The Lord Is Faithful

June 14

"The Lord is faithful, and He will strengthen and protect you from the evil one," 2 Thessalonians 3:3.

The Lord is faithful. No matter what you’re going through, no matter how abysmal the circumstances of your life appear, He is. And He is with you and He is for you. Jesus Himself said, "I AM," John 14:6 as God spoke the same words in Exodus 3:14.

Life can be overwhelming. The challenges of day-to-day living can boggle the mind and frustrate the resources of every-day people who aren’t wrestling with severe persecution or with abject poverty or with the horrors of war.

The Word says, “The little foxes spoil the vines,” Song of Solomon 2:15, and we discover that though we may rise to the necessity of problems of great import by the power of the Holy Spirit within us, we often succumb to the distressing minutia of our lives.

If we are to be people of faith in whom the unbelieving world around us may see the power and the glory of Christ revealed, we must endeavor to appropriate the peace and comfort He has available to us in the light-weight challenges of our lives, not just in the overwhelming problems whose weight is crushing.

The promise in this verse is that because Jesus is faithful, He will strengthen us. Even though we can do nothing without Him (see John 15:5), we are encouraged to trust that with Him there is nothing we cannot do (see Philippians 4:13).

In this word to believers at Thessalonica, Paul leaves no doubt as to who their enemy is and from whom it is that the Lord will protect them. Like believers of old, we are assailed to varying degrees by the evil one.

The intent behind his attack against people of faith is that they abandon their hope in Christ, that they become first discouraged, then ultimately overwhelmed by their lives and despair of faith in the only One who can set them free from the machinations of God’s ancient foe.

Though satan hates us, it is the Holy One he really hates and against whom his fight is directed. We are merely pawns in his game. It is his intent that our fall diminish the glory of God. Though he cannot achieve that end, his resolve is to wrench us from Christ’s love and salvation so he might, in his own twisted mind, topple God from His seat of glory.

Rather than facilitate his evil, let us hold firmly to the One who is “the way, the truth and the life,” John 14:6, the One without whom, “no man can see the Father,” John 6:44. Let us trust Him fully in the small and in the large challenges of our lives, for as Paul assured the Thessalonians, "The Lord is faithful."