Can God Really Help You?

Believing in a God who delivers and rescues you from your problems is wishful thinking. It’s an emotional crutch for those who need it.

If you’re a Christian, you will inevitably hear condescending sentiments and objections like these. But stop for a moment and think through these statements. On who does the burden of proof lie?

Believers can confidently say there is a God because they have experienced his help. We just have to know that on a desperate day in our life, after a brief cry to God for help, some invisible, intelligent Helper came and rescued us in the most remarkable, impossible, and creative way. It fulfilled all the criteria of a divine rescue and omitted all logical probabilities of doubt.

Okay, we might be mistaken in believing how we got rescued, but, on the other hand, we may have experienced the presence of a caring, saving God. If we compare our deliverance with the accounts of thousands of others who have witnessed and experienced the same things, we can confidently conclude that it’s not just their imagination.

However, the skeptic cannot be sure there is no God—no Supreme Being to call out to for help. They only know they have no conscious personal experience of this God. Otherwise, they would have to know what is in every corner of the universe at every moment in history to confidently say that there is no God.

In other words, those who claim that some supernatural Being helped them out of their jam simply had to know less. Sometimes it takes little knowledge to learn some of life’s most profound truths. A simple laborer could know more about God than the distinguished professor of theology or philosophy who lectures every afternoon at the university.

The plain, indisputable facts are these:

• We have an enormous body of evidence testifying to the fact that God exists and is highly active in the lives of his creatures.
• This evidence has existed for thousands of years, covering many cultures, languages, diverse geographical areas, backgrounds, and personality types.
• It comes in the testimonies of people in the Bible, church history, hymnology, missionary history, and contemporary witnesses in the newspapers, in the evening news, and from our neighbors and friends.
• The genuine church is a gathering of people who unite to enjoy and celebrate this reality of an ever-present rescuing God.
• These people include lifelong believers, previously hardened skeptics, and professors of philosophy and psychology.

Through every conceivable type of danger or distress, people from all walks of life in hopeless, impossible situations have cried out to God for relief, and he delivered them. Their rescues were tailor-made for their situation—convincing proof of God’s help in their desperate need. It might have been a rescue and reversal or Jesus’ peace and comfort as he walked with them through their life storm. We may reject or accept, love or hate the proofs, but they are there all the same.

If you’re not sure if God can help you, put into practice what you already know:

-Daily Scripture reading

-Daily prayer

-Regular worship

-Regular contact with the people of God

Unless we commit ourselves to these traditional Christian disciplines, we will not experience spiritual growth. Instead, we will lean on secular motivational talks and friends’ advice that doubts the power and love of our gracious Father. We will fall when we think we can do it on our steam. By the way, it has to be daily (every day) praying and reading your Bible (even if it’s five minutes to start with). Scriptural truths change you, strengthening you into strong Christians whose lives glorify God..

So let us pray for a faith like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who said to King Nebuchadnezzar, “If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand” (Daniel 3:16-17).