“Mom, there’s just something that I am struggling to understand about God. How is it that He has no beginning and no end? I mean, how is that even possible?!” Those are just a few of the hard to answer questions my seven year old son has thrown my way lately as he wrestles to understand who God really is! You, like my son, may have found yourself asking some hard to answer questions about God. I believe it’s in those hard to answer questions that our faith really grows as we seek to find the answers in the proper place- God’s word. The truth is, there are things revealed to us about God through His word that blow our finite minds that we will never fully understand. Isaiah 55:8 says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.”
Having a correct understanding of who God is plays a tremendously important role in every aspect of our lives. It affects our faith and trust in Him, how we pray, how we walk through victories, how we walk through storms, and how we persevere in our daily living. I love what J. C. Ryle writes in his book “A Call to Prayer”:
“The only way to be really happy in such a world as this, is to be ever casting all our cares on God. It is trying to carry their own burdens which often makes believers sad.
If they will tell their troubles to God, he will enable them to bear them as easily as Samson did the gates at Gaza. If they are resolved to keep them to themselves, they
will find one day that the very grasshopper is a burden. There is a friend ever waiting to help us, if we will unbosom to him our sorrow- a friend who pitied the poor and sick and sorrowful, when he was upon earth- a friend who knows the heart of man,…That friend is Jesus Christ. The way to be happy is to be always opening our hearts to him.”
Are you finding that the very “grasshopper” is a burden in your life? How often are you carrying a sorrow that Jesus Himself has asked for you to give to him? How often are you resolved to just “figure it out” rather than taking it to God in prayer? I find myself guilty of carrying things that Jesus Christ Himself has asked for me to lay at His feet and bathe it in prayer. If we could truly grasp who we are praying to and the fact that He is able to do abundantly more than we can ever ask or imagine (Eph. 3:20, 21) how much differently our lives would look. If you find yourself weary today, look to the One who is able to take your burdens and give you the rest you truly need.
“I lift my eyes unto the hills- where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.” Psalm 121: 1, 2
Highlighting the hope that we have in Christ! 