Happy Saturday, friends!
It’s been a week since last Saturday!
There are several ways that could be interpreted:
It could be a simple declaration that 7 days have passed. Well, duh! 🙄
It could be a joyful celebration of all the great things that have happened in the last 7 days. Wow! 🤩
It could be an exhausted acknowledgment of all the challenges of the past 7 days. Whew! 😥
It could be a rant of all the frustrations of the past 7 days. Grrr! 😡
Or maybe it’s all of the above. ⬆️
Are you on emoji overload yet?
Yeah, me too.
But when I think over the past week, it’s all there.
This morning, my Bible reading was Isaiah 7.
There is of course verse 14:
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.”
If we did not have the New Testament, we would have no idea of the significance of this verse—especially Matthew’s Gospel:
“All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel’ (which means “God with us”)” (Matthew 1:22-23).
But the verse that grabbed my attention this morning was Isaiah 7:9—
“If you do not stand firm in your faith, you will not stand at all.”
My reflection is not so much on explaining the verse in context as it is pondering the image that came to mind for me (and the one I chose for the visual).
Stand firm IN your faith …
I thought about the difference between that and:
Stand firm ON your faith …
Stand firm FOR your faith …
ONE MORE REMINDER: I’m not translating (the Hebrew is not super clear), I’m pondering with “sanctified imagination” (a term I first heard from my friend Charles Stewart. It’s originally attributed to A.W. Tozer).
I imagined myself standing in the middle of my faith in Jesus—having “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” as Paul says in Romans 13:14.
Being clothed in—surrounded by—faith in Christ means that I should view and respond to each situation through the filter of the Way of Christ as described in the New Testament.
My observation is that many of us have not spent enough time studying and contemplating the Way of Jesus to adequately develop that filter.
I see statements made sometimes by those who purport to be Christians and I want to say, “You’re really not very good at the Bible or Jesus, are you?”
I don’t say it out loud.
But I want to.
And if I’m not standing firm IN faith—clothed in and surrounded by—I’m much more vulnerable to the stuff of earth.
Standing firm ON faith leaves me vulnerable to getting knocked off my perch by the hard stuff.
Standing firm FOR faith leaves me vulnerable to thinking I have more power than I have and seeing Jesus as less powerful than He is.
So, today, I want to be sure that I am dressed properly—clothed in and surrounded by Christ—so that I can face every 😳😉🤦♂️😢🤷♂️🤬👏👎🤩🤢😲
Be amazing today, my friend.
