What is God able to do for you? Has He made any promises you can take as true as you live by faith?
Handley Moule, an early Keswick speaker and New Testament scholar at Cambridge, thought people needed to be reminded of God’s promises to work in their life.
Faith always needs an object. If you’re going to walk by faith, you’ll need something to believe. Are you on your own, or has God promised to be with you?
For Moule, the evidence was written across Scripture that God made promises to be with believers and to work in their lives in the present—in the middle of their life situation. Whoever struggles with a low, defeated view of Christian living needs to get a bigger picture of what God can do in them. Moule recommended looking at what God has promised to do. “Gather together such utterances as these, and believe them as you read them,” he wrote (Thoughts on Christian Sanctity, p. 39).
Here is a selection of key verses:
Now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us (Eph 3:20).
Where is God’s power at work? “In us.”
But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore, I will most gladly boast all the more about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may reside in me (2 Cor 12:9).
God’s grace is sufficient right now. In Paul’s difficult circumstances and in yours. And where is Christ’s power residing? “In me.”
“A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come so that they may have life and have it in abundance” (John 10:10).
Jesus gives life. Biological. Eternal. And abundant. That impacts the quality of your life now.
And God is able to make every grace overflow to you, so that in every way, always having everything you need, you may excel in every good work (2 Cor 9:8).
When can you experience this overflowing grace? Now, so you can have all that you need now, to do good. God is able.
Now to him who is able to protect you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of his glory, without blemish and with great joy (Jude 24).
Have you ever worried about stumbling? God is able to protect you from that.
For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose (Phil 2:13).
Where is God working? “In you.”
I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal 2:20).
Where is Christ living? “In me.” Paul lives by faith in the present.
Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely. And may your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ (1 Thess 5:23).
What is the God of peace working to do? Sanctify you completely.
I hope you can see, and therefore believe, that God’s work in your life didn’t stop the moment you first believed in Jesus. It continues working for you now. And you should live your life, step by step, trusting that God is able to keep those promises, too:
“Looking at these words of the living God, will you not take in, and ever more take in, the divine certainty that ‘He is able,’ and write it across every practical problem of the first step, and the next step, of your walk with God by faith?” (Thoughts on Christian Sanctity, p. 41).