GRACE TO HELP
07th Feb 2024
During the past few months we have been going though a time of sadness and challenge. There have been folk battling with health issues, life challenges, and some who have passed on. Some of the deaths have been the culmination of a long and blessed life, others have been lives cut short.
How do we handle these challenges? A verse came to me from Hebrews 4:16, “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we might receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.” The first promise is that we might “receive mercy”, which includes an understanding from God that He is in control of our lives and knows what we are going though. Then there is “grace to help”, which does not necessarily give us answers for the trials we are experiencing, but is God promising to give us supernatural peace and an assurance that He is with us in our time of need.
Earlier in the chapter it speaks of Jesus, our “great high priest”, who has been tempted and tried in every way that we are. Jesus experienced opposition, persecution, threats to his life and bereavement; His earthly father Joseph died before Jesus was thirty, leaving Mary a widow and the family fatherless.
When Paul was going through the trail he described as a “thorn in the flesh”, which may well have been persecution, the Lord spoke to him and said, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9) Even when Ananias came to Paul to pray for him just after his conversion, the message he was given included, “I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.” (Acts 9:16)
The burden of this message today is to say to each one who is in a time of trial, “Don’t let the circumstances overwhelm you, reach out to your Father who loves you and cares for you, and is the great restorer and redeemer, and who is with you as you go into the future.”
The testimony of Paul after he hears the words “My grace is sufficient for you” is to declare, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.”
by Charles Sibthorpe
