Are you in a dark season of your life? I don’t just mean you’re stressed out or even at the end of your rope or in a personal “wilderness”. Are you in a place where you don’t even recognize yourself? Is your guilt and shame over not being the woman you ‘ought to be’ or used to be has you questioning your value, effectiveness, or any other significant things despite being fully aware of what God says about you? Are all your life traumas and pains harrassing your thoughts and everytime you start to see a break of dawn in the darkness that oppression doubles down on you unrelentingly grasping onto you like a starving lion fiending for his kill? Have you been wandering the valley of the shadow of death (darkness) so much that you are desperate for embers of light to rise from the ashes of your every step towards freedom from that darkness? The leader of Jesus’s disciples, Peter, had the same struggle because Satan demands to sift Jesus’s disciples like wheat, he tormented Peter by throwing him on the proverbial sieve and shook, shook, shook until Simon Peter was only Simon again — clay and not rock (Luke 6:14); ineffective — a fisher of fish and not of men (Luke 5:10). Herein is the real terror behind our darkest seasons as followers of Christ. We feel like we’re unraveling, as if our testimony is being told in reverse. We fear we’re falling back into a Christless past; that would be our reality… if Jesus left us alone in Satan’s sieve. Thank God Almighty that He doesn’t leave us there. On Maundy Thursday, the eve before Jesus’s crucifixion, Peter was grieving over his prideful declarations of what an obedient student he was preceding his three denials of Jesus. Peter could neither see nor feel the embers of light or a break of dawn in his heart… his guilt, shame, and despair was inconsolable. Maybe you feel or have felt similarly. But Sisters, please know this: Jesus has seen embers of faith in his saints where they saw only ash. Your shadowed valley, no matter how dark, is absolutely not a sure sign that your faith has failed or left you or is going to flee from you.
Peter ultimately did come out of the otherside of that dark pit of despair he was in and stepped fully into the purposes God had for him. But he had to repent and turn again back to utter dependence on Jesus and not his own ability or willpower. “And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:32). Our deliverance — whether from a personal sin or from a darkness not of our fault — is usually a process (though God could do it in an instant if He chooses according to His all-knowing purposes), and during that process we may wonder if our faith will fail along the way. But if we are truly in Christ, our breakthrough, is a matter of when, not if. Our deliverance is as certain as Jesus’s own intercession: “But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32) (See also Romans 8:34; Hebrews 7:25). Peter’s faith did not, and your faith and mine do not rest on our own slender thread of willpower, but on Christ’s prayers before He died to save us from God’s wrath. On Maundy Thursday, the beloved Son of the Living God, whom heaven hears with pleasure (Luke 3:22, 9:35), Jesus Christ, prayed for Peter, He prayed for me, He prayed for you and all who would ever believe in Him. So take heart, dear one. Your dawn is on its way and it will break open the darkness because Jesus Christ, The Prince of Peace, Lord of Lords, had already covered you with prayer before He covered you with His precious, righteous blood.
Questions to ask yourself:
- How freeing is it that you don’t have to come up with the most eloquent, beautiful, powerful words you can muster up as you pray because Jesus intercedes for you as He sits at the right hand of God The Father Almighty?
Prayer Prompt:
(free prayer)