No One But Me

October 24

Who but the disciples of Jesus could feel the intense sense of failure that weighed them down because at the crucial moment of His time on earth among men, they betrayed the God whose hand had fashioned them and whose vision of their future commitment had called them to be among the Twelve?

Who but one of those twelve privileged men who had walked with Jesus, who had partaken of sustenance with Him (sustenance of the body and of the soul), who had witnessed His miracles—from healing blind eyes to strengthening useless limbs to forgiving sins—could feel the sting of regret of faithlessness as much as they could?

No one but me (us)—we who deny Him today feel the sting of our failure in the depth of our being. We may sit in our church pews every week, we may recite our Sunday school lessons with great accuracy, we may share our faith with the lost, but when our moment of trial comes, do we stand in faith declaring that we trust Him though we die as Job did (Job 13:15), or do we rail that He has failed us in our hour of need?

Though we disappoint Him through our earth-bound vision rather than extol Him with our heaven-focused faith, yet He will fulfill His promise. We are told, “If we confess our sin, He is faithful and just to forgive our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness,” I John 1:9. John knew the sting of letting Jesus down and he also knew the reality of forgiveness when he failed Him. The Lord wants us to know that forgiveness, too.