The Trustworthy Prophetic Word

BY Rebecca Faires

I’m so pregnant right now. I’m past taking chipper walks and decorating my nursery. I’m at the stage where I can’t sleep anymore, so I just cry while I watch reruns of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. I love being pregnant, and I was such a good soldier for so long. But there’s something about the difficulty of the last few weeks of pregnancy that primes and steels a woman for the intensity of labor and delivery. It makes us ready and willing to undergo any hardship just to be delivered from the close quarters of late pregnancy. That, and I’m tired of performing a trust fall every time I try to sit in a chair.

I love having babies. But when pregnancy gets hard, I have to remember the end goal—the baby! Somehow in the muddle of pregnancy and labor I forget all about the baby and focus on my heartburn and my contractions. I literally forget about the baby. This is true for so many things; when times get dark, it can be easy to forget the one, most important thing and instead get caught up in all the peripheral ephemera. But when it’s dark, we need the lamp of truth to lead us home.

God’s Word is that lamp shining in a dark place. His Word was delivered by prophets and then confirmed in the person of Jesus Christ. He inspires and fortifies our faith by the eyewitness accounts that again and again confirm what the prophets spoke and wrote.

Peter was one such eyewitness, a man who stood on the mount of transfiguration and heard the voice of God. I can’t even imagine. Somehow Peter managed to pry himself off the ground and listen to the words God spoke: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased!” (2 Peter 1:17). God is constantly bringing us the light of His Word to illuminate our confusion.

Don’t allow yourself to be confused or distracted. We do not hold to a cleverly devised myth, but to Truth itself. Christ came in space and time, walked before eyewitnesses who beheld “his glory, the glory as the one and only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). We have the witness of the Word, strongly confirmed in history, bearing witness to Christ, our Light and Life (2 Peter 1:19).

We must hold tight to the things that are true. We know that Jesus is God’s son (Matthew 17:5). We know that He came to save us (Romans 6:23). And we know that His Word is a light in the darkness (2 Peter 1:19).
Today, even though I have both heartburn AND contractions, I am looking forward to holding my baby. Instead of letting ourselves get caught up in the passing peripherals, we must remember that Christ is the one important thing, and we have the truths of God’s Word to hold us steady when the rush and press of life threatens to tip us over.