by Samantha Arp | Sep 7, 2026 | Featured, Hope, Life Advice, LO Library, Perspective, Prayer, Redemption, Testimonies |
The phrase “a thrill of hope” may, as it did for me, take you back to childhood Christmas Eve church services and the anticipation of Christmas Day. My family would always attend a Christmas Eve service in the evening before going to dinner and trying our very best to go to bed early—when, in reality, my younger sister and I would stay up watching movies and dreaming of Christmas late into the evening. Most children pay little attention to the Christmas hymns sung on Christmas Eve because their little hearts and minds are too excited for what they know is coming the next morning, and I was no different. But even as a child, that line from the hymn “O Holy Night” struck a chord with me.
I started looking into the history of this hymn, and it’s a bit complicated—it began as a French Christmas hymn that was later translated into English for American use, but it was banned in France for a long time because of some religious disagreement and the war for French independence, and it caused conflict in America during the Civil War. The song itself could tell many stories over its long life. But as I started studying this, one consistency rose to the surface: every person, army, and country who reached for this hymn needed “a thrill of hope.”
When we come to the Christmas story in the beginning of the New Testament, we step into a pretty hopeless scene. No word from God has been recorded for almost five hundred years. God’s people were under tyrannical rule in Israel. They had been promised for centuries that one day God would send a Redeeming King for His people, but they had been waiting, waiting, and waiting. Years underneath a king that didn’t know their God, years reading the Law and practicing the feasts and festivals, years going to the temple and sacrificing for sins and relying on a priest to advocate for them on their behalf—imagine the longing they felt for the fulfillment of God’s promises. We may not be waiting on a king or freedom from oppression, but we’ve all tasted the waiting. We wait for answers to our deepest desires, the fulfillment of God’s goodness to us, the end to chronic pain, the end to being childless, the end to being single, the end to grueling graduate school, the end to financial stress—the list goes on and on. We’ve all tasted the hopelessness that accompanies endless waiting. It’s exhausting.
Imagine you’re a shepherd living in that in-between-testaments time. You’ve heard the stories; you know God’s promises, but the hope that God will come through is starting to wane. You’re wearied of waiting. Until one night, the skies break open in blinding light, throwing you to your knees, and thousands of angels appear to tell you that the waiting is over. Just out of sight, an angel is telling Mary, the mother of Jesus, that her womb has been chosen by God to carry the Savior of the whole world. All of the hopelessness, all of the confusion, all of the questions silenced in the face of the God of Heaven, coming down to do everything He promised He would do, and more. His presence brought peace. His touch made the blind to see. He spoke life to the overlooked. He knelt in the dirt with the ashamed. He brought purity and worship back into the temple. For every need, He provided; for every pain, he brought healing; for every question, He answered with plenty. He came, not to save the people from their political enemy, but to set them free from the enemy of their soul: sin and death. On a canvas of dark hopelessness, Jesus appeared, and with Him, the weary world rejoiced.
Before Christ, we all lived in the darkness. No purpose to define our days, no anchor in God’s ultimate goodness, no ability to live a godly life, no hope that one day pain and evil will see its end. The book of Ephesians tells us that we were “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers to the covenant of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.” (Ephesians 2:12). Just as the birth of Jesus was a thrill of hope to a weary world, the gospel has come to you and me to awaken us to the same kind of hope. No longer are we strangers to God, but because of His rich mercy, we are called children of God. No longer are we people without hope, but we belong to the God of Hope. No longer do we stand guilty before God, but clean, whole, complete, and blameless. Child of God, He has already met your deepest need. Preach the gospel to yourself again today. You are His. No matter how dark it seems, hope is coming. Hope is already here. His name is Jesus.
Is that dark hopelessness stretching its hands over your life? Have you, like the weary world, long waited for pain to relent? Depression clouds our minds. Anxiety makes us so forgetful. Grief knocks us off our feet. Disappointment introduces so much shame. Over our weary lives, the gospel speaks a word of great hope. Even when you can’t see Him, there is a God who speaks light into darkness. There is a God who stands above time, who works all things according to the counsel of His will. There is a God who knows the stars in the sky as intimately as the hairs on your head, for whom nothing is ever impossible. And one day, He will make all things new. Because of Jesus, hope is always on the horizon—let us, the weary world, rejoice!
by Samantha Arp | Jul 21, 2026 | Featured, Life Advice, LO Library, Perspective, Prayer, Testimonies
So many of us spend so much time thinking about, praying through, and searching for the plan of God for our lives. Milestones tend to bring this on—graduating high school, graduating college, preparing to get married, multiple years at a job—all of these things really make us think. We only get one life. We get one chance to live in this world that God made, one chance to see it, one chance to contribute to it. That’s so exciting, but it’s also so much pressure.
I think some of this is unique to our generation. Never before have you ever had the whole world at your fingertips. In 24 hours, if you wanted to and had the resources to make it happen, you could start a life on the other side of the world. You could move to Morocco tomorrow, have Google Translate to help you speak to people, and in a few days, probably find a place to live. You could take out a loan and buy a car, you could move states away to college, you could buy a plane ticket to New York City for the day—you really could. Some of that, really, wouldn’t even be that hard to do. But at the same time, that means you could also pursue any job of the hundreds or thousands to choose from. You could live in any city, in any state. You could probably date and potentially marry many different people if the circumstances were right, and any one of these decisions could impact the entire course of the rest of your life. Terrifying, right? If you’re an over-analyzer like me, the number of options is both exciting and completely paralyzing. Our great-grandparents, even our grandparents, really didn’t have those options—they knew their immediate community and the opportunities they could hear or read about; they had the job options right in front of them, and they knew the people in their town or maybe a town over. Their options, for better or worse, were just more limited than ours.
We want to do great things for God. We so desperately want to please him, to honor him, to build something that matters in the kingdom. But what do we do when the thing God calls us to feels small? We write a blank check with our lives, we live with open hands, and God calls us to what feels, well, kinda insignificant. When we’ve dreamed of doing great things for God, what do we do with “small” things?
The Old Testament, typically, isn’t the place I go for immediate answers. The New Testament is full of answers for all of life’s questions—it tells us how to act in light of the Gospel, how to pursue holiness, how to treat our neighbor—but not as much in the Old Testament. But really, the Old Testament is a book of narratives about people who walked with God. It’s the most accurate depiction of human nature that you’ll find, full of broken people who were trying their best to limp towards a God they wanted to please but didn’t fully understand. And isn’t that, in the end, the same thing we are doing?
Consider Joseph.. He was the obvious favorite in a group of 12 brothers, and the youngest, who kept telling his brothers about all of his dreams in which they bowed down to him. Unfortunately for Joseph, the frustration and jealousy this produced in his brothers led them to leave him for dead and sell him to the Egyptians to become a slave. Joseph, put in a horrible position, ends up in the house of a powerful man named Potiphar. In this house, the favor of God rests on Joseph’s life and he rises through the ranks of leadership until he is the head of Potiphar’s house. He is then wrongfully imprisoned, where he serves and leads inside the prison by interpreting the prisoners’ dreams and speaking on God’s behalf. One of these prisoners eventually becomes a direct servant to Pharaoh, remembers Joseph in times of trouble, and calls on Joseph to interpret Pharaoh’s dream. Pharaoh is so impressed by his interpretation that he appoints Joseph as his right-hand man over all of Egypt. The household leadership, the favor of God, the interpretation of dreams, and Joseph’s faithfulness to God result in the salvation of not just Joseph’s life but the lives of Joseph’s family. So much of Joseph’s story teaches us about Jesus, but so much of Joseph’s story is God weaving together bits and pieces of what seemed random, unfortunate, or trying to build the character and skillset of a person God wanted to use mightily for His glory.
Consider also David. David was just a child when a man named Samuel, a prophet of God, came to his house and told him that one day, David would be king over all of Israel. When we read the story of David, most of us assume that David went that day right into the palace and sat on the throne. In reality, David went right back to being a shepherd. Every night, sleeping with the sheep in the grass and the mud and fighting off predators to his sheep, but with the calling in his heart to rule a nation. When the time came for David to fight Goliath, was it the calling to the throne that made him capable of killing the giant? No—it was his years of training as a shepherd. He killed Goliath, not with the potential of his reign, but with the skills he developed in being faithful to a lowly calling. When David was invited into the throne room, he probably assumed that was his moment—but Saul, the current king, just wanted David to play the harp for him. David sat in the throne room every day, and think of what he saw! He saw a man making decisions for a nation, ruling with military power, leading his household and his subjects—the very thing God called him eventually to do. When David did eventually take Saul’s throne, he was a great king. But David was a great king because God was preparing David in the pasture, long before David knew God’s plan for his life.
I can see God’s preparation in my story, too. I was called to ministry when I was 12. I know this in hindsight, really, because 12-year-old-me didn’t have the language for that kind of call yet. I was sitting in my home church during our missions conference. I remember their stories of risk for the sake of the Gospel. I remember absolutely loving it.
I sat in the Saturday evening service with my childhood best friend, whose family had spent lengths of time overseas. I have no recollection of who was preaching, but the text was Isaiah 61. It reads like this: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives…” (Isaiah 61:1-3). It’s a prophetic passage about the ministry of Jesus—the ministry that He would eventually entrust to us (Matt 28:18-20). It felt like everything around me went quiet, and the Spirit of God laid that calling right before me. I was to do as He did. That’s all I knew at that point.
Years later, as my personality, gifts, and interests developed, I figured out I was good at words. I didn’t really care to say them out loud or in front of people, but I was good at understanding them. I was also good at writing them. In high school, that meant I was really good in my English classes. So I went to college thinking that I wanted to help people, and I was good at English, so I studied to be an English teacher. I did all my classroom experience in a low-income school, really loved my students, and thought I would do that for the rest of my life. My mom and dad both worked at school—my dad is a teacher—and both sets of my grandparents were teachers. But the more time I spent in the classroom, the less I enjoyed the actual teaching. My most problematic students—the fighters, the late to class, the disengaged ones—all of them had to leave my class and go somewhere else to talk to someone else. But they were the ones I felt the most called to. I wanted to know them and help them; I just didn’t want to be their teacher. Through three very specific and random phone calls, I changed my major to English and got on a plane to spend 3 months overseas that summer, to be followed by seeing Gospel work in 7 different countries since the Lord led me to that decision. I now work at a local church where I see the winds of revival stirring in the next generation of students every week. I write curriculum for them in the same format and with the same education that I received studying to be a teacher. The writing I had a passion for as a child, I now do full-time. The passion I have for evangelism I now get to pour into my students. In every season of my life, and even more so in the ones I didn’t understand, I see the kindness of God to orchestrate my life to accomplish his purposes, even when I was clueless.
So what do we do? This doesn’t mean that we are passive, content to let things happen to us and cite God’s sovereign control so we don’t have to work hard. But it does mean that we hold our plans loosely. It does mean that we trust in God’s heart when we can’t see His hand. It means that when God ruins your best-laid plans, or when the task in front of you doesn’t make any sense, we serve a God who turns prisoners into rulers and shepherds into kings. Nothing—and I mean nothing—is wasted when it is done to God’s glory. There is an old hymn called “Little is Much When God is In It” that goes like this:
“Does the place you’re called to labor
Seem so small and little known?
Well, it is great if God is in it
And He will not forsake His own.
Little is much when God is in it
Labor not for wealth or fame
There’s a crown, and you can win it
It you go in Jesus’ name.”
Little is much when God is in it. If you are waiting on the Lord to do the things he has promised, or if you feel like you have been entrusted with something too small, it is your faithfulness to Jesus—not your impressiveness—that qualifies you for great things. Trust Him, and do well.
by Samantha Arp | Feb 12, 2026 | Featured, Life Advice, LO Library
Psalm 23
Every time I go to the store I forget to buy Command hooks. I just moved into a tiny apartment where floor space is scarce, so the majority of my square footage exists as a wall—a wall in which I cannot drill or screw in or nail anything, because my residence there is, well, temporary. Thus the temporary hooks, which I keep forgetting to buy. To be truthful there are still lots of things I need that I don’t have: dish rags, more trash bags, a bath mat, a working lamp. A recent close call with an HVAC fire has also made me consider the necessity of something my landlord called “renter’s insurance,” although I’m not sure what I would insure given the whole of my earthly possessions amounts to little more than consigned clothes on mismatched hangars and too many throw blankets. Not much on the walls yet, either—I keep forgetting those hooks.
There are all kinds of things we think we need. More seriously than my dish rags and trash bags, we all need to be seen, loved, cherished, chosen, and respected. We need to pay our very real bills that have very real consequences for not paying them. We have real people to feed and clothe and drive around to practice and dance lessons. Some of you have medical expenses, unsaved family members, terminal diagnoses, wayward children—burdens that only our Father knows and sees. In times like those, we feel our need deeply. We think about it daily.
And then we open our Bible, some of us less often than we’d like to admit, and we see a God who cares for other peoples’ needs. He split the sea, healed a disease, made the sun stand still, and raised a little girl to life, all for other people. We start to believe that God provides for the needs of other people, but He seems to have skipped right over us. Do you know that feeling?
One particularly frustrating morning between me and the Lord began with me sitting down and wasting no time to get right to complaining about all the ways He had not met my needs that day. I could see a long list of things on my list that He had not seen to yet, and I felt justified in my anger. Right in the middle of my spiritual temper-tantrum, the Lord sat me right down in Psalm 23 and (gently, as good Fathers do) put my nose to the page. If it’s been a while since you read it in the NIV, it starts like this: “The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing.”
As you can imagine, that sentence ran totally against the grain of all my feelings. So I read it again. And again. I had my list of “things” I lacked. I’m sure you do too. How can God be faithful to his Word while we still “lack?” We stand, as anyone who follows Jesus often does, at a crossroads between God’s Word and our feelings. I really don’t like it there. But it’s here that God refines and molds us—not when everything is perfect. It’s here where we sit and listen, and He kindly bends His knee to teach. It’s here where He can take a heart of stone, weathered by pain and disappointments, and make it beat again if you’ll let Him. This is the hard part, the best part, when we “gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and inquire in His temple” even when it costs us something (Ps 27:4). So bring it to him. See what He says.
“The Lord is…” There’s lots of ways we could finish that sentence. Mighty, holy, perfect, strong, powerful, loving—all true, all good. But not what He says. He says “The Lord is my shepherd.” Interesting. That’s not the most glamorous thing He could choose. Shepherds sleep on the grass, clean up after animals, and are the sole reason that sheep don’t run off a cliff or thirst to death. Shepherds tend to, feed, guide, protect, and sometimes even carry their sheep. The Lord creates with a word. The Lord exists in continual, celestial worship. And this Lord is your shepherd.
“The Lord is my shepherd.” Not “our” shepherd. Not the shepherd of the people who perform perfectly, or those who seem to have all their prayers answered, or have enough money or time to meet all their needs themselves. This isn’t talking about your kids or your husband or your pastor. In some way, somehow, by some miracle of grace, you belong to Him. You get to call Him “mine.” The God who speaks, who bends the knee to listen, who comes to you, who loves you without any condition, who died to make a way for you, and the God who will not let you go is the one who shepherds you. This God is not called “the shepherd of millions” or “the shepherd of your family” or “the shepherd of the ones who get it right all the time” but he is your shepherd. It’s really a marvel when you think about it.
I think that’s why David had the audacity to say the next part. Because the Lord is your shepherd—not a human limited by time and space and energy, not a being with little care for your soul, not a god somewhere who must be appeased and convinced to love you—”you lack nothing.” Do you think that a Father who gave His Son for you would withhold anything else? In the midst of counting the hairs on your head, do you think He forgot what you need? He says He knows “even before you ask” (Matt 6:8). Because it is Him who shepherds you and Him to whom you belong, “you lack nothing.” I hope you feel His loving eyes on you, compelling you not to sidestep His promises that He means to land squarely on you. “The Lord is your shepherd, so you lack nothing.”
So what do we do with our lists?
I find that my greatest frustration with God comes when I start to have a theology problem. I forget what God is really like, and start assuming that God is like me: worried, anxious, selfish, stingy, or mean.When the Spirit gets through my stubbornness and fixes my eyes on who my Father really is, I look down at my list again. It’s no less serious than before, but it is less terrifying. If the Lord is my shepherd, then He knows when rent is due. He knows the needs of our children. He knows how tired I am, how difficult marriage is, how tight budgets are, how hopeless I feel—He’s God. He knows. He can handle that. And if the Lord is my shepherd, then He will act in perfect love towards me, no matter what His answer is. If He tells me to wait, then I’d better trust what I don’t see. If He says no, then I must not need it. If He says yes, then I enjoy His blessings. For any answer, I can marvel that the God of the universe heard me.
Instead of staring at the beginning of Psalm 23 in defiance, looking to all the ways God hasn’t answered, what if we started leveling it as an arrow to the Enemy’s lie to us? I’ve found it starts to read a little differently and puts some courage in my bones. What can the world do to you, if the Lord is your shepherd? You lack nothing. We are safe, right in the palm of His capable hands. He knows everything, has everything, and forgets nothing. I still have to remember to get those hooks, though.
“Those who seek the Lord lack no good thing.”
Psalm 34:10
by Samantha Arp | Oct 9, 2025 | Anxiety, Featured, Life Advice, LO Library
Do you remember the first time you ran and hid? The first time you felt a genuine sense of fear, the first time your guard went up, the first time you felt the inclination to shrink in shame? For most of us it happened young—for me it was a nightmare that gripped my little heart in total fear. I was young enough to be sleeping in a princess nightgown, and in the dream I got up from my bed and walked into an empty living room. When I looked outside, there was a huge tree growing right in the middle of my front yard. As I got closer to the tree, I saw the feet of a giant standing beside the tree, so tall that I couldn’t even see his head for the clouds. That’s the only image I remember—next thing I knew, I woke up paralyzed in fear, scared to get out of my bed to find my family.
In hindsight, my little nightmare was probably a reaction to the “Jack and the Beanstalk” fairy tale I heard that day, an innocent story that grew so much in my imaginative mind that it wrapped me in fear hours later. Those of us with active imaginations understand what it’s like to talk ourselves into a totally unnecessary, ridiculous fear. That tree was real, the giant was definitely as big as I remember, and I was in grave, immediate danger—at least, that’s what the little girl in the princess gown thought. And no one, no matter how rational, was going to convince me otherwise.
Fear seems to be our thing these days. Just today, as I sit and listen, everyone is talking about it. Fear of what the world will become in the hands of people in power. Fear of the wrinkles starting to form around our eyes. Fear of that friend who we have to see tomorrow at school. Fear of not being able to pay for bills, or cars, or school uniforms, or family vacations, or eggs. Fear of what might be, fear of what won’t be, fear of what is or is not to come. We over-medicate, under-meditate, over-caffeinate, get side-hustles, get botox, get chickens—all while rest, true rest, is always at our fingertips but never on our calendars. Don’t mishear me. Most of those things are not bad things. The problem is this: we, as people of God, have accepted fear as the perpetual undercurrent of our reality.
You may have heard it said that the Bible contains the command “do not fear” 366 times. That’s enough to hear a new one every day of the calendar year and then some, just in case you have a particularly fearful leap year. If you haven’t looked into all 366 of these, you should. There is so much of the goodness of God we can see in his constant reminder against fearfulness. But our culture has tricked us into a deeper, more sinister, and harder to identify form of fearfulness that I would call victimhood. It’s more than just fear—it’s souls in constant state of defense, always waiting for the next misfortune, offense, or crisis. Instead of having momentary, circumstantial, everyday fear, we take our responses to fear, which are very real (anxiety, depression, anger, materialism, constant entertainment, etc) and slap it on our chest like a nametag. We’ve made fearfulness an identity.
Some of this isn’t a personal problem. We were not created to take in so much negative information, violence, contention, and evil on a daily basis. We have all kinds of opportunities to fuel our fear, to feel like a constant victim of evil and never fight back. Lots of us, instead of looking to what Scripture says, have taken our coping mechanisms and claimed them as identities, content to live under the banner of “anxiety,” “depression,” “anger,” or a number of other things for the rest of our lives. It’s where we live now—and that’s just “how it is, I guess.” But if you are in Christ, the name of Jesus speaks a better word over you.
It is a scheme of the Enemy to keep us in that kind of bondage. If the Enemy of God can look at God’s people, people who the Bible says are “seated in the heavenly places with Christ” (Eph 2:6) and “held together by the word of his power” (Col 1:17), who have been “given all authority in heaven and on earth” (Matt 28:18) and who “will soon crush Satan under their feet” (Rom 16:20) and make them cower in fear instead of march forward in confidence, then he wins. If he cannot keep us from believing in Christ for salvation, then the next best thing is to keep us from living in the victory of it.
Here’s the truth: we cannot be content to live as victims anymore. The world is too lost, God is too good, and your inheritance in Christ is too rich to let fear make you a victim. Romans 8:35-39 speaks directly to this: “Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword?…No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present or things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Even if you have been a victim of sin (your own sin, the sins of others, or the general brokenness of the world), in Christ, that’s not who you are. In him, you are more than a conqueror.
Even when it doesn’t feel that way, even when it feels like the Enemy is taking ground, even when you fail, even when tragedy strikes, none of those things are stronger than your Savior’s grip on you. Death, angels, authorities, powers, uncertain futures, insecure incomes, unstable homes—nothing can separate you from his love. Nothing gets to name you, claim you, or rule you but his total, complete, and overwhelming love for you. It will not leave, it will not fail, it will not give up. Victimhood isn’t your reality—God’s love is.
Which takes me back to my princess gown and my giant. So many of us are staring at giants of fear, and the words of Jesus feel shockingly small next to a giant with his head in the clouds. Until you remember what is true: that giant of fear, whatever it is, is just a schoolyard bully next to our God. He reigns supreme and undefeated. No giants, no nightmares, no fear stands before his love for you.
What is that thing controlling your heart and your mind? What is the giant of fear, taunting your faith in God? That isn’t who you are. Stop naming yourself by it. Replace that lie with the truth of God’s Word, and cling to it. There is too much available to you, and too much Kingdom work to be done, to settle for anything less than His love for you.
by Samantha Arp | Aug 3, 2023 | Bible Reading / Study, Forgiveness, Life Advice
We spend a lot of our energy convincing others of the love of God. In fact, for the most part, we seem to be convinced of it for others— fully believing that the grace of God covers every sin of theirs and that their Heavenly Father profoundly loves them. For many of us who are familiar with church, it would be a simple thing to biblically prove that God loves His people.
But sometimes we find ourselves distant, anxious, and unsteady in His presence. We know that Jesus makes it possible to be in His throne room and that He is sufficient to cover sins. We just don’t think God wants us there.
I went to Him cautiously, thinking that He was accepting, but displeased. I went to Him reluctantly, convinced He rolled His eyes when I showed up. I went quietly, on my best behavior, not wanting to take up any space where I already felt unworthy. If you’ve ever felt like me, give the Bible a chance to convince you otherwise— His presence is the safest, most joyful place to be, and He really does want you there.
First, it is commanded that we go to Him. He is the one who commands it. Matthew 11:28-30 starts with this: “Come to me, all…” This is an imperative command. A deliberate instruction. Jesus is commanding that all come to Him. He says the same thing in John 15, commanding us to abide in Him. But how can we come to Him?
Second, we know the holiness of God, and that our sin makes it impossible to go to Him on our own. The Father knew that too. Since the beginning, He has been making ways for us. Establishing covenants, using men as mouthpieces, dwelling in tents made by human hands, leading in pillars of cloud and fire, honoring sacrifices, responding to prayers, and finally, coming down Himself. The story of the Bible is one of God constantly seeking broken people. He subjected Himself to human life and death—why? For His glory and our participation in it. That we might be called sons and daughters. So He commands that we come to Him, and He made it possible to come to Him.
Third, it was the joy of Christ to hang on the cross on our behalf. Hebrews 12:2 says that Jesus went to the cross “for the joy set before Him.” The joy of bringing us to the Father was great enough to justify the torture of the cross. He called it “joy” to endure the cross when He saw our communion with Him on the other side. In fact, Hebrews calls Him the “author” of our faith in this sense. He chose the cross in order to choose you, and He wrote it that way.
So we have a command to come to Christ, the path to Him accomplished by Christ, and a declaration that it was His joy to bring us to the Father. Maybe He does want us to come— and still, there’s more.
Jesus “knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.” (Psalm 103:14) He is not shocked by our weakness. 1 John says that “if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” We are even told that His power is made perfect in our weakness. That we are hidden in Christ. Seated with Him in the heavenly places. So when the Father sees us, He sees the sufficiency of Christ.
The deeper our need for forgiveness, the more the worthiness of Christ is put on display. His sacrifice was enough to accomplish not only our sinlessness before Christ, which is a miracle in itself, but it was enough to accomplish His delight in us as well.
To go to Him anxiously believing that He is secretly disappointed is to reject the truth that the blood of Jesus is enough to cover your failures. This weight on our shoulders is enough to keep us from His presence, which is the very point of Jesus’ sacrifice in the first place. Why would He command you to come to Him, give His life to make it possible, call it joy to endure the cross, and then hide you in Christ and include your life in His glory if He didn’t want you in His presence? Even delight in your coming to Him?
I’ll submit to you what I have been leaning on for life: The Father is greatly pleased when you trust the blood of Jesus enough to walk into His throne room with confidence. This confidence does not come from faith in yourself, but complete knowledge of your complete unworthiness, matched and exceeded by the sacrifice of Jesus on your behalf. He knows your frame. He knows your weakness. He knows your sinfulness— much better than you do, actually, for He felt the whole weight of it— and He has covered it to the uttermost, accomplishing not only your righteousness but joyful communion with your Father. I can personally testify to what a life lived with Jesus is like. Living this broken, messy, heartbreaking and difficult life can take a toll on any soul, no matter how resilient it might be. The Bible, and our Lord, does not diminish the difficulty of life. In fact, He often warns us about how hard it is. But if no one has ever held your hands and looked you in the eyes, and through tears promised you that He really means what He says, then let me be the first. There is nothing that compares to the embrace of Jesus. There is no sweetness like the Gospel. There is no freedom like His friendship. There is no greater joy than sitting at His feet. There is no Father who is tender like Him. I know this stuff can be hard to believe— trust me, I do. And I know that this life can harden hearts into believing that there is no ultimate good. But I can look at you with confidence and say that I believe Him. His Word truly is life, He really does love you, and He really does know what He is doing. He is trustworthy. His will is the greatest adventure you could ever know, friend. So here’s my final plea to you: go sit at His feet. Go to Him first, go to Him quickly, and go to Him often. He is so pleased when you do.
