For When You're Ready to Give Up

I felt like I was gripping a cobwebby tightrope above a vast and murky chasm.

And even as my toes curled around the lifeline, my arms flailed as I was pelted with lie after lie:

You're a failure if you can't even get it together here!

God is far away from you.  You'll never be close to Him.

You're only a big fat pretender to say you're a Christian with this lurking sin.

And there I could have fallen into the bottomless death of discouragement had not the sunlight of truth dawned, and I looked down.  In that instance, I saw that it was all a farce.

While my arms had flailed weakly against the onslaught of lies, my feet had been walking along the lie all along.  For the rays of sunlight revealed that there was no chasm beneath the path on which God was leading me.  Instead, I was quiveringly walking a tightrope only an inch above firm and solid ground.  The chasm, then, was only between the facade of the precarious tightrope and the reality of that protected path.  It was a great chasm--but great in deception, not in depth.

The enemy wanted me to imagine that I needed to claw for sure footing when God had already given it.

The enemy wanted me to fear an imminent fall when I would only be falling into my Shepherd's arms.

Most crucially, the enemy wanted me to believe I was already defeated when in fact the victory had already been won.

The roughness of the path, the sorrow, the pain--that was all too real.  But the yawning chasm was but a rickety backdrop no better than a middle school drama set, designed to drive me to cling to cobwebs of comfort rather than to the firm foundation of Jesus Christ.  

How trustworthy is Jesus' path and Jesus' love for me? Remember, He is the one who will even go to the extent of stopping the sun from setting to protect His people: 

"And there has been no day like that, before it or after it, that the LORD heeded the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel." {Joshua 10:14}

This is the greatest chasm-destroyer I know: He has fought for you...He has fought for me, and He has already won the victory on the cross.  So let's live in this beautiful reality:

"‘Death is swallowed up in victory’ ‘O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?’  It is sin which gives death its power, and it is the Law which gives sin its strength. All thanks to God, then, who gives us the victory over these things through our Lord Jesus Christ! And so brothers of mine, stand firm! Let nothing move you as you busy yourselves in the Lord’s work. Be sure that nothing you do for him is ever lost or ever wasted." {I Corinthians 15:55-58, PHILLIPS} 

---

“The Chasm,” © 2007 Eric, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

Joshua 10:14 taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
I Corinthians 15:55-58 taken from J. B. Phillips, "The New Testament in Modern English", 1962 edition by HarperCollins