“Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My name.

Psalm 91:14

God always delivers. That’s His nature. But God doesn’t always deliver us in the way we expect or when we hope the answer will come. When we ask Him to deliver us from sickness, a conflict, or any other difficulty in our lives, we need to avoid demanding that He answer the way we want Him to. If we demand a certain answer, we set ourselves up for disappointment, and if disappointment isn’t arrested, it will soon lead to discouragement.

The mark of true faith is steadfast trust in God when we don’t see what He’s doing or how He’s doing it. In spite of what we see with our physical eyes, we cling to the truth that God’s purposes, ways, and timing are higher than our ways, as “the heavens are higher than the earth”(Isaiah 53:9). With that kind of faith, God sets us “on high” even in the middle of our trouble. No, we aren’t oblivious to our problems, but we hang on tightly to God through thick and thin with the confidence that sooner or later, in one way or another, He will deliver us.

We learn some of life’s lessons only by taking the path through life’s valleys. It would be great if we could learn all the important lessons on the mountaintops, but we don’t. Valleys are part of the path for every believer. When we’re there, we can be sure that we have a Guide we can trust and the path will eventually lead us to higher ground.

Zig Ziglar

Faith for my deliverance is not faith in God. Faith means, whether I am visibly delivered or not, I will stick to my belief that God is love.

Oswald Chambers

Faith is not as much as believing in what God can do as it is in believing that God is who He is. That’s the faith of the Bible. When the disciples asked Jesus what they needed to do so they could do the works of God, Jesus told them they just needed to believe in Him. God isn’t just a miracle worker, He is the God of miracle-working power. Neither is God some lucky charm, or some magical figure that we can influence or order at our command. He is the Sovereign Lord of the universe and has absolute authority over all things.

Jesus spoke of how fathers give good gifts to their children and then told us that the Father would give us even better gifts. When we believe that God is a good God and that He really loves us we no longer have to demand He prove that love by giving us everything we ask. We learn to trust Him and His wisdom and plans for our lives. The difficult thing for us is that we can only see this world and we measure things by our limited understanding and our finite life. God, on the other hand makes decisions from an eternal point of view.

In the book of Daniel we read of three Hebrew boys whose story illustrates this measure of faith. They were faced with an impossible situation. If they chose to bow and worship the idol, they would do so at the expense of their walk with God. For them it would be the ultimate act of blasphemy and judgement. If they chose to bow, it meant their execution by being burned to death in the furnace. We read the outcome of their story and how it all ended well, but they had no clue about what the outcome would be. Their faith was not just faith to be delivered from the furnace. Their faith was in God. They didn’t know what God would do. Listen to their response to the king:

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego answered and said to the king, “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If that is the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up.”

Daniel 3:16-18

Did you hear what they said? Our God is able to deliver to deliver us. What a powerful statement of faith that is when you’re facing a furnace. But wait there’s more! They then said, “He will deliver us from your hand!” Now most of us read that to mean out of the fiery furnace but what they were saying is that whether of not they were spared from the furnace, either way they would no longer be subject to the king’s will. They simply said that God was able to deliver them from the furnace but if He chose not to do so, they still would not bow and worship any other God.

That’s faith. Faith that says we believe that all things are possible with God. We believe that God can do anything. But faith goes beyond demand of deliverance on our terms and in our way. Faith goes to the place of trust the Hebrew boys went to say, “God we believe you can but we leave the choice to you. Whatever You choose we will still follow You, trust in You and believe Your promises. When we release our lives, hopes, dreams, challenges, and problems to our loving Father, when we trust Him with everything, the we open the way to experience amazing interventions and answers.

Dr. John Thompson