Colossians 1:17 NASB
He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
Isaiah 33:6 NASB
And He will be the stability of your times, …
When I first surrendered my life to Christ I was suffering from clinical mental illness. Clinical depression, and clinical anxiety dominated my life. Two years after surrendering my life to Christ I discovered the heart of the gospel which was that I was actually “in Christ,” and because of that He was “in me.” I discovered that Jesus Christ was the only one who could live the Christian life victoriously, and he was prepared to manifest that victorious life as I simply rested in his adequacy. My emotional healing was instant, and miraculous. What I have been walking through was like an emotional earthquake, and I wasn’t sure I was gonna survive it, but God used the emotional earthquake to reveal Christ in me as my very life, and that was 40 years ago this spring.
In the ensuing decades since my healing there have been times when I’ve known little aftershocks here and there in my emotions, as a reminder to me that my very existence depends on me leaning on the breast of Jesus for his adequacy and ability to face life and live it to the full. After my healing, the first time I experienced one of the little aftershocks, I came under a lot of warfare because I was afraid that something had gone wrong and that I was finally going to fall apart. The truth is, our body has not yet experienced the manifestation of redemption that we will one day when we get our new glorified body. Until then, our emotions are still attached to this fallen body and sometimes they just decide to go out for a hike, without us even understanding why. Most of the times, those aftershocks are just a result of warfare, and the enemy always attacks us where we might be most vulnerable. It is so important that we know what to do in those moments so that we can keep moving forward in the abundant life that Jesus has come to live in us.
The two verses I listed above were two of the most important words God gave me in those early days of freedom when a little aftershock would hit on the inside. From the Colossians passage he spoke clearly to me that the job of holding me together was a job that Jesus was committed to, and was quite adequate for. I did not have to fear falling apart, because Christ is my life and he holds all things together, including me. It says in that verse that he is before all things, which to me, in a practical sense means, that he already knew what I was going to be going through and what I was going to be feeling before I ever felt it, and he was already prepared to hold me together. I could rest in that truth.
That verse in Isaiah has always been a great blessing and comfort to me, because if I go through a time when there seems to be a seismic shift of circumstances on the outside , or of my emotional life on the inside, that He is the stability of my times. I did not have to be concerned about feeling unstable in the moment, because my stability was not dependent on me; instead He was, and is my stability. I’ve learned over the decades that when things around me seem like they’re falling apart, or feels that way for a moment or even for days on the inside, to just ignore all those feelings, and ignore what it looks like on the outside, because I’ve learned to rest in the truth that he is the stability of my times, and that he is holding all things together, including me. Through all these decades he has always proven faithful, and has become even easier to rest in his stability, when under attack, because I know that Satan is not attacking my stability, but he is attacking the stability of Jesus who was the one who holds me together. Jesus never falls apart