We Cannot Rely on Our Feelings

On the contrary! You feel as if you have to wait so long. It is certainly not as long as you feel; your feelings are lying to you. It feels like that because we are in flesh and blood. The greater your impatience, the longer you feel you have to wait.

The very fact that we are flesh and blood can make us feel that our difficulties are insurmountable. Yet they are not as insurmountable as we feel they are.

We can feel that we cannot hold out any longer. However, the fact is that we can hold out. Our feelings are wrong. We read that he who “endures to the end will be saved.” This proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that we can hold out—irrespective of what our feelings say.

How sad it is when a person feels that other people’s faults and sins are so big and that one’s own sins are so small. The truth is that the others’ faults are not at all as big as we feel, and that our own faults are considerably bigger than we feel they are.

When it concerns our salvation, we need to reject everything our feelings and our natural reasoning tell us, and only rely on the Word of God, which alone is true when it concerns this area.

One of the most important words we have is 1 Corinthians 10:13. There we can read with all clarity that God faithfully sees to it that we will never be tempted beyond what we are able to bear. This is the truth, though both our feelings and our human reasoning protest powerfully against it.

Of course, this does not mean that everyone is always victorious, but it does mean that a person could have been victorious if he had reacted properly.

What a tremendously faith-strengthening word!