Tenaciously Holding to His promises

 Tenaciously Holding to His promises

 

Have you ever looked up the definitions for tenacity and tenacious?  Until a couple of days ago I never had and when I did, I was a little surprised.  You see for 3 days this week the Lord kept bring up patience and waiting and their connection to trust and faith.  I believe that this was a response to my asking the Lord what was wrong with me that was keeping me from seeing healings and miracles flowing through my life.  I have read about in other people’s lives starting in the New Testament till modern times and I know that God is the same yesterday, today and forever and that He is no respecter of persons. If I am not walking in all that God has for me the problem is on my side, not His. This brings me to the definitions I spoke of earlier and here they are. 

 

TENAC'ITY, 

1. Adhesiveness; that quality of bodies which makes them stick or adhere to others; glutinousness; stickiness; as the tenacity of oils, of glue, of tar, of starch and the like.

2. That quality of bodies which keeps them from parting; without considerable force; cohesiveness; the effect of attraction; opposed to brittleness or fragility.

TENA'CIOUS, 

1. Holding fast, or inclined to hold fast; inclined to retain what is in possession; as men tenacious of their just rights. 

2. Retentive; apt to retain long what is committed to it; 

3. Adhesive; apt to adhere to another substance; as oily, glutinous or viscous matter. 

 

As I read these definitions this is what came to me.  Will I hold fast to what God says in His Word regardless of the circumstances, what my experience is or the length of time it takes?  Will I stick to His promises like glue?  What I began to realize is that far too often I let my lack of patience destroy my faith and cause me to give up.  Instead of sticking to God’s Word and promises I let facts get in the way of the truth.  If things didn’t happen in my time frame, then I would get into doubt and self-condemnation.  I still believed that God COULD do it but I stopped believing that He WOULD do it because it hadn’t in my time frame. 

 I knew John 17:17 Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth but I wasn’t always living in by my actions.  I knew Mark 11:23-24 and 1 John 5;14-15 but if the mountain did move the first time, I commanded it to go, depending on what it was, I gave up.  When I gave up, I was walking by sight and not by faith.  

 

When I went back and reviewed some of the miraculous things that I have seen in my life not all of them happened right off.  Some of them it took patience, tenacity and speaking to that mountain more than once to go.  This didn’t mean that I had to ask the Lord multiple times to do anything. By His grace He has already done it and given me as a believer authority to ask anything according to His will. What I did was apply Hebrews 10:23 every time. “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.”  Whenever I held fast, i.e. was tenacious, held to a promise of God and just kept after it I would see the promised result.  My allergies were an example of this.  One day I realized that I didn’t have to suffer from seasonal allergies because of 1 Peter 2:24. So I declared that I was healed of allergies and you know why the symptoms didn’t go away but instead of giving up I just kept declaring over and over that I was healed and kept telling those symptoms to go because they had no right my body.  Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t denying that the symptoms were present nor how they made me feel.  I choose to believe God’s Word was true no matter how I felt and that congestion, itchy eyes had to and would go because they had to.  Why I didn’t apply this tenacity to everything I prayed I don’t know.  In those times where I gave up why I didn’t remember that it took Daniel 21 days to receive his answer to prayer because of demonic hinderance I don’t know.   All can say is now I am going to do my best to wait in patient rest in the faith and trust of God’s promises for whatever I have asked of Him.