Perseverance

Here is a blog post I wrote for Extreme Love:  http://www.extremelove.com/perseverance/

Allow perseverance to finish its work, so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. ~ James 1:4

I’m amazed at the words from James 1:4, it’s as if I never read them before.  James is saying that one of the ways to lack nothing and not have a deficiency is to “let endurance have its perfect work.”  Perseverance is the will to see things through until the end in spite of fear, difficulties, failure, or opposition. 

God recently landed on this verse for me and made it come alive.  This verse is loaded with nuggets for us.  Firstly if we read it starting at the end, it says that we will lack nothing, if we surrender to endurance and perseverance.  We must let it run its course. How many times do I short-circuit what God is doing in my life because it’s too hard and I’m too uncomfortable?  In this scripture James is saying in essence that we must give permission for endurance/perseverance to finish.   It’s so easy, for me, in a western culture to pull myself out of persevering due to the resources that surround me.  Yet often on the mission field, we are faced with areas that require focused perseverance and can lack the resources and relationships to rescue ourselves.  These areas of perseverance, when we face head on, process through and finish, release in us maturity, a completion, a perfection and . . .  we do not lack anything!

Revelation 3:10 says, ‘Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going to come on the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth.”  

This is another amazing promise regarding endurance or in another translation it uses the word perseverance.  It’s as if God is saying, you have persevered through to the other side and now the great trial that is coming I will keep you from.  It reminds me of the children of Israel when they were living in Goshen and had persevered through the great cruelty of slavery.  While God was sending plagues on the Egyptians He dealt differently with the Israelites and the plagues did not touch their camp.

Exodus 8:22 - 23 “But on that day I will deal differently with the land of Goshen, where my people live; no swarms of flies will be there, so that you will know that I, the Lord, am in this land.  I will make a distinction between my people and your people. This sign will occur tomorrow.”

He has done it before and He can do it again, where there is a distinction made between God’s people and the world.  This is a supernatural distinction, where inside of perseverance we do not lack and we are kept from the hour of trail. 

Today I am encouraged to persevere.  Even when we do not know the outcome, or our soul starts to feel deeply uncomfortable – let us be encouraged to throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the Pioneer and Perfecter of faith and push through to that place where we lack nothing inside of everything that has purchased for us in Jesus.   

  "I Will Fight" Video Attached:  https://youtu.be/XyzG7F-CS7U