Are You Sure? (Friday Devotional)

“The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him; if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he will also deny us; if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.”

- 2 Timothy 2:11-13

I have never been any good at auto repair. Cars are complicated machines, and they work exactly as they should (or close enough) so often that when they do suddenly start acting up, I generally assume the problem is beyond my ability to fix. When I hear someone describing an automotive issue, my eyes glaze over the same way a churchgoer’s do when the preacher starts speaking in Greek. Car repair is just not something I have any knack for.

But if there’s one basic thing I can work on under the hood, it’s the battery, something I have an unfortunate amount of experience dealing with. Whether it’s cleaning corrosion buildup near the terminals, jump starting a dead battery, or replacing a bad one altogether, I’m relatively competent. But I’m also exceedingly careful.

You see, the first time I ever jump started a car, the person teaching me made a point to be sure I was attaching the right cable to the right terminal in exactly the right sequence. Make a mistake, he insisted, and I could create enough sparks to blow up the car. Was he joking? Probably. But I’m not confident enough under the hood to make any assumptions. So to this day, any time I have to jump start a car, it takes me several extra minutes, because before I’m ready to turn the key in the dead car, I have to double check and triple check my connections. Sometimes you just need to be sure.

It would be nice if you could be that sure in every part of life, if you had the luxury of double and triple check everything before moving forward, but of course there are areas where that’s just impossible, including your relationship with God. The very nature of faith is that you’re never 100% sure, that you are placing your heart, mind, and soul in the hands of an invisible God. No one living today ever saw Christ in the flesh, ever touched the scars in his hands, ever witnessed any of his miracles or heard his voice proclaim the Gospel—yet every Christian, drawn in by the Holy Spirit, is able to confidently proclaim that they know his power to save them. Denied the luxury of empirical data, faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not yet seen.

But admittedly, there are times when you want a little more proof, when you just need to be sure. When your family fractures, when your career craters, when sickness stops you in your tracks—any time your life seems to be splintering before your very eyes—you find yourself looking to heaven for reassurance that God is still faithful. You simply want a reminder that, to quote the hymn, faith is the victory, especially when your life seems anything but victorious.

In those times, draw encouragement and comfort from the saying found in 2 Timothy 2:11-13, a saying apparently already widely circulated throughout the early church at the time of Paul’s writing. The believer in Christ is inextricably identified with him, is in fact part of his body through the church—and is the beneficiary of his faithfulness. The world may hurl its darts, but in Christ you are given both the strength to endure this life and the promise of a better life to come. There is no promise of easy living now, but the beautiful promise that is made—of life in Christ, both now and eternally—is one that God faithfully fulfills. Even when your faithfulness wavers, God’s never does—of that you can be sure.