“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1 KJV).
We’ve all asked for help, or will ask for help sometime in our lifetime. When we ask for help, we are asking for change. We want to change our situation, and sometimes we need others to help us do so. There are a number of organizations designed to help individuals overcome any number of problems. But the only ones they actually help are those who are willing to change.
We make bad choices and get bad consequences and can’t get out of them ourselves, and ask for someone’s help. If someone does help us out of a bad situation and we repeatedly get back into it and need help again and again for the same thing, we will eventually find no one wants to help us because we were not willing to make the choices necessary for keeping ourselves out of trouble.
There are some people who need help, who want help, who ask for help, but will not receive help because they refuse to change. We have truly been helped when the changes made through another’s help cause us to change our choices to make those changes permanent in our life.
Help is synonymous with change. When we ask for help, we’re asking for a change for the better. So many people are better off because someone took the time to help them.
We ask for help when our troubles are more than we can handle alone. Sometimes it takes time for help to arrive. Our closest help in time of trouble is God. We’ve truly been helped when we have been changed to where we are in sync with reality.
Some people who need real help don’t think they need help, but instead think everyone else needs help. They want to alter reality to where everyone and everything, including God, is aligned with them.
Our getting saved is something God does alone, and He doesn’t need our help. All we have to do is put our faith and trust in Jesus Christ, who took responsibility for our sins and died to pay our sin debt so we could be saved. But after we’re saved, we’re constantly being changed into the likeness of Christ. “The only thing consistent about the Christian life is change.” — “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18). And God has given His Word and His Spirit to help bring about our change if we will obey them. We will not change if we do not use the help God gives us.
Have you been changed by God’s help?
