from the pit

In my own life, God has brought me through a lot of crap. I was living in a pit of legalism, laws, and carrying around some baggage from my past. God came to the pit of pulled me out of it. He came to the pit. I didn’t have to do anything except admit I wanted Him to come there. Sometimes I get in the mindset that the pit had to come to for me really wasn’t that deep and then in my head, it gets translated that God really isn’t that big. However, last Thursday night, the Colts’ chaplain came to speak to the students at IU, and then I went to Chicago this past weekend to serve at Pacific Garden Mission. At both places, I heard the message that Lord will go to all lengths to rescue His people.

Both the chaplain and the speaker at PGM were from broken homes and had been deep in drugs from an early age. They at points in their lives thought that their lives were not worth living, but God met them at those points. He pulled them out the sin and their past into a future so much better than ever could have imagined. David, in Psalm 103:2-4, says, “Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits – who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion.” The Lord comes to the pit to rescue His chosen people. The Lord came to my pit and pulled me out of it. The even cooler thing that never ceases to amaze me is that He redeems our lives from the pit. To the chaplain and the PGM worker, this meant giving them a story relatable to the people they minister to, or the ability to minister to their own children. For me, I’ve seen the redemption in so many places, one has been the relationships in my life and the testimony to say, “Look what I was so deep in, and look what God did. He can do that to anyone.” The Lord not only changed my present circumstances, but He changed the way that I viewed my past and the way I view my future. There were times in high school that I just didn’t understand why I was struggling with things that way that I was, or that I didn’t think there was hope for things, but I have so much hope now, because of Jesus.

The Lord is big enough to bring any person out of the pit. If that’s difficult to believe, He’s the Lord big enough to raise Jesus from the dead. He’s the Lord big enough to create the heavens and the earth. He’s a Lord big enough to bring two men that the world have labeled as “hopeless causes” into a life with Him, where they use their pasts to help people in the present. The Lord will go to all lengths to rescue His people because He has called each of them in righteousness and He knows everything about them. Their pits are not all the same, but His love is big enough to conquer all of them.