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Pointers along the way #782

Able to keep us from stumbling

- Jacob Ninan

"Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy" (Jude.24). Does this mean that we never stumble? No (Jas.3:2). God is 'able' to keep us from stumbling, but He cannot do it by Himself. He needs us to submit to Him.

When I said 'God cannot' was I negating His almighty power? No. In His sovereign wisdom, He created us in His image, and part of that image is the ability to make choices. If we didn't have that ability we wouldn't have had the ability to sin and we wouldn't even have had the ability to choose to love Him! We have been created 'sovereign' within God-prescribed limits.

This is why we cannot expect God to do everything for us, without our taking individual responsibility for what we ought to do. We sit and wait for God to give us a godly character without our denying ourselves (Ro.8:13) when we are tempted by our lusts to do wrong (Jas.1:14,15)! We pray and pray that God should heal our relationships without taking any steps on our part to set things right with others. We refuse to take medicines and insist that God has to heal us miraculously. He is able, but there are things He has enabled us to do, and if we won't do them, we can't get the results we want.

This is also why we end up blaming God for the evil things that happen to us. Perhaps we are only suffering the consequences of our own foolish behaviour or we are getting hit by the wrong things others do or the chaos people have made on the earth. We blame God because we think He should have prevented such things!

If God always prevented everyone from doing wrong or took away the consequences, He would be interfering with our free will. When He created us with a free will, He knew that there could be bad choices we make and that we would suffer because of them. He prepared His plan of salvation for us even before He created the world. That is why He 'cannot' overrule in everything man does, even though He does intervene when things go outside His overall will. But He allows us to suffer from the consequences of our wrong actions in order that we may learn not to repeat them. It is when we learn this that we begin to act more wisely and also seek for His help for us to make the right choices and to be able to do accordingly (Php.2:12,13). We see very clearly in this passage that there are things God will do for us and also that there are things He wants us to take responsibility for.

God will save everyone who seeks Him (Ro.10:13). He is able. But which man or woman is there who always calls on Him without depending on their own strength? Is it right, then, to blame God for what goes wrong? In all such situations, let us learn to find out what we need to correct in our thinking and behaviour and then do what we need to. Let us ask Him more earnestly to give us the right understanding and the strength to do what is right always, including to set things right.

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