My ‘98 Ford Taurus has been smoking for I at least 12 years. It’s actually steam but I call it smoke anyway. Also, within the last six months, I took it for its annual emissions inspection and it failed. I paid the required five hundred dollars to have it fixed, took it back for inspection and it still failed. To add insult to injury, for the last four months, the “check engine” light has been on. All the indicators tell me that the car is not working. But it is. To put it in old laymen’s terms, “when I turn it on the engine purrs like a kitten.” There are no oil leaks in my driveway and in the dead of winter, a turn of the ignition and it roars like a lion.
A similar pattern sometimes exists in our religious lives. The story is told of a woman who had an indication that something that was wrong in her body. Yes, her indicator light was on. She had an issue of blood. And unlike my Ford Taurus, she spent all she had and she couldn’t get her problem fixed either. She went to Jesus and finally got her problem fixed. It was her faith that did it. Jesus told her, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.”
All of us have indicator lights of one kind or another, that something is not working the way it ought to work. We get a little extra money in our paychecks and something sucks it up. We pour extra love on someone and they take your love and rip it up. It just seems to me that this is not the way life is suppose to work but it does.
There have been times in my life and my ministry when things did not seem to work the way they were suppose to work and I mean, things were smoking. They were smoking so ferociously that I wanted to pull down my shingles and admit defeat, but like the woman with the issue of blood who took an unfixable problem to Her God, I took my whole life to Jesus and, in the perfect scenario He has said,
“Perry, your faith has made you whole”‘ but in the imperfect scenario, I can say, “My faith is making me whole.”. You might say that I have a “Whole Life Policy”.
I could give you a Scripture to encourage you, but I am not. I am just going to tell you to hang in there.
Any number of my friends can tell wonderful stories of what happened when they hung in there.
PS: If you want a Scripture, just ask and I will give you one.
Hang in there.
Life Step Ministries 