Thursday, September 1, 2022 Some material taken from God? What Happened?
Who will bring me into the besieged city? Who will lead me to Edom? Have not You Yourself, O God, rejected us? And will You not go forth with our armies, O God? Psalms 60:9-10
Living Undefeated
As we learned this past Sunday and earlier this week, David did many amazing things in his lifetime, but he was no stranger to defeat. Brother Van preached about how his armies had been defeated by tiny Edom. Then David sent Joab and a division of his army to deal with Edom, but David’s confidence wasn’t in Joab. Joab would do the fighting, but his faith was in God. Even though they had just been defeated, David did not bow to defeat. He got up again and kept going. Defeat will be a part of our lives but we cannot let defeat defeat us!
Failure is no fun but it doesn’t mean life is over, although it certainly feels like it at the time. God doesn’t want us to run from our failures, but to confront them in His strength. Sometimes the reason we fail in the first place is because we try in our own power to do what should be done in His power. Everything should be done in His power.When we face our failures in His power, we have a different kind of weapon, a spiritual weapon, which is way more powerful than any earthly weapon. The battle belongs to the Lord and the victory is always His.
God may have allowed David to fail, but He also led him back to victory. He will do the same for us, but sometimes failures come in clusters. We may get up only to fail again and again, but we cannot stay down and give up. The only real defeat is when we completely give up.
Just because we bump up against defeat a few times, that doesn’t automatically mean we are on the wrong path. All failure will serve a purpose in our lives. God wastes nothing and sometimes uses our defeat to make us realize that we do not organize our own victory or defeat. It is all God, and He wants us to depend on Him.
David realizes this after Edom defeats was through making plans and committed to following God’s leadership. He reclaims the victory - Through God we shall do valiantly, And it is He who will tread down our adversaries. Psalms 60:12
God wants us all to live in the victory He has already won for us. If we fail and do nothing but live in that failure, we are not walking in faith, but in doubt – doubt that God can do what we need or ask Him to do. This spills out to everyone around us and they see us living in doubt and defeat instead of the victory we have in Him. It keeps us from witnessing because we see ourselves as a failure and we feel to much like a hypocrite to speak up.
Victory is ours already, even in the face of defeat. We must remember to depend on him no matter what we are facing or confronting and realize that we don’t have the power to solve our own problems. Even when we think we have solved them on our own, we have not. When we do fail, we can reclaim the victory by faith and walk in that victory every day.
Have you fallen into sin? Are you failing in your marriage? Let God work through your failure to bring you His victory
