Never Lose Faith
Acts 12:6
This verse always stops me. This isn't the Peter we see in the Gospels--the man wildly swinging a sword in the dark, the man in Caiaphas' courtyard who wouldn't admit he even knew Jesus. This Peter is sleeping peacefully in prison on the night before his scheduled execution!
What changed? How could one person be such a portrait of opposites: fear and faith? Here's how: Peter finally understood the big picture. He got his eyes off of PETER'S STORY and focused on GOD'S STORY.
Peter's story looked for Jesus to set up an earthly kingdom; God's story is about a heavenly kingdom. Peter's story was "man versus man, man versus nature and man versus himself", to use literary classifications; God's story is "God over all and in all". Peter got a glimpse of the "end of the story" and that glimpse changed his fear into faith.
Admiral Jim Stockdale was the highest ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over 20 times, in leg irons for two years and in solitary confinement for four years during his eight-year imprisonment, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda.
When interviewed on how he survived, Stockdale said this, "I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Don't lose faith in the end of the story! God is still at work; He is on the throne. 2021 is an open book to Him; He has already written the end of the story.
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