Keep Coming to the Lord
I kept thumbing aimlessly through my Bible. My previous years of desperation had built the habit—but now my heart wasn’t in it. Still, I plodded on. Coming cold was better than not coming at all.
It’s so tempting to quit reading the Bible when it seems like nothing is sticking, isn’t it? Why pray if your heart feels cold? Why persevere when the scriptures don’t seem to say anything about your situation? I get it. Years of reading the same Bible on the same couch, with the same dead feeling inside, passed me by. We’d reached the other side of answered prayers, but my heart was cold. I didn’t want to follow Jesus like this.
But there’s no in-between. Either you follow him or you don’t. You submit to his word or you don’t. Emotions are not truth-tellers, and feelings are the worst instructors. When subjected to the authority of God’s Word, they can rightly express what is stirred up or grieved or affected. But they do not get to call the shots when it comes to following Jesus. When the feelings don’t come along with the determination to obey the Lord, this is when perseverance gets to do its good work. Perseverance is plodding forward when everything in you resists.
According to James, it takes trials in order for perseverance to mature (see 1:2–4). And while you may hesitate to call a spiritual dry spell a trial, God may use this very season to lay the groundwork for perseverance during future trials. On every gray day of spiritual apathy that you come to him with a cold heart, you practice perseverance. He is training you to come to him when you don’t feel like it so that you’ll be sure to come to him when life takes a hard turn. The motivation here is that, no matter how cold your heart may feel, the Lord will meet you when you come to him in his word. His presence is promised whether you’re aware of it or not. And the more you practice coming, the more aware of his presence you’ll be.
The Lord wasn’t just teaching me perseverance—he was wringing it out of me. Extracting, wrenching, prying. He pulled perseverance out of the tiniest, most blocked-up recesses of my heart. I couldn’t see it then, but he was preparing me for the darkest days ahead. He is the God who faithfully keeps his promises, and whether or not I felt like pressing on, he never ceased to be present. He doesn’t waste our desperate seasons—whether they send us to the word in desperation or dull our hearts with dryness. He can use any season to keep us close to Him.
Many of David’s psalms begin with doubt and end with hope. The reed in his hands may have shaken out words in fear, but when the ink dried, David was resolved to hope in the Lord who had never failed him. Often I have worked through that same pattern of lament, panic, remembrance, and resolution as I’ve read the scripture. I’ve found that the act of remembering leads to a resolute perseverance.
This is why the redeemed people of God read, meditate on, and study scripture. We need to remember who he is and what he has done in order for us to persevere in our faith. His word is a sword that both protects and defends. Though we’re tempted to settle for temporary fixes, the word anchors us in the depths of God’s sufficiency. We so quickly forget that the Lord is the one who satisfies the heart’s hunger. In one breath we forget the way he has saved us.
But the scriptures have the power to remind us where we’ve been, who we were, who we are now, and where we’re going. This is why we rise early to meditate on his promises or spend our lunch hour studying his words. It’s what draws me to the faded couch with the tulip-tree sunrise. I am more aware of the Lord’s nearness when His words are soaking my thoughts, seeping into my mind with power and truth and memory. Remembering the past faithfulness of God ignites our faith in his present and future faithfulness. Our confidence in God’s presence is kindled through our regular opening of his word. A friend of mine who works as a firefighter calls this being “fully engulfed” in the Scriptures. Allowing the word to engulf your heart can eventually thaw what’s cold.
When our hearts struggle to absorb the scriptures, the word does not lose its power. When our emotions are slow to catch up to truth, the Lord doesn’t abandon us. In kindness, he urges us to press on—to keep reading. Keep absorbing. Keep the rhythm of coming to the Lord with your desperation. The rhythms of remembering keep us close to his side so that we’ll know where to turn when trials do come.
Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from The Promise is His Presence: Why God is Always Enough.
