Faith To Faint Not

“I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.” (Ps 27:13-14 AV)

 

There is a bridge between these two verses.  One that is obscured without some meditation.  David is relaying an experience of deep faith in God.  He is relating how he would have fainted unless he truly believed that one day, he would see the goodness of the LORD in this life.  This suggests David endured hardship because of faith.  He didn’t endure because he saw the goodness of the LORD.  Rather, he endured because he believed he would see the goodness of the LORD.  The second verse is an instruction of encouragement either to himself or to another who may be going through a similar set of circumstances.  The instruction to wait goes back to the testimony of faith in the goodness of the LORD.  The two go hand-in-hand.  To wait here means to trust God for something future.  If the soul under a trial will have faith, then strength in the present difficulty is the result.

Nothing is worse than camping in the rain.  Everything gets wet and there is nothing to do.  However, we have the technology today that we didn’t have two decades ago that makes camping in the rain all the more tolerable!  This technology is called a smartphone.  One can download several apps that show the weather and active radar.  If caught in a storm, information is at one’s fingertips.  One can make plans and be encouraged that the storm will pass and life will go on.  Years ago, you had to depend on your ability to read the skies.  We grew up camping.  For better or worse, we spent months out in the wilderness.  One of these places was my father’s tree farm.  It was a reclaimed potato farm that turned back into the wild.  He dug a half-acre pond and stocked it with bass.  Fishing was one of the only activities we had.  On rainy days when we got sick and tired of Yahtzee, the fishing pole was calling our name.  However, it was raining.  So, we would dodge out of our trailer camper and look off to the west.  It might be downpouring, but we could tell by looking at the sky about how long we would have until the rain let up and the sun came out. Another round or two of Yahtzee and we could escape our watery cell.  Knowing what was coming made what was happening all the more tolerable.  Having experienced that storms will pass made the waiting a bit better.  Yahtzee was replaced by reading.  Many Hardy Boys or Encyclopedia Brown books passed through my hands on a rainy day in the woods.  The clouds would break and life could get back to being enjoyable.

The reason we faint in the reality of adversity is that deep down, we don’t really believe God will be good.  Or, we think He will but not in the way or speed in which we wished He would.  Our problem has always been a lack of faith.  We all struggle with this.  Lack of faith that His ways are best.  We fail to live according to the commandments and standards of the Bible because we truly do not believe in the goodness of the LORD.  We think living in the statues of the word of God will mean a life void of joy and pleasure.  We lack faith in the testings of life.  We don’t think God will do what He says He can do.  We lack faith in the grace of God thinking we have to earn His forgiveness.  We lack faith in the deep waters of life thinking He was gracious in the past because of our youth and naivety, but now that we are grown and know better, surely He is out to end our foolishness at any cost.  David had a hard life.  But David was a fighter.  He never gave up!  He endured through it all because he had a simple faith in the goodness of the LORD.