Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
It’s been a rough month for several families in our little congregation. We are grieving deaths, fighting illness, and mourning other heartaches.
Others, though, are adjusting to life with new babies, while a few cruise along pretty normally, doing business as usual and enjoying the holidays. We are a single church with members who seem to be walking radically different paths, at least in some ways.
The commonality with us all is that, as it says in Psalm 25:10, “All the paths of the Lord are steadfast love and faithfulness, for those who keep his covenant and his testimonies.”
David wrote that line, probably at the end of his life, looking back on all the radical ups and downs he experienced. He had amazing successes and also devastating periods of loss.
Frankly, his own actions caused more of the latter than they did the former. This is the same guy who learned to recognize, and rely upon, the presence of his heavenly shepherd, while walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Whatever his earthly path looked like, by now David could see that each moment was a token of God’s love toward him.
“All the paths of the Lord.” It doesn’t say “some” or “most.”
There is no qualifier concerning how the path feels at the moment. Is only the joyful path his? If so, old Job might want a word with you, as well as all the faithful heroes we remember precisely because of their perseverance. Acts 12 begins with two of Christ’s apostles in prison. By the end of the chapter, one was beheaded by Herod and the other experienced an angelic jailbreak. Both their paths, though seeming to go in opposite directions, were from the Lord who loved them.
As we approach the new year, for some of you it feels like the stare-down of heavyweight boxers waiting for the bell to signal the beginning of a new round. You got beat like a drum in the last round, 2021. You’re wobbly on your feet for this one, exhausted.
I can’t tell you what 2022 holds for you, at least not in the details. However, if you belong to God through faith in Jesus, the Lord of the covenant, I can guarantee you that the new year represents a path you will not walk alone. It may wind up or down, or contain some dizzying hairpin turns, but if you have the eyes to see it, the whole thing will represent God’s great faithfulness.
In the second half of Romans 8, hundreds of years after David, Paul taught the same concept. Verse 28 says that God works all things for good, for his own. Not some things, but all. It doesn’t mean that all evil things get turned into good things, but that the result of having to walk a path through them truly is good. This is how we grow. This is how we learn: and the chief lesson is the steadfast faithfulness of a loving God.
Through all these things (the things seeking to destroy us) we are more than conquerors. We don’t conquer by avoidance. We go through, by the power of him who loved us.
Gordan Runyan is the pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church in Tucumcari. Contact him at: