee" might grace us with the abiding presence and working of God (Matthew 27:46; Hebrews 13:5). To live without confidence in such a gift must therefore be viewed as a spiritual scandal of the darkest neglect. To live with such confidence should even more be joyfully viewed in terms of the love that "passeth knowledge," but which dwells within our hearts to enable a life that can only be the fruit of the very life of God within us (Ephesians 3:19).
"The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given unto us" (Romans 5:5).
"Being confident of this very thing" confessed the Apostle Paul of God's perpetually faithful "good work." Let us join our brother of old in our day, and in this moment. Yes, our Lord will ever be for us all we need, and infinitely more. He will ever do for us what we require, and infinitely more. He "cannot lie" and He cannot fail to be who He is and do what He does. This is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the One who has never disappointed anyone who has placed confidence in Him. And who never will.
"For the Lord shall be thy confidence."
(Proverbs 3:26)
Weekly Memory Verse
All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.
(Isaiah 53:4-6)
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