Stay Upon God
Pastor Don Snow

Isaiah 50:10
“Who is among you that feareth the Lord, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.”

What do we learn in the dark times of our life? When tough times of life come.  Praise God for those people that keep plugging away for God in the darkness of life. We can still move on for God even through difficulties. We can still live right, we can still keep keeping on in a difficult time. When people do that they bring a smile upon the Lord’s face. Because you are living by faith, you are trusting by faith, you are walking by faith.
It’s exciting to have a bunch of people doing right, and serving the Lord. But there it may be that before the Lord comes the pickings might get thin. And it might be difficult and it might be tough to live for God in these last days. Here in this verse it gives us a lot of insight and a lot of help on how to live during the dark days.

Verse six is a prophetical verse speaking of Jesus Christ:
“I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.”

We know from the New Testament how well this matches the suffering of the Lord Jesus Christ, and yet verse seven shows us the determination of the Lord:
“For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.”

Natives on islands learned that to construct boats that could reach other islands they must choose the right kind of wood it. They would go to the top of the highest mountain and find the trees that had withstood the storms and the wind and use those for their masts. They knew that they were good because they had withstood the storms.
We can learn lessons from that - that there are going to be dark times that we are going to go through here on earth, and that God has a purpose for those trials. Just like a little tree on the top of a mountain can be used for a purpose. The higher up on a mountain you get, the less trees there are. That means that those trees take even more of the storms and violent winds. Those trees become very seasoned and ready for their use. Well, problems in life season us. They help us become strong people. We could think about people that went through great trials and darkness in their life and, yet did well.

I think about Daniel who worked through three different empires. He had been taken from his homeland and his home was devastated, and placed as a young man in the midst of a heathen country full of idol worship. He became a eunuch and never had a wife and lived alone during his life. Even when the laws of the land we turned against him, and he faced the mouths of lions, he still served God. He taught three other Hebrew men to serve God in the dark times.

Joseph spent 21 years of dark trials yet, he stayed faithful. Job lost everything and even his wife said to just die, yet he did not turn from God. We can learn from these men of God that stayed upon God in the dark trials.

Stay Upon God!