Who Will Help Us?

For I am the Lord your God, who upholds your right hand, Who says “Do not fear, I will help you.”  Isaiah 41:13  NASB

Help – It takes a long time to get to the place where we ask for help.  We often know we need help but there is something in us that continues to shout, “I’m not going to give up.  I can do it my way.  I don’t care!”  This is a symptom of normal insanity.  It is normal, all right, but it is insane.  It is the belief that doing the same thing we did before will magically result in different consequences.  But we always end up in the same place, don’t we?  We are fighting against the way God designed the world to work and all of our shouting won’t change it.

The Hebrew word translated “help” comes from the root azar meaning “to rescue or save or to excuse.”  The general sense is military assistance, but in the Psalms God’s help arrives in personal intervention during illness (Ps. 28:7), oppression (Ps. 54:4), and great personal distress (Ps. 86:17).  That’s the kind of help most of us really need – very personal, very direct, very crucial.  Knowing there is a lifeguard station on the beach doesn’t matter much when you are drowning in the middle of the lake.  You need someone close at hand.  That’s the help God promises.

When we finally become willing to surrender all of our ego prancing, we realize we desperately need help.  We reach the end of ourselves at last.  Our surrender is the declaration of our inner bankruptcy.  We just can’t do it.  Calling on God at this point could be a fearful experience.  We have been so used to failure and disappointment.  We might fear that God will also find us unworthy; that He will refuse to help because we have turned away so many times.  But God is not like that.  God promises to rescue the moment we depend completely on Him.  If God can say, “Do not fear,” what is there to really be afraid of?  Only the voice of our old self could be bold enough to call God a liar.  The truth is in God’s word.  He stands ready and willing to help.  That inner old voice has been lying to us all along.  We need to believe what God says in spite of the fact that we have trained ourselves not to believe even what we say.  Remember the admonition, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”  Today the question is:  Will I believe God’s promise or will I believe my past emotions?

If you’re like me, you have discovered that you have been lying to yourself for a long time.  You have been making promises that you never keep.  But all that past history doesn’t change God’s word.  Your failures do not set aside His commitment.  Your inner voice can’t be trusted, but His voice can be.  God does what He says – every time.  So push aside those “personally validated” doubts.  Your opinion doesn’t matter here.    Stop evaluating and trust what He says.  Help waits for you.

Topical Index:  help, ‘azar, rescue, promise, Isaiah 41:13