THE FIRST STEP

By Rick Mathes

John 11:39 (NASB77) ³⁹ Jesus said, “Remove the stone.”

When our Lord stood before the tomb of Lazarus, He commanded, “Move the stone!” He could have had that bolder crumble to dust with a word, blast off into outer space with a wave of His hand or produce legs and have it walk off into the wilderness but He didn’t. He told the onlookers that they needed to take the first step and then he would unleash His power and let it flow in life giving power only God the creator could accomplish. He chose us from eternity and will love us throughout the length of forever but we must put our foot forward like metal attracted to a magnet and take that first step.

Put one shaking foot out and do it: go forward in your weakness and sin. This trembling faith took Peter back to the boat in his limited understanding and slender hope of faith. It is a gift we cannot buy nor borrow. Our total essence and form is totally for His good pleasure, only. Our hands are empty as we humbly approach the throne of the King with the faith He gifted us with. We bring nothing but as a consequence of His blessings we step up in repentance, submission and obedience in the power of God the Holy Spirit.

We come to Him in prayer, broken by the confession of our sins. How hard is it to look Him in the eyes with all the love we have for Him and recite one by one the horrible sins we chose in spite of His life and sacrifice for us.

Even our praises fall short as time after time pride crawls up in our ego and we swell with self-pride. The very pit of our being is diseased, polluted, worn out and worthless.

It is at this point when our knees hit the ground and our heart beats with His once again. When we are laid flat out on him and our face is in the mud, blood and tears of those that went before us, we can’t fall any further. Now at our lowest we finally experience and understand His strength.

What a friend we have in Jesus as He puts His hand out, we lift up our heads and move out in the rest of the steps we need to take that we might fight the good fight, keep the faith and finish the race. Our first step is all He is waiting for so that He might walk the rest of the way with us.

The gates of hell cannot prevail against us, He will never give us more than we can handle, He will always provide us a way out, He will never leave nor forsake us, no one can take us out of His hands and where He is we soon will be. You can take these promises to the bank!

There will be only one set of footprints on the path to glory and they won’t be ours. They will be his because it was He who carried us because we had the holy boldness to take the first step. Take your first step right now and let Him lift you up and carry you the rest of the way. AMEN!