Ligonier Ministries Blog

1. Save on Resources from R.C. Sproul

   R.C. Sproul devoted his life to helping Christians grow in their knowledge of God and His holiness. This week only, explore a special collection of more than 100 discounted books, teaching series, and other discipleship resources from the founder of Ligonier Ministries. With his signature ability to bring clarity to complex theological subjects, Dr. Sproul’s timeless teaching continues to make the deep truths of the Christian faith accessible to people around the world. Explore a variety of discounted titles from Dr. Sproul, including: Discounted books like The Power of the Gospel: A Year in Romans. Commentaries such as Romans: An Expositional Commentary Video teaching series like Dust to Glory: An Overview of the Bible And More Explore this collection of discipleship resources before the sale ends on Saturday, February 21, at 11:59 p.m. ET. Shop now, while supplies last.

2. Standing Firm When the World Shifts Under Your Feet

   The world is changing fast. Ideas that once seemed solid are crumbling. Morality is treated like soft clay, molded and reshaped to fit the mood of the moment. In such times, Christians can feel pressure to either blend in or stay silent. But Scripture doesn’t call believers to blend in. It calls us to stand firm. It calls us to build on the rock, not on sand (Matt. 7:24–27). The church has always lived in changing times, even if today’s changes might feel more aggressive and chaotic than before. But our hope has never rested in the stability of society. It rests in the stability of God: “I the Lord do not change” (Mal. 3:6). The world may reinvent itself every decade, but God does not evolve, and His truth does not expire. It does not need updating. It does not need rebranding. Truth that shifts with the culture isn’t truth at all—it’s marketing. Truth Is Not Negotiable Christians today are often told that faith should adjust to the times. But Jesus prayed, “Your word is truth” (John 17:17). Truth is not up for public vote. It doesn’t become outdated just because some commentators call it unpopular. The Apostles didn’t rewrite their faith to get better reception from the Roman Empire. They preached Christ crucified whether the crowds cheered or scoffed. We need to be constantly reminded that God is the author of faith from start to finish. We do not keep ourselves; God keeps us. Jesus said, “No one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:28). That is not the language of fragility. That is the language of divine strength. Christians are not weak, fragile creatures clinging to God by our fingernails. We are held in the powerful arms of God. And because we are held, we can stand. Obedience Is Not Optional But standing firm doesn’t mean inactivity. Faith is not passive. The same God who preserves His people commands them to obey. Paul does not say, “Relax and let things happen.” He says, “Do not be conformed to this world” (Rom. 12:2). That is an active command. The world pushes us in its direction, but the obedient Christian resists. Many believers today are tempted to soften the edges of Scripture in the name of love. But love without truth is flattery. And truth without love is arrogance. Scripture refuses to tear the two apart. We are to speak the truth in love (Eph. 4:15). That combination is explosive. It makes Christianity look too gentle for tyrants and too uncompromising for cowards. Do Not Panic: God Reigns When the nations are raging and morality is spinning like a weathervane, Christians must refuse to panic. Anxiety is not a fruit of the Spirit. God has not surrendered His rule over history just because society decided to redefine itself. Scripture says He “works all things according to the counsel of His will” (Eph. 1:11). All things. Not just spiritual things, not just church things, not just private things. History runs on rails that God laid down before the world began. This perspective does not make suffering painless, but it makes suffering purposeful. There has never been a century in which the church survived by aligning with the spirit of the age. The church survives because Christ rules. He is not like a politician running for office. His kingdom does not depend on cultural approval. “He must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Cor. 15:25). Stand with the Church, Not Alone One of the devil’s oldest strategies is isolation. Lone Christians are easy targets. Scripture commands believers to gather, to encourage, and to stir one another up (Heb. 10:24–25). A true Christ-loving and Bible-preaching church, however small it may be, however unimpressive by worldly standards, is nevertheless a fortress in a hostile age. The local church is where faith is fed, where truth is taught, and where weary saints are reminded that they are no fools for believing what God has said. Do not underestimate the power of corporate worship, prayer, and fellowship. You may not always feel it, but God uses ordinary means to forge extraordinary endurance. A Long View of Victory Modern culture trains people to think only about the present moment. But Christians are commanded to lift their eyes. We await a kingdom that cannot be shaken. We await a King who will not compromise. “We are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). That future is not escapism; it is fuel for the fight. It gives us courage. It puts steel in our spine. If this world is all there is, then compromise makes sense. If this world is passing away, then compromise is foolish. The early Christians did not die for a metaphor. They died because they believed Christ would raise them. And He will. The Call of the Hour Our moment in history does not require a new gospel, a new strategy, or a new tone. It requires the old faith. And that faith should be believed, lived, and proclaimed without apology. Paul’s words still stand: “Be steadfast, immovable” (1 Cor. 15:58). The world shifts. Christ does not. Therefore, let us stand firm in shifting times.

3. The Freedom to Be Yourself: Personhood in Marriage

   God’s creation is full of surprising variety. Such diversity extends to human creation. Each person is made in God’s image, each fallen and finite, each body and soul destined for eternity, each valuable, but each different. The wonder of personhood is dim to us only because it is ubiquitous. It is everywhere we look and we are part of it, so it can be hard to see. We climb mountains or visit remote coastlines to marvel at creation, when the driver’s license office may be even more spectacular—if we only had eyes for the wonder of created personhood. God did not make people clones. While humans are one “kind,” the variety within humanity is staggering, and evidence of how particular God is in His creation. Between nature and nurture—we might call that small-scale creation and providence—God fashions each particular human. The image of God in every person expresses aspects of the Lord who made us and takes care of us. Some shared attributes, such as anger, are often twisted through the fall, but the capacities for creativity, innovation, love, thought, and dominion all find varied expression in the human creation that was the crown to the six days of God’s creative work. Each man, woman, and child has unique being and purpose and thought. This has implications for marriage and is part of God’s design for the relationship. A recognition of our spouses’ personhood really is a lived-out acknowledgment of their fundamental identity. As part of God’s creation, our spouses have individuality: unique status as human beings made in God’s image. This extends far beyond their created bodies. God also made their minds, hearts, and souls. Each person is a different mix of genetics and family culture, history, and experience, which make the person who he or she is. The person has his or her own gifts and abilities, likes and loathings, interests, strengths, and failings. Personality is a large part of this, but personhood goes even deeper. Before this person is your spouse—and long after he or she is your spouse—the person is his or her own self before God, totally apart from you. This concept might not sound like the fast track to oneness, but Scripture teaches both things: unity in marriage and a sanctified individualism. We have looked at oneness already. Unity is fundamental in a marriage. It is a source of great joy. The idea of personhood in Scripture is repeatedly shown in the importance of everyone’s individual choices in Psalm 1; the consequences of our actions in Matthew 25, Luke 12, and Romans 2; and the primacy of our relationship to God, both as a creature and as a redeemed sinner. Even after the best, holiest marriage, each person will stand on his or her own before God to give an account and receive a reward for deeds done in the flesh. A biblical marriage promotes unity and values personhood, as Scripture itself does. In some passages, such as 1 Corinthians 7, the two concepts of unity and personhood overlap: “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband” (1 Cor. 7:3). Here, even corporeal individuality in decided giving creates oneness. Unity and individuality become tangled in a way that can make it difficult to discern where one starts and ends, but they are both there. So biblical individualism is not autonomy. In other words, it is not my calling the shots, defining myself, and pursuing independence. Instead, it is a recognition that we are each created by God for a particular purpose, and each in need of His saving grace and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. Biblical individualism involves accountability and distinct roles, value, and limitations. This is why it is compatible with and complementary to oneness. Since the Bible teaches both unity and individuality, they will not be contradictory in a Christian marriage. Instead, the idea of personhood brings blessing. It gives our marriages interest, allowing us to enjoy variety. It gives us freedom, releasing us from burdens that we are not designed to bear. And it also gives us responsibility, understanding Scripture’s requirements of us in relation to personhood. The idea of personhood in marriage gives us the happiness of enjoying our spouses’ gifts as deliberate blessings from God in their unique callings. Because our spouses are each their own person, we can be interested in their strengths and talents not just as they relate to us as our spouses, but also as who they are as individuals, serving the Lord in church and community. So often, these are the things that attract us to someone before marriage: conversational skills, a healthy work ethic, creative involvement with friends and family, athletic ability, or musical talent. After marriage, we can enjoy these even more. We can see service and gifts and talent and particular sacrifice better than anyone else, and so we can be more thankful for it and encouraged by it. We can more deeply enjoy the display of gifts in this person with whom we share life. We can be drawn into the person’s interests—our own horizons broadened by another set of utilized strengths and gifts. And being interested fosters being interesting: there is a healthy feedback loop here. As we enjoy our spouses’ use of their unique gifts, they feel and value it and are encouraged in using them. Someone who tries to use his or her gifts in an atmosphere of inferiority or invisibility will soon lose zeal: practicing a skill or exercising a gift in an environment of criticism or dismissal makes further effort feel pointless. But the opposite is also true. Even common skills that we use daily—in work, parenting, or recreation—become sweeter when they are met with recognition and appreciation. Encouragement blesses even the most independent people, and unity becomes a fruit of recognizing individuality. Being conscious of personhood also gives us the freedom of getting to know this other human being on a level that nobody else does. Another person, indwelled by the Holy Spirit, is something that we will never come to the bottom of in this life. We do not fully understand ourselves, let alone someone else, so in marriage we can enjoy the privilege of a lifetime of study and discovery. It is true even in the constant closeness of a marriage; there is always something new. Despite established life patterns and personalities, people are always changing. So there are always new things to observe. Sanctification is an incredibly interesting process! And it is a joy to watch, even if it comes, as it so often does, through pain. If you are in a Christian marriage, then you have a front-row seat for watching God make another believer increasingly Christlike. Things are always changing, and it is an exclusive honor to see this up close. Knowing that your spouse is his or her own person will also give you the freedom to respect the unique likes, dislikes, and interests that your spouse has. Daily disunities in the little things have the potential to create friction and resulting heat. Maybe it is a preference in how the laundry is folded or the grass is cut or what is for supper, but respecting your spouse’s personhood can smooth things out here. Our spouses were made in God’s image, not ours, and they have their own preferences! We live in a time when cheerful, adaptable, mildly extroverted personalities are the cultural gold standard. They are the easiest to live with! Even John Owen, writing centuries ago, noted this: “Some are naturally of a more tranquil and quiet temper than others. These people are comparatively peaceable and useful to others.” This perspective is especially true in the twenty-first-century West. People who do not fit this profile tend to be seen as aberrant. We have fewer eccentrics: people whose personalities make others uncomfortable by their intensity or introversion or grief. The characters who populated Dickens’ novels do not live in middle-class America, at least not publicly. This does not mean that there is never a time for behavioral intervention. And though certain personalities are prone to certain sins, we can never blame a personality for sin any more than we can blame circumstances for sin. Personality itself is part of divine creation and divine creativity. Each personality, though fallen, has something unique to offer, some role to play that another cannot, some perspective to show that another is unable to see. In marriage, personality is a factor that affects daily life and gives it great interest. Respecting that gives both spouses freedom to enjoy activities and ideas and blessings that we might not naturally see or appreciate. There is happiness in appreciating our spouses for being themselves. Winston Churchill was not an easy man. The story goes that one female MP actually told him, “If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your coffee!” (He retorted that if she were his wife, he would drink it.) But a biographer wrote about Winston and his wife, Clementine: “Their completely different temperaments... found a clear appreciation of each other.” “Their marriage never would have worked had it been otherwise.” We can value our spouses for who they are, not just what they do. It is easy, as the years flow on and husbands and wives follow the same routines, month after month, to blur our spouses with their role, to confuse who they are with their function in the relationship: the one who primarily cares for the children, or makes the bulk of the income, or schedules everyone’s social lives. While associations can be inevitable, making a human synonymous with a function or limited role is degrading. An older couple in a congregation I was part of had been empty-nesters for decades but never used each other’s names. Instead, it was “Mamma” and “Papa.” Their marriage had revolved around their children, and though those children were long gone, with older children of their own, this couple was unable to separate each other from the roles that had been most important in their lives. They had lost part of each other’s personhood and could not—or would not—regain it. That is a relational as well as a humanitarian failure. We get to value our spouses as God’s creation, not as a relational function. But then we can value what they do because they did it, and that makes it more valuable to us than mere functionality. The order matters—personhood, then role—and there is great freedom in this logic, a freedom that brings closeness as we recognize, appreciate, and enjoy. When spouses continue working day after day to faithfully fulfill their calling out of love to God but also care for the family, love makes that work more valuable to us. They are doing it because they care, not simply because they have to. There is certainly blessing in that. And this idea of individuality also gives us the responsibility to challenge our spouses in places where they need that. Because marriage is not an end in itself, and because we will each stand alone before God at the end, we have the freedom to challenge and question wrong things, even if this temporarily disrupts the peace in our marriages. The pattern set out in Matthew 18 is not only for church relationships, but for marriages, too. Perhaps this is especially important for women to remember. Very often, believers who rightly value the Bible can push past what is written, falling into reaction against cultural norms. A very unbiblical, imbalanced headship can be the ugly fruit. As Christian wives, we are to respect our husbands—not be in awe of them. Part of respecting them as people means that we respect the reality that they live before God’s face, and they need to be respectfully confronted if they start to forget that. Sanctification and the fight against sin do not neutralize a personality: they use the strengths and root out the weak parts. They maximize this aspect of creation for God’s glory. Our job is not to conform our spouses to ourselves or to some extrabiblical ideal that we have for them but to facilitate their conforming to Christ as whole persons, body, mind, and soul. Kindly and humbly calling out our spouses’ sin helps them put to death the old man—actually helping them become more human, more fully who they were created to be and who they really are in Christ. It also helps us to become more balanced. We are all prone to little quirks and obsessions that distort us, in all sorts of facets of our personhood. The Lord told us that it is not good for man to be alone—and that was in unfallen Eden! In our sinful state, our personalities need the balance of a spouse to help keep them in proportion. A good understanding of personality combined with loving truth can keep us from becoming caricatures of ourselves and help us stay proportional in ways that are spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and socially healthy. At the same time, a sanctified individualism also takes away the burden of feeling that we are ultimately responsible for our spouses. Now, we are certainly responsible for the way that we live with our spouses, the way that we treat them and help them grow in the fruit of the Spirit. But we are not all-sufficient. We are creatures, too, and do not bear ultimate responsibility for our spouses’ safety, joy, satisfaction, sanctification, or evaluation. We cannot bear another human’s fallen personhood. We cannot be everything that he or she needs. That burden is too great for one mere human being to bear for another, so it does not have to come between us or slow us down as we walk beside each other. Instead, Christ offers Himself as the infinite Person who bears and redeems fallen personhood. We are not a savior; we have a Savior. Living in that reality gives great freedom in a marriage. And this is connected to something deeper. A biblical view of personhood also means, despite the closeness that this reality fosters in a relationship, that some things are off-limits to us simply because we are another creature. We need to be careful here, because this cannot mean that there should not be free openness, honesty, and ability to ask questions, express concerns, confess sin, and share our deepest dreams, disappointments, frustrations, and joys. There should be that; there must be that—it is all essential in a marriage, and it needs to happen. Unity should be deep and extensive. Friendship must be genuine and trusted. But our spouses, like us, are fully known only to God. We may know them better than any other human does, but even after a lifetime, it will not come close to God’s knowledge of them. And that is the relationship that has primacy, because that relationship is the source and chief end of personhood. That is the relationship that cannot be violated or usurped, especially by a godly marriage. Our culture holds up the idea of a soulmate: that one person who knows everything about you and whom you tell everything. We have imbibed so much of this concept that we often cannot see that it is not only impossible but also not right, simply because the spousal relationship should not be the ultimate one. The idea that spouses do not and should not have 100 percent access to each other shocked me the first time that I heard it verbalized, but I have heard it from several elderly, godly people with long and happy marriages and seen it in many more. This idea can be twisted, used as an excuse to conceal or withdraw, but that will not bring trust or joy. And this acknowledgment of these relational limits makes biblical sense. As much as we are to study each other and know each other and share each other, there are places that we are not able to go, simply because we are another creature. We are not absolute. Personhood was made for intimacy, not omniscience. In T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland,” he describes a couple who are sitting at home in the evening, and the wife keeps nattering on: > Speak to me.... Speak. > What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? > I never know what you are thinking. Think. She erodes the relationship by her constant grasping at her husband’s mind and heart. If we were called to be the ultimate sanctifiers and managers of our spouses, we would need omniscience. Since we are not, we do not need it. We would not be able to bear such a burden. Instead, we can release our spouses to the Lord by acknowledging this primary relationship. We do it not in blind faith but out of love for our spouses and trust in our Creator. In a healthy marriage, a respect for personhood and the Lord’s absolute right in each other’s lives means that you both have the freedom to go to the other out of a need for fellowship and companionship—a willingness to share and be shared—not because you have a need to control what is going on in the other person’s heart and head. This goes back to the idea that before this person is your spouse—and long after he or she is your spouse—the person is his or her own self before God, totally apart from you. Respecting the primacy of this relationship is part of respecting our spouses’ personhood and seeing how we can help them grow in it. Personhood itself is a gift. In this fractured and changing world, our personhood means that our link with our Creator is unbreakable and permanent. It gives us an anchor. In marriage, that anchor of personhood gives stability and healthy limitations. It adds depth and color to the blessing of union. And it respects not only the Lord’s creativity in crafting each of us but also the bounds that He has included in that creation and the happiness for which He designed them. : John Owen, The Holy Spirit (Edinburgh, Scotland: Banner of Truth, 2021), 231. : Jack Fishman, My Darling Clementine: The Story of Lady Churchill (New York: David McKay, 1963), 57. : T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M.H. Abrams (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1975), 2532.

4. Does Jesus Love Me?

   It is a question that many believers have asked. It is often on the mind of the downcast and discouraged. “Does Jesus love me?” It may be a nagging doubt or an agonizing cry of the heart—possibly quite similar to Psalm 22:1. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” sounds much like, “God, do you really love me?” While this may be a common experience for the Christian, we must look to the not-very-common answer. In other words, we need the biblically satisfying solution to such deep longing. To arrive there, we begin where the Scriptures begin, and not with our own subjective experience. We so easily look to ourselves for the answer: “Do I feel loved? Am I really all that lovable? Have I obeyed Jesus enough that He would love me?” But all these subjective attempts at comfort are no comfort at all. Who among us has ever-steady emotions? Who, biblically speaking, is lovable in their own right? Who could ever obey enough to be acceptable in their own righteousness before a holy God? The Scriptures are clear on these points: no one. No, the solution to this fundamental question is not in ourselves. Rather, it is in the person and work of Jesus. When the Scriptures encourage us with the reality of Christ’s love for His people, they always look to Him and never to us. “But God proves His love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8, BSB). Don’t miss how that verse begins: “God proves his love for us.” How is it that we know God loves us? He sent Christ to save us even when we were yet His enemies. Elsewhere, the Apostle John argues the exact same way: “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). When we doubt the love of God in our lives, we must look to what Christ has objectively done for us, in that He came, He pursued, He sought us, He saved. After all, this was the very reason Christ came into the world: to seek and to save His people (Luke 19:10). This type of love, a love that originates entirely in God and not in our own loveliness, is at the heart of biblical “unconditional love,” or agape love. God’s perfect love flows from Him and is entirely of Him, as He places it upon us. While we are devoid of everything lovable, excellent, praiseworthy, or beautiful, God lavishes His love upon us. He did this “in order to make known the riches of his glory,” as Romans 9:15–23 makes clear. The love that God shows us, now His children in Christ, is entirely free and gracious, flowing from Him to us, not because of us, but entirely because of Him. Once we can comprehend this type of love, it is a glorious and encouraging reality. Human love is so often grounded in the object of our love, which is why people speak of “falling in and out of love.” What makes our hearts sing one day leaves us disappointed and despairing the next. We can be so fickle. Then we take our ever-changing, always-conditional love, and read our humanness back into God. We think He loves like we love. May it never be. The unmerited love that God displays toward us is of an entirely different kind. Listen to how Ephesians 1 describes it: “He chose us . . . before the foundation of the world . . . in love . . . according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:4–6). He chose us in Christ. He perfectly loves Jesus, described here as “the Beloved.” That is who Christ is—the loved one of God. And out of Himself, He loves us just as He loves Christ, and this from all eternity. Could there be any greater news? If ever there is a question about whether God loves us, the biblical solution is not to look to ourselves, our love, or our faithfulness. Instead, we are called to look at the objective reality of what God has done for us in Christ. We are to ground our certainty and assurance of His love in who He is and what He has done—not in ourselves, which is ever-shifting sand. As biblical theologian Geerhardus Vos famously said, “The best proof that He will never cease to love us” is “that He never began.” Jesus has loved us from all eternity. He has always and will always love His people—His sheep—His precious chosen ones. As the children’s song so simply and profoundly puts it, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” May this be all the answer to the question “Does Jesus love me?” we ever need. The answer, in Christ, is “yes.” Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on February 13, 2023.

5. Does God Really Care?

   At the depths of despair or in the extremes of anxiety, believers often wonder—even if only in their own hearts—whether God truly cares about them. If that’s you, I have good news. A Common Question First, you are not alone. Believers have asked this question throughout history. The prophet Habakkuk looked at the state of God’s people—trampled and oppressed by the unrighteous—and cried out, > O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, > and you will not hear? (Hab. 1:2; see also 1:3, 13). The psalmists often pleaded with God to “rouse” Himself, questioning His care when anguish seemed to go unanswered (Ps. 35:23; 44:23). Though they knew that God never sleeps (Ps. 121:4), His perceived inaction amid their suffering made them wonder if He truly cared. This struggle isn’t confined to the Old Testament. In a moment of desperation, the disciples cried out to Jesus, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4:38, emphasis added). Even in the mundane, believers wrestle with this question. Martha, overwhelmed by her work, questioned whether Jesus cared that she was left to serve alone (Luke 10:40). Across time and circumstances, when God doesn’t intervene in our suffering as quickly as we hope (or prevent that suffering in the first place), believers of all ages have questioned His care. A Spectacular Answer Second, God doesn’t leave you alone to wonder whether He cares. He has revealed His care for you in the most profound way imaginable: the sending of His beloved Son. John tells us as much when he writes: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). This means that Christ fully understands the frustration, pain, and fear that goes into living in a sin-sick world and is able to sympathize with you (Heb. 4:15). Even more, God’s care is made present through the activity of the Holy Spirit. When Jesus promised the Spirit, He described Him as “another Helper” who would never leave us (John 14:16). Unlike human friends, who may grow weary or distracted, the Holy Spirit remains with you always. He never takes a break, never slinks away, and never abandons you. This is the outworking of God’s fundamental covenant promise to you: “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Deut. 31:8; Heb. 13:5). This is true even when your emotions tell you that you are alone, forsaken, and outside the purview of God’s care. Suffering Points to God’s Care Finally, you must realize that God’s care doesn’t mean that you will avoid suffering and frustration. Rather, His care means that you will endure it and even grow through it. This may seem counterintuitive. Yet God tells us that suffering, far from destroying us, produces steadfastness, character, and hope (Rom. 5:3–5). Some suffering comes as loving discipline from our Father, intended for our good (Heb. 12:7–11), which means our suffering—even when it is disciplinary in nature—is not a sign of God’s abandonment but of His care. Other suffering allows us to share in Christ’s life. Paul boldly declares that we are “heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with Him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17). Even Christ Himself learned obedience through suffering (Heb. 5:8). If we are to become like Him, we must learn at the same hand. Far from being a burden, this is a gift—the privilege of sharing in the experiences of our Savior. Conclusion When you are tempted to doubt whether God cares, look to the cross. There, God’s love is displayed in full. He would not—in fact, could not—abandon His people after paying so high a cost. And He would not pay so high a cost if He didn’t dearly care about His people—about you—in the first place. Your suffering is not necessarily a sign that God has withdrawn His favor; rather, it may be evidence of His ongoing work in you. Take heart. When doubts come and your faith feels frail, He will not let you go. One day, when you look back on this trial from a place of peace, you will see that it was not the strength of your grip on the cross that sustained you, but the strength of His nail-scarred hands carrying you, keeping you, strengthening you, never leaving nor forsaking you. Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on February 19, 2025.