Isaiah 43:2 He Will be With Us
Food for Thought
An all-creatures.org Guide to Kingdom Living

By Marni Montanez

Isaiah 43:2
New Living Translation (NLT)

2. When you go through deep waters,
I will be with you.
When you go through rivers of difficulty,
you will not drown.
When you walk through the fire of oppression,
you will not be burned up;
the flames will not consume you.

This is an incredible promise for us. No matter what we go through God Himself says He will be there with us.

This season in my life has been particularly difficult. I am experiencing feelings and emotions that were buried deep in my heart; these feelings and emotions were built on lies and deceptions. I lived in a world of denial and kept my secrets....secret, even to myself. But now they are surfacing; even though I have tried my best to avoid dealing with them. I have used different approaches of escape like watching TV, going shopping, and overeating; all to keep my mind busy and off of what I was feeling, but nothing calmed the stirrings within. It became obvious that running from the healing hand of God is futile and foolish. God cannot let us wallow in the trappings of the enemy's distortions. He is a God of progress and healing and He wants us healed even more than we want healing for ourselves.

In this verse...

He speaks of us passing through waters. Symbolically waters can mean a lot of things. Mostly I have seen water as a symbol of emotions or representative of the Holy Spirit. God uses the word waters or rivers as visual insight into the troubles we face. He is very careful to say 'when" you pass through the waters, because It is inevitable that we will pass through waters of pain, trouble and suffering. On our spiritual journey we face many hardships and some of these experiences involve the hard task of healing; these healings remove the barriers that prevent us from becoming closer to God.

Even though we will experience hardship, it is important to note that God promises to go through these times with us. This is how I am getting through this season; by keeping my focus on the Lord and believing He will walk to the end with me. I am not alone and I am not afraid as long as He is with me.

Not only does God promise to go through the desert with us, He also promises that we will be victorious after going through these hard times: we come out the other side with victory and strength. It is then that we experience a new normal. This normal is full of clarity and confidence and brings us another step closer to our destiny.

Challenge: Choose to place your hand in God's hands and allow Him to take you where you need to go in the spirit and emotionally so that you can be free.

God bless

Marni

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The purpose of this series is to encourage people to live as loving, compassionate, and peacemaking children of God: Jesus tells us to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." (Matthew 6:10) God tells us through Micah (6:8), "He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God." And we know from Revelation 21:4 that there will be no more mourning, or crying, or pain, or death. Thus, Christian living requires us to set the standards of these conditions here on earth for our fellow human beings, and for the other animals, as a witness to the rest of the world. To do otherwise is not Christian.