Now, I am a man that calls himself a Christian believer, a man of faith as it were, and yet Christian faith by way of definition is a solid position and posture of both trust and obedience. “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” While I strive to obey the will of God, as I understand it, I often fail to trust and obey Him just like some of the folks listed above. This disobedience is based on human weakness and a human propensity to sin. At such times of weakness and sin, I am obliged, or more accurately, privileged to appropriate the grace of God’s forgiveness by trusting in His promises. One of my favorite promises of God is, “I write unto you that you sin not; But, if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous: If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sin and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

Now, I guess one of the things that grieves me most about this drama that is being played out between Heaven and Hell, between my spirit and flesh, and between my soul and body is my apparent ability to quickly confess and receive forgiveness for my sins, but I seem to have an inability to forsake the same sins that I’ve confessed time and time again, as quickly as I would like to, and thus experience the manifest reality of being cleansed from all unrighteousness of both character and behavior. Do you ever feel that way, if so, read on because I’m here to tell you there is hope.

Enter patience … stage right. Patience is the other side of the faith coin. We are exhorted in the scriptures to, “Follow after those who through faith and patience inherit the promises.” I have often said that faith and patience are the power twins, and that one is never complete without the other. “And now abide faith, hope, and love these three, but the greatest of these is love.” Faith and patience are both the out workings of divine love and, “God is love.” “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.'” God has promised to “perfect that which concerns us,” to “complete the good work that He began,” and to “sanctify us wholly spirit, soul, and body, unto the coming of the Lord. Faithful is He who calls you, who will also do it!” “Jesus Christ Himself is the author and finisher of our faith” and “the life that we live now in the flesh we live by the faith of the Son of God who loved us and gave Himself for us.” “I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any thing else in all creation, shall be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Our faith is working through His love.

I would like to close this exhortation with some lyrics from the old Negro spiritual that was made popular during the civil rights movement in America during the sixties and seventies. The marchers sang it as a song of faith and hope in their aspirations to overcome social prejudice and injustice. God has blessed the Black people of America because of their fathers’ brave and noble efforts. Of course, there is still much work to be done, but I would venture to say that as a people seeking social equality and justice, they are better off today than when they started on the long up hill road towards human and civil rights. May we learn a lesson from those righteous souls, and may we sing that hymn again as a song of faith and hope in our aspirations to overcome the weights and sins that so easily beset us.

“It is because of God’s mercies that we are not consumed. His mercies are new every morning. Great is His faithfulness.” May God bless us also as we learn to depend upon His all sufficient grace found in the Person of His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ and the power of His Holy Spirit. May we keep hope alive as we draw upon God’s un-searchable love, mercy, and compassion. May we learn to endure and persevere in the midst of internal and external temptations, tests, and trials like good solders of the cross. And let us attain to and maintain a buoyancy in our hearts and a bounce in our steps as we continue on our steady march upon the straight and narrow path with the understanding; "Though a righteous man stumbles seven times, he will not be cast down." Jesus said that we are to forgive each other seven times seventy because this is His attitude towards us. Therefore. let us consistently proclaim with a genuine assurance of faith, “We shall overcome; we shall overcome; we shall overcome some day.”