Completing What Has Begin In You

I've spent the last eleven Wednesday evenings with a real dynamic and faith-seeking group of people from our local congregation. They've been examining what it means to encounter and experience a God who is living, who is at work all around us, and who is pursuing a personal relationship with each one of us. It's been a powerful joy to watch them journey together. I was looking for a way to express my thanks to God and my appreciation to them. I ended up using Eugene Peterson's expression of Philippians 1:3-6 from his paraphrase, The Message: "Every time you cross my mind I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. Each exclamation is a trigger to prayer. I find myself praying for you with a glad heart. I am so pleased that you have continued on in this with us, believing and proclaiming God's Message, from the day you heard it right up to the present. There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears." (italics mine.)

The last line is the one that really caught my attention tonight. If you are reading this blog and you feel discouraged in your faith journey, these words are for you. Maybe you sense no direction and no fire in your walk with Christ right now. Maybe you're been hurt in your journey, and maybe it's been fellow believers who have been the vehicle of the wound. Perhaps others seem to "get it" in a way you feel you never have. It could be that you wonder if this whole following-Jesus-thing is worth it at all.

Know this - the very fact that you even face these struggles indicates that God has stirred something in you. God will not abandoned what God has started in His love for you. God will bring to completion what God has started in you. Don't give up. If you need help on this journey, reach out and get it. Find a Jesus follower who will walk along with you for a time. If I can help in that search, let me know. (gwp@sikestonfirstumc.org.)

Let's group up and float around this next bend together.