Determination
Our walk with the Lord will bring us to events and situations where we are going to have to either stand strong, or we will turn and run. In my life, I have made that decision already. My life is His. I will stand, so help me God.
Yeshua (Jesus) had made that decision too. He was determined to do the Father’s will, and He did it.
We must choose to be as He was, and have the determination to do what is right before that time will certainly come.
“The Master, God, has given me a well-taught tongue, so I know how to encourage tired people. He wakes me up in the morning. Wakes me up, opens my ears to listen as one ready to take orders.
The Master, God, opened my ears, and I didn’t go back to sleep, didn’t pull the covers back over my head. I followed orders, stood there and took it while they beat me, held steady while they pulled out my beard.
Didn’t dodge their insults, faced them as they spit in my face. And the Master, God, stays right there and helps me, so I’m not disgraced.
Therefore I set my face like flint, confident that I’ll never regret this. My champion is right here. Let’s take our stand together! Who dares bring suit against me? Let him try! Look! the Master, God, is right here.
Who would dare call me guilty? Look! My accusers are a clothes bin of threadbare socks and shirts, fodder for moths!” Isaiah 50:7-9, The Message
When I was the office manager of a Canon copier dealer in Lansing, Michigan, between 1980-1987, I was asked to do an invoice for the company, billing a location that I had heard did abortions. I refused to do so. I wanted no part in it.
I would have been around 26, and we had three young kids at the time. I couldn’t afford to lose my job, but my Lord told me I was not to do that invoice. I told the owner as such.
He then made his wife, the co-owner, do the invoice. (In later years they asked me to become Vice President of the company, but even then the Lord had called me on to other work for Him, and that meant a move to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to work for Derek Prince Ministries.)
Are we going to stand as Christians, when faced with decisions that will go against the actions and beliefs of those around us?
Now is the time to make that determination. Not when the time to stand faces us head on. We will need to have made that decision already.
Christians, and Jews, are among the most persecuted in the world. Times have not changed since Jesus’ time. We know the Bible says the same days are coming for us.
Decide now what you are going to do when called upon to choose.
Ahava and shalom,
Steve Martin
Message #21, April 14, 2026
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