(I found this looking through some old files. I’d written it during the Covid shut-down as a reflection…I’ve changed two Covid-specific references so it’s readable in 2024, but the truth of this remains eternally relevant)

Do you really think God brought us shoulder-deep into where we are only to leave us alone? Only to abandon us here? Only to start us down a pathway that leads to our grave and our demise?

Maybe you haven’t met this God.

This God is a finisher. What He starts He finishes. What He begins He completes. What He sets out to do, He does it.

This God promised Abraham that if he left his home by faith his offspring would not only outnumber the stars but they would have a land of promise to call their own.

So God gave him Isaac, He gave Isaac Jacob and Esau, He gave Jacob the 12 tribes, and even under the oppression of Egyptian slavery God gave Abraham’s offspring hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people.

But not only that, God liberated them out of Egyptian slavery and over the course of the next four decades He took them into a land that He had promised their father Abraham He would give them. He ran out their enemies, gave them favor in every way, and establish the nation that stands to this very day.

But not only that, this same God, through his son Jesus, expanded the idea of what it meant to be the offspring of Abraham. And now not only those who were of the bloodline of Abraham but anyone who shares the same faith as Abraham is under the promise of God‘s favor and blessing. So millions of people down through the ages have now been adopted into the family of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And that includes me, and I hope it includes you!

And not only that, this God didn’t just make a promise to Abraham about offspring and a track of land in the Middle East. This same God had actually previously made a promise to the first two humans He created, Adam and Eve, that the one who had brought temptation to them and called and cajoled them to taste death would be defeated and destroyed by One who came from them through birth. So when Jesus went to the cross, bled for our sins and rebellion, and then split death in half by walking out of that tomb, God was really just finishing what He told Adam and Eve He was starting in Genesis 3.

And for what it’s worth the same God who finished what He started in Jesus has promised you and I in Philippians chapter 1 that whatever He started in us He’s not going to stop working it until it’s done.

Now, come hell or high water, come kings, tyrants, presidents, and Prime Minister‘s, come sickness or mental illness, come social unrest or unexpected danger, come pain, suffering, depression or anxiety – what we believe because of who God is, is that all of these difficulties are just the middle and not the end!

Some of us feel like the new life we were promised has stalled and we can’t seem to give birth to the beauty that we’ve been promised.

But I want you to hear this right now, my God and your God has never failed, He’s never started something and not finished it, and who He is, His faithfulness and His power, can begin to induce the birth process in you so that joy emerges in the middle of your process!